• image.alt
  • With Mayo Clinic health education outreach coordinator

    Angela Lunde

    read biography

Mayo Clinic Health Manager

Get free personalized health guidance for you and your family.

Get Started

Free

E-Newsletter

Subscribe to receive the latest updates on health topics. View sample

25 comments posted

In attempting to organize the piles on my desk this week (a long overdue project), I ran across this piece that was given to me by a colleague, and written by a woman named Esther. I believe Esther speaks for those who no longer can communicate what is important to them. I look forward to your comments.

Declaration of Independence

Look at me as someone very, very special with personal accomplishments only I have accumulated throughout all my years of living; I am different from anyone else, unique and precious because I am the only one who has lived my life.

I cannot be duplicated, and what I am, what I know, what I have done, what I can become belongs solely to me. While I am here, I am still being, still becoming. I am irreplaceable and invaluable, the only one of a kind, ever, before or after.

The community where I live will grow only as I grow. Don't discard me as a worn-out, useless finished garment. Wear me out in honor and pride and don't ignore me, talk down to me, over me, or around me as if I am no longer there. Be careful how you label me and please don't call me a senior citizen, you don't call your teenagers junior citizens. When I am lying ill in bed, don't come in and say to me shall we have our bath now? There's no we or our, it's my bath.

I don't want to be humored, babied, or pampered, patronized, exploited for your advantage. I want to be regarded, not someone at the end of a journey, but, rather as one still vitally involved in the living of life in all of its possibilities, good to the last drop.

Enable me through your wisdom, to experience a 'doing', a 'being,' a 'becoming' every day of this life so that I am what I was intended, in my creation, to become, to hear my calling, and to live out my destiny in all of its fullness, expected of me. Don't waste me and make me stand with empty hands and unfulfilled hopes before my creator at the end of this life.

Help me to grow and achieve all that I was potentially able to be with your help. And give me a sense of worth, dignity and achievement, for there is so much to do, use me!

Remember, I go this way but once. Want me, love me and let the ending be as gracious and living as it was in the beginning when I first arrived.

25 comments posted

blog index

AZ00057

Oct. 26, 2007

© 1998-2009 Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research (MFMER). All rights reserved. A single copy of these materials may be reprinted for noncommercial personal use only. "Mayo," "Mayo Clinic," "MayoClinic.com," "EmbodyHealth," "Reliable tools for healthier lives," "Enhance your life," and the triple-shield Mayo Clinic logo are trademarks of Mayo Foundation for Medical Education and Research.


Text Size: smaller largerlarger