Previous
Dr. Paul Marcoux
Jack is Susan Block’s father. At 74 years old, doctors discover that he has a spinal cord tumor and they have to operate on him to prevent him from becoming quadriplegic, though the surgery also has severe risks. He and Susan have a difficult but ultimately necessary conversation, in which he tells her that if he can eat ice cream and watch football, he wants to continue living. This proves crucial, as complications arise in the surgery and Block uses this metric to instruct the doctors to save his life. While Jack loses some motor function and recovery is difficult, he is still able to write two books—their conversation enabled him to recover meaningful time.
Jack Quotes in Being Mortal
The Being Mortal quotes below are all either spoken by Jack or refer to Jack. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
).
Chapter 6 Quotes
“If I had not had that conversation with him,” she told me, “my instinct would have been to let him go at that moment because it just seemed so awful. And I would have beaten myself up. Did I let him go too soon?” Or she might have gone ahead and sent him to surgery, only to find—as occurred—that he was faced with a year of “very horrible rehab” and disability. “I would have felt so guilty that I condemned him to that,” she said. “But there was no decision for me to make.” He had decided.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7 Quotes
I realized then that my father had already told us what to do, just as Susan Block’s father had. My dad was more afraid of becoming quadriplegic than of dying. I therefore asked Benzel which posed the greater risk of his becoming quadriplegic in the next couple months: stopping or proceeding? Stopping, he said. We told him to proceed.
Related Characters:
Related Themes:
Page Number and Citation:
Explanation and Analysis:
Get the entire Being Mortal LitChart as a printable PDF.
"My students can't get enough of your charts and their results have gone through the roof." -Graham S.
Jack Character Timeline in Being Mortal
The timeline below shows where the character Jack appears in Being Mortal. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 6
Block’s 74-year-old father Jack was admitted to a hospital 10 years earlier with a mass growing in the spinal...
(full context)
The conversation proved critical, because after surgery Jack developed bleeding in his spinal cord. Doctors could save his life, but the bleeding would...
(full context)
Block and Jack had the necessary conversation to figure out when to switch from fighting for time to...
(full context)
Chapter 7
...what his father wants out of the end of his life. Gawande tells him about Jack (Susan Block’s father), who said if he could still watch football on TV and eat...
(full context)
