I'm so glad I read this book! No regrets, as I titled this post. I decided to "collect" the words I singled out, the words that made me think or smile or compare to my own life. I hope you enjoy them, too. I need to return this book to the library today, but I want to continue thinking about the insights I tagged about Clover, a death doula in New York City. That means she had dedicated her life to ushering people peacefully through their end-of-life process, as I posted HERE. By the way, she was raised by her grandfather because her parents died in a freak accident was she was little.
1. "I stood in front of bookshelves ... three dilapidated notebooks stood out ... On the first, REGRETS, the second, ADVICE, the third, CONFESSIONS. Aside from my pets, these were the things I'd save in a fire" (p.6). [These were people's last words.]
2. "When I first started working as a death doula, I'd naively tried to get people to focus on all the positive things about their life –– all the things they should be grateful for. But when someone has spent their years angry at the world, death just feels like one final cruel blow. Eventually, I realized that it wasn't my job to help them gloss over that reality if they didn't want to; it was to sit with them, listen, and bear witness. Even if they were unhappy right up until their final exhale, at least they weren't alone" (p. 7).
3. "I got on the F train toward Midtown, headed to the only kind of social gathering I ever really frequented: a death café" (p. 23).
[I had never heard of a death café, so I googled it and learned it is a scheduled non-profit get-together to talk about death over food and drink, usually tea and cake. The idea originates with the Swiss sociologist and anthropologist Bernard Crettaz, who organized the first café mortel in 2004. Jon Underwood, a UK web developer, was inspired by Crettaz's work, introduced the death cafe to London in 2011, and launched the Death Cafe website. They have since been held in many countries.]
4. [Clover and Grandpa would always go out for breakfast at a diner each weekend, then to a bookstore for one book each.] "Grandpa and I walked back to the apartment with our chosen books under our arms –– him with a thick biography of the scientist Louis Pasteur, me with a comprehensive guide to a mystical village of gnomes. I knew exactly how we'd be spending the rest of the afternoon. Grandpa would sit in his courduroy armchair, I'd settle into a beanbag at his feet, and togehter we'd escape to different worlds in the pages of our books" (p. 43).
5. "Have you ever wondered if we all have a specific time we're meant to die? Kind of like a set fate? You know when you hear those stories of people who escape death, like in a plane crash or a building collapse, and then they die in a freak accident a few months later? It's like death has their number and they can't escape it" (p. 62).
6."If you could know the date of your death in advance, would you want to?" (p. 62).
7. [As they sat at the diner one weekend, Grandpa said,] "Intelligence will only get you so far in life ... And the same can be said for wit and charm. But two things will serve you better than any others. ... Infinite curiosity and a keen sense of observation" (p. 75).
8. "If you want something you don't have," he'd said, "you have to do something you've never done" (p. 114).
9. "The two of them, lost in a world of their own. And me, alone in mine" (p. 198).
10. Claudia, a dying patient, said to her: "I've been dying to see you, Clover –– pun absolutely intended, because what's the point of being close to death if you can't make use of wordplay?" (p. 261.)
11. "Don't let the best parts of life pass you by because you're too scared of the unknown" (p. 288).
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