Being Mortal: Illness, Medicine, and What Matters in the End

This book is written by Atul Gawande. Out of the 150 or so pages that I have read, here are my takeaways from this book:

  • Aging is one of the processes that can result in a change in perspective from the future & the 2 I's(Immortality, Invulnerability) to the present & acknowledging one's limited lifetime.
  • It is a lack of empathy, not necessarily intentional but may very well be, that causes people to place their parents and elders in living conditions which drain their souls. Nursing homes are like prisons, not only in their relationship to their inhabitants but in their design as well(keeping the miscreants of society away from "normal people or keeping the elderly/incapacitated away from those who are "free").
  • The solution to ensuring old people retain their souls seems to be to acknowledge and accept that the extra freedoms that the elders retain could very well cause their death. That is okay.
  • Assisted living was once a phenomenon that provided #3 but then became misappropriated and misused by nursing homes and other institutions that provide inadequate care.