When I heard, Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall, I thought, Did he fall or was he pushed?

Death ... obliterates family resemblance as it does personality: there is no affinity between the living and the dead.

Perhaps it's only when people are dead that we can safely show how much we cared about them. We know that it's too late then for them to do anything about it.

Old age makes caricatures of us all.

The world of the terminally ill is the world of neither the living nor the dead. I have watched others since I watched my father, and always with a sense of their strangeness. They sit and speak, and are spoken to, and listen, and even smile, but in spirit they have already moved away from us and there is no way we can enter their shadowy no-man’s-land.

I learned early and at that kitchen table that there are ways of avoiding, without guilt, the commitments of love.

Work did bestow dignity, status, meaning. Wasn't that why people dreaded unemployment, why some men found retirement so traumatic?