In 2005, data shows, only seven percent of those between seventy-five and eighty-four, and only twenty-five percent of those over eighty-four, needed help with personal care.
Evidence also tells us that decrepitude and incapacitation that come with age are, on average, only about the last three months of a life. Even then, studies assure us, mental clarity is more likely than not to remain to the end. Clearly, life does not end till it ends.
— Joan Chittister, The Gift of Years