along the way. Whenever serious sickness or injury strikes and your body or mind breaks down, the vital questions are the same: What is your understa… - Atul Gawande

For the solution to chronic pain may lie more in what goes on around us than in what is going on inside us.

A few conclusions become clear when we understand this: that our most cruel failure in how we treat the sick and the aged is the failure to recognize that they have priorities beyond merely being safe and living longer; that the chance to shape one’s story is essential to sustaining meaning in life; that we have the opportunity to refashion our institutions, our culture, and our conversations in ways that transform the possibilities for the last chapters of everyone’s lives.

The battle of being mortal is the battle to maintain the integrity of one's life-to avoid becoming so diminished or dissipated or subjugated that who you are becomes disconnected from who you were or who you want to be.