We always hope for the easy fix: the one simple change that will erase a problem in a stroke. But few things in life work this way. Instead, success … - Atul Gawande

Even our brains shrink: at the age of thirty, the brain is a three-pound organ that barely fits inside the skull; by our seventies, gray-matter loss leaves almost an inch of spare room. That’s why elderly people like my grandfather are so much more prone to cerebral bleeding after a blow to the head — the brain actually rattles around inside. The earliest portions to shrink are generally the frontal lobes, which govern judgment and planning, and the hippocampus, where memory is organized. As a consequence, memory and the ability to gather and weigh multiple ideas — to multitask — peaks in midlife and then gradually declines. Processing speeds start decreasing well before age forty (which may be why mathematicians and physicists commonly do their best work in their youth).

For all but our most recent history, death was a common, ever-present possibility. It didn’t matter whether you were five or fifty. Every day was a roll of the dice.

When my father met her, he was surprised to learn she lived by herself. He was a urologist, which meant he saw many elderly patients, and it always bothered him to find them living alone. The way he saw it, if they didn’t already have serious needs, they were bound to develop them, and coming from India he felt it was the family’s responsibility to take the aged in, give them company, and look after them.