'Death with dignity' is our society's expression of the universal yearning to achieve a graceful triumph over the stark and often repugnant finality of life's last sputterings. But the fact is, death is not a confrontation. It is simply an event in the sequence of nature's ongoing rhythms.
Interpretation
The quote reflects on death as a natural event rather than a confrontation, expressing a desire for dignity in its inevitability.
Sherwin B. Nuland's quote emphasizes that death is a natural part of life's cycle, articulating a common desire among individuals to face it with dignity. By framing death as an event within nature's rhythms, Nuland encourages a perspective that seeks grace rather than confrontation, suggesting that acceptance can lead to a more peaceful understanding of life's end.
In practice
This quote can be used in a eulogy to highlight the beauty of life and facing death with grace.
Where nothing in a person's earlier years lends itself to an old age devoted to continuing intellectual and physical pursuits, a late-life interest in Tolstoy or even crossword puzzles is unlikely to appear, no matter the urging by well-intentioned social workers or people like me who write books about it.
Where the despair of loneliness and poverty haunts every hour, the optimism to embark on new projects cannot find a place to alight on the brain's cortex. Poverty itself is an enormous obstacle to an enlightened and enlightening - not to say healthy - old age.
Being someone who had had a very difficult childhood, a very difficult adolescence - it had to do with not quite poverty, but close. It had to do with being brought up in a family where no one spoke English, no one could read or write English. It had to do with death and disease and lots of other things. I was a little prone to depression.
I think when you think of death as being part of the life cycle and recognize that death is an inevitability for our species because the world has to be renewed with each death, then the hope becomes when it is renewed it will be renewed by people on whom I have had some influence for good.
Death is the surcease that comes when the exhausting battle has been lost.
The 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.
A golf course is the epitome of all that is purely transitory in the universe, a space not to dwell in, but to get over as quickly as possible.
If you would enjoy real freedom, you must be the slave of Philosophy.
Could we change our attitude, we should not only see life differently, but life itself would come to be different.
Authority and place demonstrate and try the tempers of men, by moving every passion and discovering every frailty.
Look around, and you see everywhere the exertions and acts of individuals restricted, regulated, or promoted, on the principle of the common welfare.
Commonplace people dislike tragedy because they dare not suffer and cannot exult.
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