Poignancy –positive and negative emotions mixed together. P. 95
In the absence of…a vast extended family constantly on hand to let (them) make (their) own choices - - at elderly are left with a controlled and supervised institutional existence, a medically designed answer to unfixable problems, a life designed to be safe but empty of anything they care about.
Culture is the sum total of shared habits and expectations. P. 119
Culture has tremendous inertia…culture strangles innovation in the crib. P120
The problem with medicine and its institutions it has spawned for the care of the sick and old is not that they have had an incorrect view of what makes life significant. The problem is that they have had almost no view at all. Medicine's focus is narrow. Medical professionals concentrate on the repair of health, not sustenance of the soul. Yet - and this is the painful paradox - - we have decided that they should be the ones who largely define how we live in our waning days. For more than the half century now, we have treated the trials of sickness, aging, and mortality as medical concerns……That experiment has failed. If safety and protection we're always sought in life, perhaps we could conclude differently. But because we seek a life of worth and purpose, and yet our routinely denied the conditions that might make it possible, there is no other way to see what modern society has done. P. 128
