Margaret M. Lock quotes:

Flirting with death is the spice of life.

Aging is fraught with difficulties, most particularly for women who have been socialized to think of youth as beauty and the female role as reproduction.

Above all, Alzheimer wanted the medical world to recognize that mental illnesses have an undeniable material component. There was an obvious political reason for taking such a position because it could then be established that dementia-like conditions are not part of the spiritual/theological domain, but undeniably biological in origin and therefore not attributable with moral implications.

Death is not a self-evident phenomenon. The margins between life and death are socially and culturally constructed, mobile, multiple, and open to dispute and reformulation.

The locus of the modern struggle with its enemy of death is clearly the body (not mind, society, or the afterworld). The body is the site of tragedy, the ultimate unresolvable paradox, for it is at once the source of life and of death.