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Knocking On Heaven's Door
Katy Butler
The Path to a Better Way of Death
Scribner
September 2013
On Sale: September 10, 2013
322 pages
ISBN: 1451641974
EAN: 9781451641974
Kindle: B00A285OF6
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction Memoir
In this visionary memoir, based on a groundbreaking New
York Times Magazine story, award-winning journalist Katy
Butler ponders her parents’ desires for “Good Deaths” and
the forces within medicine that stood in the
way.
Katy Butler was living thousands of miles from
her vigorous and self-reliant parents when the call came: a
crippling stroke had left her proud seventy-nine-year-old
father unable to fasten a belt or complete a sentence.
Tragedy at first drew the family closer: her mother devoted
herself to caregiving, and Butler joined the twenty-four
million Americans helping shepherd parents through their
final declines.
Then doctors outfitted her father
with a pacemaker, keeping his heart going but doing nothing
to prevent his six-year slide into dementia, near-blindness,
and misery. When he told his exhausted wife, “I’m living too
long,” mother and daughter were forced to confront a series
of wrenching moral questions. When does death stop being a
curse and become a blessing? 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
prolonged and agonizing death, Butler set out to understand
why. Her quest had barely begun when her mother took another
path. Faced with her own grave illness, she rebelled against
her doctors, refused open-heart surgery, and met death
head-on.
With a reporter’s skill and a daughter’s
love, Butler explores what happens when our terror of death
collides with the technological imperatives of medicine. Her
provocative thesis is that modern medicine, in its pursuit
of maximum longevity, often creates more suffering than it
prevents.
This revolutionary blend of memoir and
investigative reporting lays bare the tangled web of
technology, medicine, and commerce that dying has become.
And it chronicles the rise of Slow Medicine, a new movement
trying to reclaim the “Good Deaths” our ancestors
prized.
Knocking on Heaven’s Door is a map
through the labyrinth of a broken medical system. It will
inspire the difficult conversations we need to have with
loved ones as it illuminates the path to a better way of death.
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