Knocking On Heaven's Door

Bol

Bestselling memoir and exposé of modern medicine calling for more humane, less intrusive end of life care that has sparked conversation about the way we die. “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, T he 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 isinspiring the difficult conversations we must have to light the path to a better way of death.

Bol Partner

In Knocking on Heaven's Door,award-winning journalist Katy Butler describes in vivid and poetic prose what happened to her family as her parents were moved from a ripe and vigorous old age toward a long and protracted phase of dying. After suffering a stroke at age 78, Butler's father Jeffrey, a retired professor, was left entirely dependent on the care of his wife, Butler's mother. Six years later, with a heartbeat managed by a pacemaker put in by an unthinking cardiologist, Jeff's body had outlived his brain and his wife was exhausted, sick and depleted from nearly a decade of full-time caregiving. When Butler and her mother appeal to doctors, ethicists and lawyers for help getting the pacemaker turned off-allowing Jeff a natural, painless death rather than the extended, diminished life provided by the pacemaker-they are seen as monsters. Knocking on Heaven's Doordocuments the rebellion brewing against a broken and morally adrift medical system that has morphed from saving lives to prolonging dying. Butler shows how our culture turns to technology to solve the spiritual problem of death, and how we are ignorant of the ancient and modern realities of dying. Knocking on Heaven's Dooris a profoundly moving, expertly researched mediation that will serve as a map for the 78 million baby boomers, caring for elderly parents, facing a medical system that robs death of its sacredness and intensifies its suffering.