Knocking on Heaven's Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death
Katy Butler
Language: English
Pages: 352
ISBN: 1451641982
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
"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 groundbreaking blend of memoir and investigative reporting--hailed as "Notable Book of the Year" by The New York Times--ponders the "Good Death" and the forces that stand in its way.
Katy Butler was living thousands of miles away when her old but seemingly vigorous father suffered a crippling stroke. She flew East and in time became her parents' part-time caregiver, thoroughly re-embroiled in the childhood family dynamics she thought she'd left behind.
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).
about intimacy, especially with my mother. She went to Maine anyway, with my father and one of her closest friends. If she was angry or disappointed in me, she did not say. After many tries, my father succeeded in writing her a short birthday letter by hand, decorated with a wavering line drawing. “You will notice I have given you the most elegant legs,” he wrote in a tiny, nearly illegible script. “Your legs never let you down even though put under great pressure. Such legs are not available to
it as light. Yes, in light there is darkness, but don’t see it as darkness.” My knees hurt. We chanted some more, about filling a silver bowl with snow and hiding a heron in the moonlight. I loved the language. It pointed to something that I, a lifelong maker of phrases, couldn’t put into words. “Sentient beings are numberless,” we chanted. “I vow to save them.” When it was over, I walked out into the clear morning light. Something nameless was within me, a pool of pure water long hidden in a
Our brains shrink. Dendritic spines, the knobby lumps on individual brain cells that act as contact points between neurons, grow sparse and stubby, like a tree limb that has been harshly pruned. Synapses fail, and associated neural pathways fall into disuse. Arteries thicken, reducing blood flow. Myelin, the fatty white protective sheath that surrounds filamental brain cells like insulation, grows as porous and leaky as an old hose, slowing the speed at which messages move from one cell to
eye over my hair and clothes. I was in baggy blue jeans, white athletic socks, running shoes, a no-iron white shirt, and a dark-blue fleece jacket. My dyed brown hair, newly cut, ballooned over my forehead in a bulbous helmet. As she and I twittered through our first hellos, my father said little, beyond an occasional, “I don’t know what you’re talking about!” or “What are we doing now?” Within minutes, my mother and I were acting as if he weren’t there. My father’s main expression now was one
Too Much Medicine Is Making Us Sicker and Poorer. New York: Bloomsbury, 2007. Nuland, Sherwin B. How We Die: Reflections on Life’s Final Chapter. New York: Vintage Books, 1993. LEGALITIES You have a constitutional right to refuse any medical treatment or ask for its withdrawal on your own behalf or on behalf of someone who has legally entrusted you with that role. Some family members have even called an ambulance and signed someone out of an intensive care unit against medical advice.