'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.

Our deaths become a part of our lives in the sense that with our deaths we give something to those who are left behind, as we have given our lives to them.

Not death but disease is the real enemy; disease, the malign force that requires confrontation. Death is the surcease that comes when the exhausting battle has been lost.

Sherwin B. Nuland Quotes