Being Mortal: Illness, Medicine and What Matters in the End (Wellcome Collection)

Everyone succumbs to finitude. I suspect I am not the only one who reaches this pluperfect state. Most ambitions are either achieved or abandoned; either way, they belong to the past. The future, instead of the ladder toward the goals of life, flattens out into a perpetual present. Money, status, all the vanities the preacher of Ecclesiastes descri

The terror of sickness and old age is not merely the terror of the losses one is forced to endure but also the terror of the isolation.

The tricky part of illness is that, as you go through it, your values are constantly changing.

On your deathbed, you have clarity. You’re unhooked from cultural fluency and conventional wisdom—whether because you possess your own wisdom or because, in your final moments, you no longer care about those things. Tim believes we should try to find that same level of deathbed clarity while there’s still plenty of time in our lives left to care.