“Of course I knew I could rely on your sympathy. I am reconciled by the certainty that a continuance of life would have meant only a continuance of pain and suffering of which my wife had had too much before the final accident. (She fell and broke her hip bone.) We have had our share. For sixty years she made life poetry for me and at 88 one must be ready for the end. I shall keep at work and interested while it lasts—though not caring very much for how long.”
Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., letter to Frederick Pollock, May 24, 1929