Letting Go

“Is she dying?” one of the sisters asked me. I didn’t know how to answer the question. I wasn’t even sure what the word “dying” meant anymore. In the past few decades, medical science has rendered obsolete centuries of experience, tradition, and language about our mortality, and created a new difficulty for mankind: how to die.

by Atul Gawande, The New Yorker (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/08/02/100802fa_fact_gawande?currentPage=all)