Elisabeth Kubler-Ross Quotes

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.

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.

Death is what men want when the anguish of living is more than they can bear.

Cancer is something that, tragically, affects almost all of our lives.

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.

You can actually be bored stiff while you're dying.

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.

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.

Don't look forward to the day you stop suffering, because when it comes you'll know you're dead.

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

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

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

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.

We must all die. But that I can save him from days of torture, that is what I feel as my great and ever new privilege. Pain is a more terrible lord of mankind than even death itself.

Everyone is down on pain, because they forget something important about it: Pain is for the living. Only the dead don't feel it.

I wish I was dead,And lay deep in the grave.I've a pain in my head,I wish I was dead.In a coffin of lead-With the Wise and the Brave-I wish I was dead,And lay deep in the grave.

It is by no means a fact that death is the worst of all evils; when it comes it is an alleviation to mortals who are worn out with sufferings.

It has always seemed to me that the only painless death must be that which takes the intelligence by violent surprise and from the rear so to speak since if death be anything at all beyond a brief and peculiar emotional state of the bereaved it must be a brief and likewise peculiar state of the subject as well and if aught can be more painful to any intelligence above that of a child or an idiot than a slow and gradual confronting with that which over a long period of bewilderment and dread it has been taught to regard as an irrevocable and unplumbable finality, I do not know it.

O Death the Healer, scorn thou not, I pray, To come to me: of cureless ills thou art The one physician. Pain lays not its touch Upon a corpse.

Would you require a wretched being, whose life is slowly wasting under a lingering disease, to despatch himself at once by the stroke of a dagger? Does not the very disorder which consumes his strength deprive him of the courage to effect his deliverance?

You have left me so long to struggle against death, alone, that I feel and see only death! I feel like death!

Count no mortal fortunate till he has departed this life free from pain.

There is no remembrance which time does not obliterate, nor pain which death does not terminate.

Lo, sleep is good, better is death--in sooth The best of all were never to be born.

Each man is master of his own death, and all that we can do when the time comes is to help him die without fear of pain.