It is difficult to accept death in this society because it is unfamiliar. In spite of the fact that it happens all the time, we never see it.

Those who have the strength and the love to sit with a dying patient in the silence that goes beyond words will know that this moment is neither frightening nor painful, but a peaceful cessation of the functioning of the body.

I know beyond a shadow of a doubt that there is no death the way we understood it. The body dies, but not the soul.

I’ve told my children that when I die, to release balloons in the sky to celebrate that I graduated. For me, death is a graduation.

It is not the end of the physical body that should worry us. Rather, our concern must be to live while we’re alive – to release our inner selves from the spiritual death that comes with living behind a facade designed to conform to external definitions of who and what we are.

You have entered an abnormal, lonely, and unwelcome new world where you are nothing but an island of sadness.

Watching a peaceful death of a human being reminds us of a falling star; one of a million lights in a vast sky that flares up for a brief moment only to disappear into the endless night forever.

It is important to feel the anger without judging it, without attempting to find meaning in it. It may take many forms: anger at the health-care system, at life, at your loved one for leaving. Life is unfair. Death is unfair. Anger is a natural reaction to the unfairness of loss.