Aging Quote by Caitlin Doughty

““We do not (and will not) have the resources to properly care for our increasing elderly population, yet we insist on medical intervention to keep them alive. To allow them to die would signal the failure of our supposedly infallible modern medical system. The surgeon Atul Gawande wrote in a devastating New Yorker article on aging that “there have been dozens of best-selling books on aging but they tend to have titles like ‘Younger Next Year,’ ‘The Fountain of Age,’ ‘Ageless,’ ‘The Sexy Years.’ Still, there are costs to averting our eyes from the realities. For one thing, we put off changes that we need to make as a society. . . . In thirty years, there will be as many people over eighty as there are under five.””

Caitlin Doughty

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“Dead people look very, very dead. It is difficult to grasp what that means, since it’s unlikely that any of us will stumble across a roving pack of dead bodies in the wild. We live in a world where people rarely die in their homes, and if they do, they’re carted off to the funeral home the second after taking…

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“The most salacious stories—bones ground in a metal blender or torture-spike eye caps—had the power to disrupt people’s polite complacency about death. Rather than…

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“He explained that he talks about death "all the time" with his friends. They ask each other, "Hey, what you want when you die?"…

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“Many children and grandchildren of immigrants, have, like Sarah, found themselves severed from their family’s cultural rituals. The funeral system in the United States…

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“I have come to believe that the merits of a death custom are not based on mathematics (e.g., 36.7 percent a "barbarous act"), but…

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“It was death that the public was being cheated out of by the funeral industry, not money. The realistic interaction with death and the…

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“Exposing a young child to the realities of love and death is far less dangerous than exposing them to the lie of the happy…

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“Rather than let author and environmentalist Edward Abbey be buried in a traditional cemetery, his friends stole his body, wrapped it in a sleeping bag, and hauled it in the back of his pickup truck to the Cabeza Prieta Desert in Arizona. They drove down a long dirt road and dug a hole when they reached the end of it,…

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“The ICU was not the thrill ride I had expected. Turns out, they never called the high school student in from the reception desk…

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“Death should be known. Known as a difficult mental, physical, and emotional process, respected and feared for what it is.”

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“Untreated, a dead person’s face looks horrific, at least by our very narrow cultural expectations. Their droopy, open eyes cloud over in a vacant stare. Their mouths stretch wide like Edvard Munch’s The Scream. The color drains from their faces. These images reflect the normal biological processes of death, but they are not what a family wants to see. As…

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“It is worth noting that the main players in the recomposition project are women—scientists, anthropologists, lawyers, architects. Educated women, who have the privilege to devote their efforts to righting a wrong. They’ve given prominent space in their professional careers to changing the current system of death. Katrina noted that “humans are so focused on preventing aging and decay—it’s become an…

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While we've youth in our hearts, we can never grow old.

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