The more personal you are willing to be and the more intimate you are willing to be about the details of your own life, the more universal you are. Everybody needs to be understood. And out of that comes every form of love.
Sherwin B. NulandA realistic expectation also demands our acceptance that one's allotted time on earth must be limited to an allowance consistent with the continuity of our species... We die so that the world may continue to live. We have been given the miracle of life because trillions and trillions of living things have prepared the way for us and then have died-in a sense, for us. We die, in turn, so that others may live. The tragedy of a single individual becomes, in the balance of natural things, the triumph of ongoing life.
Sherwin B. NulandThe dignity we seek in dying is not to be found in our final weeks, days or moments but in the way we live and how we are seen by those people whose lives we affect.
Sherwin B. NulandThe greatest dignity to be found in death is the dignity of the life that preceded it. This is a form of hope that we can all achieve, and it is the most abiding of all. Hope resides in the meaning of what our lives have been.
Sherwin B. NulandThe belief in the probability of death with dignity is our, and societyโs, attempt to deal with the reality of what is all too frequently a series of destructive events that involve by their very nature the disintegration of the dying personโs humanity. I have not often seen much dignity in the process by which we die.
Sherwin B. Nuland