Jenny Downham Quotes

This has been harder for my friends. I know I'm going to die.

My mother did not want cancer to interfere with my life, as she knew it would eventually end hers.

It's not morbid to talk about death. Most people don't worry about death, they worry about a bad death.

I think everyone's experience with a terminal disease is so deeply personal and unique to the person, the context in which they're living and the relationships that they have.

Cancer victims who don't accept their fate, who don't learn to live with it, will only destroy what little time they have left.

My father's death from prostate cancer in 1993 was tragic. He never complained about pain. He was a fighter. By the time he was ready to die he wasn't able to die in the way that he wanted to, which seemed an outrage to me.

Before my cancer was diagnosed, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn't know when. After the diagnosis, I knew that someday I would die, but I didn't know when. But now I knew it acutely.

When your spouse is given a bleak prognosis, you become an expert in soaking up every moment of every day.

I have been unexpectedly confronted with my own mortality as I was told that I had cancer.

My ultimate aim is to make euthanasia a positive experience.

When you go through a long illness, certainly one of cancer, there's a certain release from it and relief that it has come to an end, because the suffering can be unbearable, as opposed to an abrupt stop to life when they go out the door and there's a loved one who never comes home because of some accident.

Both individual fulfillment and the ecological balance of life on this planet are best served by dying when our inherent biology decrees that we do.

Gracious dying is a huge, macabre and expensive joke on the American public.

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 want people to understand that I intend to continue living and doing all the things that I love to do up until the end. And the end is by no means rushing up on me.

I mean some doctor told me I had six months to live and I went to their funeral.

My father was in terrible pain towards the end because of his bed sores, and he did go into hospice, and I think that was better in some ways. You know, I think his death was peaceful, and it was all right. He was just in terrible pain.

I think I definitely got scared by the second or third time a doctor told me I was dying.

I'm trying to die correctly, but it's very difficult, you know.

I realized not long ago that by the time I leave this Earth, no matter when it is I will have officially only spent approximately 14 years of my life where I did not have to deal with cancer.

First-class delivery of children's palliative care is life-changing. When families are confronted with the shattering news that their children have a life-limiting condition, their world can fall apart.

We have been so successful in the past century at the art of living longer and staying alive that we have forgotten how to die. Too often we learn the hard way. As soon as the baby boomers pass pensionable age, their lesson will be harsher still.

There's never been a doctor who served many patients who, despite their best efforts, did not lose some of them to death. But they understood that was part of life itself.

My mother battled cancer for 12 years before losing her fight.

A terminal diagnosis can really mess with your head. Honestly, it makes you want to run away to the moon. Many ALS patients want to fade away quietly. This was not for me.