"The desire to prolong youthfulness," writes Kass, "is not only a childish desire to eat one's life and keep it; it is also an expression of a childish and narcissistic wish incompatible with devotion to posterity".
"I have come to realise that I do not want my life to be prolonged artificially," he writes.
"Clare from Manchester should certainly hold off working until September, on the precondition that she develops a hearty gin habit suffused with the extra bit of nervous tension that only prolonged loneliness can provide," writes Damien Evans, who works, believe it or not, for the NHS Trust.
The dozens of adult daughters who talked to me for my book, and who write about prolonged rifts with mothers, come from varied backgrounds and experiences.
In 2012, he got an offer to write a book but he wasn't sure what he would write about, so he prolonged it until 2014.
"I think they wrote to prolong their own childhoods," she said, "or the fantasy childhoods they would like to have had".
I am well-aware (and wrote) that prolonging the process has been one of the major reasons the whole healthcare reform effort lost political support.
The department's chief, Steven Bradbury, wrote several memos arguing that waterboarding, prolonged isolation and sleep deprivation were not really torture, so the Convention Against Torture did not apply.
"In addition," they wrote, "average overall acid clearance was significantly prolonged with right side down".
Yes, modern medicine prolongs the dying process, and therefore allows more time for writing about it.
