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# Conversation with a 92-year-old friend, a colonel, who left a palliative care ward alive
- URL: https://theparnassian.com/en/razgovarival-s-odnim-svoim-drugom-kotoromu-92-goda-i-on-nedavno-iz-reanimatsii-popal-v-palliativnoe-otdelenie-otkuda-chudom-vyshel-zhivym/
- Published: 2025-11-09T14:14:59.000Z
- Updated: 2026-10-02T18:44:22.000Z
- Author: Alexandr Radayev
- Tags: Observations, Mores

I was talking to a friend of mine, who is 92 and was recently moved from intensive care to a palliative ward, from which he emerged alive by some miracle. No one believed in it any longer. A colonel, a highly educated and active man, he said these words: "one does, of course, want to live", and "I used to think I would live to a hundred, and then this illness came out of nowhere".

We talk simply, without ceremony, and we say more to one another than one does in society conversation. But this phrase made a particularly strong impression: "one does, of course, want to live". As did the self-ironic pessimism of a very elderly man, admitting that the dash to a hundred had turned out to be not so easy after all.

May all your loved ones be as healthy as is possible, and value the time you spend together, in whatever way you know how