“They say a person needs just three things to be truly happy in this world: someone to love, something to do, and something to hope for.”
The quote above popularised by Tom Bodett has been stuck on my mind for a few weeks. It weighs heavier the more I think about it. It’s so simple but not easy to achieve. None of the three could be achieved if one does not have a firm grasp of his or her own identity. Anyway, below are my favourite quotes from the book Being Mortal by Atul Gawande.
Chapter 1 - The Independent Self
The author’s father from India could not get used to the modern way of how the old and frail is treated:
“their last conscious moments spent with nurses and doctors who barely knew their names.”
More people are living alone in old age, including in Asia:
“in early-twentieth-century America 60 percent of those over age sixty-five resided with a child, by the 1960s the proportion had dropped to 25 percent. By 1975 it was below 15 percent. The pattern is a worldwide one.”
Technology enabled easy access to information, reducing the importance of the wisdom of the elderly. The modern culture:
“Modernization did not demote the elderly. It demoted the family. … The veneration of elders may be gone, but not because it has been replaced by veneration of youth. It’s been replaced by veneration of the independent self.”
Chapter 3: Dependence
“Old age is a continuous series of losses.”
Chapter 4: Assistance
A feeling I’ve been feeling persistently for the past year:
“When people reach the latter half of adulthood, however, their priorities change markedly. Most reduce the amount of time and effort they spend pursuing achievement and social networks. They narrow in.”
I’ve never thought of it this way before:
“Living is a kind of skill. The calm and wisdom of old age are achieved over time.”
This part of the book touched on why people become happier as they age, despite knowing that death is nearer. The change in our needs and desires has nothing to do with age but perspective. Carstensen survived a car crash and that episode changed her. This had me thinking deeply about my own near-death experience when I was five or six. As a kid, I was always described as being too mature for my age.
“I got better enough to realize how close I had come to losing my life, and I saw very differently what mattered to me. What mattered were other people in my life. I was twenty-one. Every thought I’d had before that was: What was I going to do next in life? And how would I become successful or not successful? Would I find the perfect soul mate? Lots of questions like that, which I think are typical of twenty-one-year-olds. All of a sudden, it was like I was stopped dead in the tracks. When I looked at what seemed important to me, very different things mattered.”
Further:
“When life’s fragility is primed, people’s goals and motives in their everyday lives shift completely. It’s perspective, not age, that matters most.
Tolstoy recognized this. As Ivan Ilyich’s health fades and he realizes that his time is limited, his ambition and vanity disappear. He simply wants comfort and companionship.”
Chapter 6: Letting Go
The description of dying in a hospital:
“You lie attached to a ventilator, your every organ shutting down, your mind teetering on delirium and permanently beyond realizing that you will never leave this borrowed, fluorescent place.”
Pressure to persist:
“…about two-thirds of patients are willing to undergo therapies they don’t want if that is what their loved ones want.”
Chapter 8: Courage
“Socrates is skeptical. He points out that there are times when the courageous thing to do is not to persevere but to retreat or even flee. Can there not be foolish endurance?”
On the danger of assisted death:
“Assisted living is far harder than assisted death.”
On the author’s own father passing away. Death is akin to an autumn leave gently falling in the forest unnoticed:
“Finally, around ten after six in the afternoon, while my mother and sister were talking and I was reading a book, I noticed that he’d stopped breathing for longer than before. ‘I think he’s stopped.’ I said. We went to him. My mother took his hand. And we listened, each of us silent. No more breaths came.”