num_pages: 322
description: Knocking on Heaven's Door is a visionary map through the labyrinth of a broken and morally adrift medical system. It will inspire the necessary and difficult conversations we all need to have with loved ones as it illuminates a path to a better way of death.Like so many of us award-winning writer Katy Butler always assumed her aging parents would experience healthy active retirements before dying peacefully at home. Then her father suffered a stroke that left him incapable of easily finishing a sentence or showering without assistance. Her mother was thrust into full-time caregiving and Katy became one of the 24 million Americans who help care for aging parents. In an effort to correct a minor and nonlife threatening heart arrhythmia doctors outfitted her father with a pacemaker. The device kept his heart beating but did nothing to prevent his slide into dementia incontinence near-muteness and misery. After several years he asked his wife for help telling her I am living too long. Mother and daughter faced a series of wrenching moral questions: When does death cease being a curse and become a blessing? Where is the line between saving life and prolonging a dying? When is the right time to say to a doctor Let my loved one go? When doctors refused to disable the pacemaker sentencing her father to a protracted and agonizing death Katy set out to understand why. Her quest had barely begun when her mother faced her own illness rebelled against her doctors refused open-heart surgery and instead met death head-on. Knocking on Heaven's Door a revolutionary blend of memoir and investigative reporting is the fruit of the Butler family's journey. With a reporter's skill a poet's eye and a daughter's love Butler explores what happens when our terror of death collides with the technological imperatives of modern medicine. Her provocative thesis is that advanced medicine in its single-minded pursuit of maximum longevity often creates more suffering than it prevents. Butler lays bare the tangled web of technology medicine and commerce that modern dying has become and chronicles the rise of Slow Medicine - a growing movement that promotes care over cure. Knocking on Heaven's Door is a visionary map through the labyrinth of a broken and morally adrift medical system. It will inspire the necessary and difficult conversations we all need to have with loved ones as it illuminates a path to a better way of death.
language: English
title: Knocking on Heaven's Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death
publisher: Scribner