Judith Viorst Quotes

We have lost close friends and relatives to cancer and Parkinson's disease, and the level of personal suffering inflicted on patients and their families by these diseases is horrific.

I don't want to lose my legs, you know. I don't want to be wheeled around in a wheelchair. I don't want to be attached to a catheter. I saw all that stuff happen to my father, and as much as it upset me because I loved my father so much, it also really traumatized me.

My dad was suffering with cancer for six years and my mum was in coma for three-and-a-half months. So, I have seen the hospital life.

Before he died, my dad had three primary cancers over 20 years, and for four of those years, he was having chemo every day. We got used to sitting as a family at the table and him not to be able to taste what we were tasting.

Cancer is awful. It took 10 years until I didn't think about it every day. Nobody should go through this. Nobody.

A lot of people spend their last decade of their lives in pain and misery combating disease.

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.

Dementia is quite unlike cancer or heart disease or any of those other conditions where you bargain with God for a cure or even just a bit more time.

I hate to sound this way but, 'Why me? Why me with dementia?'

It's silly to keep people alive who have a terrible disease.

You don't have free will when you have lung cancer.

My father had spent years fighting cancer of the head and neck. He had numerous operations, and he was reduced and reduced and reduced. By the end, he had a growth so big under his eye that it hurt to look at him.

Cancer doesn't care if you have suffered before.

I think some people do want to die, and they will get a disease. There are people who know their lives are so troubled, and their bodies are getting them out of here.

My dad lived with pain his whole life.

There is nothing more painful than watching a child with a terminal disease.

I have people that have died from cancer and friends that are dealing with cancer.

Illness and death are not optional. Patients have a right to determine how they approach them.

I never had time to think about my beliefs until my 28-year-old daughter Paula fell ill. She was in a coma for a year, and I took care of her at home until she died in my arms in December of 1992.

Circulating through the children's ward and seeing terminally ill kids, heads shaved, smiling and having a ball despite the tubes and needles sticking into them, I thought: What do I have to worry about? If God takes me, at least I've lived for 35 years.

The thing about losing any loved one, I think, particularly in a long disease, is that you know that other people have gone through it and are going through it, but I think for every person it feels unique.

My illness is excruciating and difficult to cope with. It takes over your entire life and causes more suffering than I can describe.

A fiction about soft or easy deaths is part of the mythology of most diseases that are not considered shameful or demeaning.

My mother begged doctors to end her life. She was beyond the physical ability to swallow enough of the weak morphine pills she had around her. When she knew she was dying I promised to make sure she could go at a time of her choosing, but it was impossible. I couldn't help.

I loved my husband very much, and it was heartbreaking to have him develop Alzheimer's disease, and to stand by and watch him decline in his ability to take care of himself.