Lynn Casteel Harper

“Machines don’t mature; they either work or they get replaced by ones that do. Old bodies are merely worn-out machines that possess suboptimal parts. They are past their prime, on the decline, sliding down to uselessness. If they have not already, elders join the ranks of others pushed aside by market values—the poor and developmentally disabled, for instance. Thrown off the line, discarded, and replaced. When what is profitable is good, and what is good is profitable, then persons who no longer produce—including the most rudimentary “goods,” like coherent thoughts and sentences—are in danger of abandonment.”
― Lynn Casteel Harper, On Vanishing: Mortality, Dementia, and What It Means to Disappear

“A Methodist clergywoman, Shamy declares in the introduction that she hopes the book will bring together those who work with and love people who have dementia. She describes this communion as a “fellowship of the foolish.” “For foolish we most certainly will appear,” she writes, “in a society obsessed by the quantifiable, by the immediate, by productivity and usefulness, by competition and profit, by individualism and loss of community, and where the bottom line really is the bottom line.”
― Lynn Casteel Harper, On Vanishing: Mortality, Dementia, and What It Means to Disappear