Jane Gross > Quotes

“I do not pretend to know who is right. But I do know this: most old people do not want their lives extended beyond reason. They don’t want their adult children changing their diapers. They don’t want to lose their minds and their memories. Give them the chance to tell you that. Don’t try and jolly them out of it. Imagine yourself in their shoes. Love them enough to let them go.”
― Jane Gross, A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents--and Ourselves

“Now, as an adult child, ask yourself: Does either of your parents have a half-million dollars on hand to provide for himself or herself in old age?”
― Jane Gross, A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents--and Ourselves

“All the very old people I know, and the vast majority of those who commented on my blog, see long life as a blessing only if they are reasonably functional and not at the mercy of others to get through the day. Once they reach that point of helplessness, with only the rarest exception, they want out.”
― Jane Gross, A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents--and Ourselves

“The lesson in my friend’s observation is that the line moves. What had once seemed unendurable to an aged parent, and still does to us, the adult children, changes. They come to tolerate the formerly intolerable and to surprise us with their forbearance. Diapers, it turned out, were not the end of the world. Nor was a wheelchair, despite initial resistance. Millimeter by millimeter the line was moving, as it would many times more.”
― Jane Gross, A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents--and Ourselves

“My mother often mulled the pointless but compulsively compelling question of whether mental decline would be better than physical decline. Wouldn’t being round-the-bend demented be an easier way to go than being paralyzed, losing the ability to talk, becoming incontinent, and being totally aware of every second of it?”
― Jane Gross, A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents--and Ourselves

“Because I said so” might work with a child, but it doesn’t work with a parent, and it would be disrespectful besides.”
― Jane Gross, A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents--and Ourselves

“I didn’t ask any of the right questions,” I said to Dr. Leipzig. “That’s because you didn’t know what questions to ask,” she answered. “You thought the doctors would lead the conversation, and they didn’t.” “I did the best I could. I did the best I could, and it wasn’t good enough.” “That’s because of the system,” Dr. Leipzig said. “You can’t do better than you did in this system. Hold on to that.”
― Jane Gross, A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents--and Ourselves

“enlightened geriatric professionals told me that physical therapy had benefits, even absent improvement,”
― Jane Gross, A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents--and Ourselves

“Taking care of someone in old age isn’t a job for an amateur, especially if you want some time at the end of your parents’ life to enjoy them, learn more about them, and be a good son or daughter. To”
― Jane Gross, A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents--and Ourselves

“I only had the surgery because I thought I’d die on the table.” This, I was sure, was not one of my mother’s black jokes but the absolute truth, and the explanation for her otherwise bewildering decision to have the surgery at this late date.”
― Jane Gross, A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents--and Ourselves

“When a patient shows up at a cancer hospital, these experts argue, the assumption is that she wants aggressive treatment. Why else would she be there?”
― Jane Gross, A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents--and Ourselves

“How We Die, Dr. Sherwin B. Nuland rails at the “soulless summary” of the death certificate.”
― Jane Gross, A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents--and Ourselves

“Don’t let the perfect drive out the good”
― Jane Gross, A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents--and Ourselves

“Carrillo noted, too, that few of us plan in advance for the time and money we may have to spend on extended elder care, arguably because we don’t want to think about it and are hoping it will never be necessary. By contrast, the arrival of a new baby is preceded by elaborate and lengthy preparation; child care arrangements and college savings accounts are set up in advance.”
― Jane Gross, A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents--and Ourselves

“During that span, my mother’s long-term care cost was $609,123, or more than $67,000 a year. This figure does not include doctors’ bills, hospital stays, surgery, or any of the medical care categorized as “acute,” which, as I said, is paid for by Medicare and, in my mother’s case, a supplementary Medigap policy,”
― Jane Gross, A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents--and Ourselves

“Living Long in Fragile Health: The New Demographics Shape End of Life Care.”
― Jane Gross, A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents--and Ourselves

“It is hard to keep track of the nation’s ever-changing and merging providers of backup care—companies with names like Visiting Angels, Home Alone, and Comfort Keepers; some are franchises, and others are centrally managed. One of the leaders was the Work Options Group, based in Superior, Colorado, whose clients included”
― Jane Gross, A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents--and Ourselves

“I am old enough to have been taught in early adulthood to always leave a party while you are still a welcome guest. Nowhere is this more important than in life itself.”
― Jane Gross, A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents--and Ourselves

“inching toward oblivion.”
― Jane Gross, A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents--and Ourselves

“She had a long-term care insurance policy, purchased in 1993 when she was seventy-eight, for almost $7,000 a month, a most unusual expenditure for someone in her age group, that wound up costing a total of $53,600.”
― Jane Gross, A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents--and Ourselves

“The decision about whether an older patient is an appropriate candidate for surgery is often made in the context of what some call “binary thinking” (“I’m healthy and I’m fine” or “I’m dead”), with little recognition or acknowledgment of the potential—no, the likelihood—that the patient will experience a lengthy period of deepening disability and dependence between those two extremes, often exacerbated by surgery.”
― Jane Gross, A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents--and Ourselves

“a “culture of rescue” still dominates American medicine, according to Sherwin B. Nuland, in a 2010 update to How We Die: Reflections on Life’s Final Chapter. Dr. Nuland writes, in a coda to his sixteen-year-old best seller, that”
― Jane Gross, A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents--and Ourselves

“Until she reached the nursing home, no doctor or other medical professional ever asked her for her goals of care. Did she want to live as long as possible? Or was day-to-day quality of life, independence, and level of functioning more important than longevity? In the same vein, no medical professional ever suggested or assembled a family meeting on this subject, even though Michael and I would surely have a role in how she met those goals.”
― Jane Gross, A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents--and Ourselves

“Now, as the saying goes, they leave sicker and quicker.”
― Jane Gross, A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents--and Ourselves

“What I have come to see is that my standards weren’t the only standards, maybe not even the best standards, and that measuring him against them was unfair to him, a waste of energy for me, and not necessarily in my mother’s best interests. There is a lesson for you in that.”
― Jane Gross, A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents--and Ourselves

“We treat our pets better than we treat people!” It was a”
― Jane Gross, A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents--and Ourselves

“profit. At SeniorBridge, which bought Fine Newcombe & Winsby, for instance, fees for aides and for hourly care management have gone up considerably in the years since my family was a client. But the original consultation fee remains $500, a way to introduce prospective families to the services (or to lure them in, depending on your level of cynicism).”
― Jane Gross, A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents--and Ourselves

“Claudia Fine, originally the co-owner of Fine Newcombe & Winsby and now executive vice president of SeniorBridge,”
― Jane Gross, A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents--and Ourselves

“it’s easier to confront death than to confront dying:”
― Jane Gross, A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents--and Ourselves

“Nell Casey’s anthology An Uncertain Inheritance: Writers on Caring for Family.”
― Jane Gross, A Bittersweet Season: Caring for Our Aging Parents--and Ourselves