Knocking on Heaven's Door · the Path to a Better Way of Death

"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 blend of memoir and investigative reporting--hailed as a "triumph" and a "Notable Book of the Year" by The New York Times--ponders the "Good Death" and the forces that stand in its way.

Katy Butler's parents had lived good lives and hoped to die good deaths. One succeeded; one failed. The book describing their final journeys -- a visionary blend of memoir and investigative reporting -- is a map through the medical labyrinth for the 28 million Americans helping care for aging parents.

Butler, an award-winning journalist, was living thousands of miles away when her vigorous and self-reliant seventy-nine-year-old father suffered a crippling stroke. She flew East and became thoroughly embroiled in her parents' lives.

In time, she saw her father's suffering prolonged by an advanced medical device, one of a panoply of recent inventions capable of prolonging "life" beyond its natural end. The device was pacemaker, and it kept her father's heart going while doing nothing to prevent his 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?"

After  doctors refused to disable the pacemaker, subjecting her father to a lingering death, Butler set out to understand the cultural forces that transformed dying from a natural process to an ordeal with high financial and emotional costs.  Her quest had barely begun when her mother, faced with her own grave illness, rebelled against her doctors and met death 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. Its provocative thesis is  that technological medicine, obsessed with maximum longevity, often creates more suffering than it prevents. It also 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 passionate conversations about lighting the path to a better way of death.

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

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