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Title details for Knocking on Heaven's Door by Katy Butler - Available

Knocking on Heaven's Door

The Path to a Better Way of Death

by Katy Butler
Katy Butler
Audiobook (Includes supplementary content)
1 of 1 copy available
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1 of 1 copy available
"A thoroughly researched and compelling mix of personal narrative and hard-nosed reporting that captures just how flawed care at the end of life has become" (Abraham Verghese, The New York Times Book Review).
This bestselling memoir—hailed a "triumph" by The New York Times—ponders the "Good Death" and the forces within medicine that stand in its way.

Award-winning journalist Katy Butler was living thousands of miles from her aging parents when the call came: her beloved seventy-nine-year-old father had suffered a crippling stroke. Katy and her mother joined the more than 28 million Americans who are shepherding loved ones through their final declines.

Doctors outfitted her father with a pacemaker, which kept his heart going while doing nothing to prevent a slide into dementia, near-blindness, and misery. When he said, "I'm living too long," mother and daughter faced wrenching moral questions. Where is the line between saving a life and prolonging a dying? When do you say to a doctor, "Let my loved one go?"

When doctors refused to disable the pacemaker, condemning her father to a lingering death, Butler set out to understand why. Her quest had barely begun when her mother, faced with her own grave illness, rebelled against her doctors, refused open-heart surgery, and met death the old-fashioned way: head-on.

Part memoir, part medical history, and part spiritual guide, Knocking on Heaven's Door is a map through the labyrinth of a broken medical system. Technological medicine, obsessed with maximum longevity, is creating more suffering than it prevents. Butler chronicles the rise of Slow Medicine, a movement bent on reclaiming the "Good Deaths" our ancestors prized. In families, hospitals, and the public sphere, this visionary memoir is inspiring the difficult conversations we must have to light the path to a better way of death.

"A lyrical meditation written with extraordinary beauty and sensitivity" (San Francisco Chronicle).

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    September 10, 2013

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781442366244
      • File size: 301486 KB
      • Duration: 10:28:05

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from May 27, 2013
      In this eloquent exegesis on taking control of the end of one’s life, Butler defines a “good death” as one that is free from unnecessary medical intervention and faced with acceptance and dignity. The book is an expansion of her groundbreaking New York Times Magazine article, published in June 2010. A journalist living in Northern California, Butler helped her aging parents, who lived in Middletown, Conn., through several serious health issues (both parents have since died). She writes affectingly of her parents’ wishes to make moral decisions about their deaths—in spite of the medical establishment’s single-minded efforts to prolong their lives, regardless of the quality of those lives. Butler’s father had a pacemaker installed in 2003 after an earlier stroke, allowing his heart to continue functioning indefinitely even as his overall health deteriorated. The brunt of his care fell on Butler’s prickly, authoritarian mother—to the anguish of Butler, who eventually became her father’s caregiver, despite living 3,000 miles away and having two able-bodied younger brothers. Butler usefully weighs the benefits of life-prolonging medical care, and argues persuasively for helping elders face death with foresight and bravery. Agent: Amanda Urban, ICM.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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