I have always very
much liked old folk and taken great pleasure in treating them.
Doubtless this is because I have felt that it is with them, with the
drawing near of death and the new scale of values that this gives,
that true values are sifted out, the enduring ones. If living means
choosing...then choosing becomes the supreme vocation of old age,
when life has become privation and earthly treasures have lost their
glitter.
Then it is that a
purely technical and scientific medical care, less and less
effective, gives way to an ever more pressing care of the person...If
medicine has no other hope to offer than a limited and temporary
renewal of a vanishing ability then it becomes most disillusioning…
To cling to the
past, to seek most doggedly to prolong one’s time of action means
precisely this: living a useless old age…
Our task is to help
men right to the end, to help them to grow up, and to help them to
grow old. The new transition means to face, rather than avoid, this
question of the true meaning of life.
-Paul Tournier, The Seasons of Life
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