Arriving at an acceptance of one's mortality is a process, not an epiphany.

The battle of being mortal is the battle to maintain the integrity of one's life.

In the end, people don't view their life as merely the average of all its moments-which, after all, is mostly nothing much plus some sleep. For human beings, life is meaningful because it is a story. A story has a sense of a whole, and its arc is determined by the significant moments, the ones where something happens. Measurements of people's minute-by-minute levels of pleasure and pain miss this fundamental aspect of human existence. A seemingly happy life maybe empty. A seemingly difficult life may be devoted to a great cause. We have purposes larger than ourselves.

Expertise is the mantra of modern medicine.

I think the extreme complexity of medicine has become more than an individual clinician can handle. But not more than teams of clinicians can handle.

In one study, old people assigned to a geriatrics team stayed independent for far longer, and were admitted to the hospital less.

You know, 97 percent of the time, if you come into a hospital, everything goes well. But three percent of the time, we have major complications.