Mercedes McCambridge Quotes

I attended the bedside of a friend who was dying in a Dublin hospital. She lived her last hours in a public ward with a television blaring out a football match, all but drowning our final conversation.

We could keep his body going, but it was trying its hardest to die.

I would like to avoid dying if possible. I do like living! The worst, I think for me, though, would be a really bedridden death.

'Incurable' is a tough word. So is 'terminal.'

A few months before my dad died, his eyes had started to go, and his skin was turning green. When he finally went to hospital, he was diagnosed with late-stage pancreatic cancer. None of us kids knew why the old man ignored the doctors and refused their help, but none of us were surprised, either.

Years ago I watched my 1st wife suffer through cancer and she went to be with Jesus.

I have sat with countless patients and families to discuss grim prognoses: It's one of the most important jobs physicians have. It's easier when the patient is 94, in the last stages of dementia, and has a severe brain bleed. For young people like me - I am 36 - given a diagnosis of cancer, there aren't many words.

I don't want to die in pain or in an undignified way, I don't want any of the people I love to die in, die painfully. But I'm aware of the fact that they may die before I do and I have to part with them and take the loss. The hardest thing of love is to let go. But I think I can get let go of almost anybody.

It's always difficult to watch someone you love die.

You ask particularly after my health. I suppose that I have not many months to live; but, of course, I know nothing about it. I may add that I am enjoying existence as much as ever, and regret nothing.

I'm dying, but otherwise I'm in very good health.

I have seen many die, surrounded by loved ones, and their last words were ‘I love you.’ There were some who could no longer speak yet with their eyes and soft smile left behind that same healing message. I have been in rooms where those who were dying made it feel like sacred ground. (26)

It was the patient, cut-flower sound of a man who is waiting to die.

Augustus Waters died eight days after his prefuneral, at Memorial, in the ICU, when the cancer, which was made of him, finally stopped his heart, which was also made of him.

We could move catalog, if he'd only die quicker.

I have not often seen much dignity in the process by which we die.

The doctors allow one to die, the charlatans kill.

Why do dying people never shed tears?

What a nasty act of cruelty, giving a dying man his last wish. Don't you realize he doesn't want it? His real wish is not to die.

"I'm going over the valley." (Dying from throat cancer, his doctor found him wandering around his room, asked him where was he going?)

Everything but truth becomes loathed in a sick-room ... Let the nurse avow that the medicine is nauseous. Let the physician declare that the treatment will be painful. Let sister, or brother, or friend, tell me that I must never look to be well. When the time approaches that I am to die, let me be told that I am to die, and when.

My grandmother made dying her life's work.

Auntie Phyl's last months in the care home were extra pieces. Age is unnecessary. Some of us, like my mother, are fortunate enough to die swiftly and suddenly, in full possession of our faculties and our fate, but more and more of us will be condemned to linger, at the mercy of anxious or indifferent relatives, careless strangers, unwanted medical interventions, increasing debility, incontinence, memory loss. We live too long, but, like the sibyl hanging in her basket in the cave at Cumae, we find it hard to die.

My dad's dying wish was to have his family around him. I can't help thinking he would have been better off with more oxygen.