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    Knocking on Heaven's Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death
    Knocking on Heaven's Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death
    Knocking on Heaven's Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death
    Audiobook10 hours

    Knocking on Heaven's Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death

    Written by Katy Butler

    Narrated by Katy Butler

    4.5/5

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    About this audiobook

    “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 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 is inspiring the difficult conversations we must have to light the path to a better way of death.

    “A lyrical meditation written with extraordinary beauty and sensitivity” (San Francisco Chronicle).
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSimon & Schuster Audio
    Release dateSep 10, 2013
    ISBN9781442366244
    Author

    Katy Butler

    Katy Butler’s articles have appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Best American Science Writing, and The Best American Essays. A finalist for a National Magazine Award, she lives in Northern California. She is the author of Knocking on Heaven’s Door and The Art of Dying Well.

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    Reviews for Knocking on Heaven's Door

    4.5/5

    60 ratings8 reviews

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    • 5/5
      Outstanding! Searingly honest and filled with compassion. Thank you, Katy Butler.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 4/5
      It's thrilling to see how many readers are giving 4 or 5 stars to this amazing book. As individuals and as citizens, we need to help our medical system cure itself of the overtreatment disease. My hope is that this book will impact our culture as much as books like "The Jungle" and "Silent Spring".
    • 5/5
      I really loved it, very soulful and quite informative! Great!
    • 2/5
      A book about a family dealing with the death of the elderly and the trauma involved, this is a seriously flawed work. At one end, it is an almost cold, factual assessment of our medical system's faults in dealing with death and dying. At the other end, it is overloaded with highly emotional, contradictory, sometimes narcissistic and elitist rantings. Occasionally, it finds some balance and middle ground, and it provides some worthwhile substance for most people, but it could easily have been a third or a quarter the length and still provided all the good it had to offer. I suspect that some folks will happily wade knee deep in the emotions and miss some of the most salient issues, as did the author. I can't recall having read such a flawed non-fiction book that still had something worthwhile to say. Read it or not. I'm convinced one can get as much value elsewhere.
    • 5/5
      This memoir is an intensely personal recounting by Katy Butler of the deaths of both her parents, which she then makes universal and political. One of the most poignant statements for me was when Ms. Butler realized that the medical interventions that were prolonging her father's life, even as his dementia progressed, were taking years off the life of her mom, as his caretaker. Ms. Butler analyzes the current medical practices around the issues of end-of-life care and treatment, and recommends significant changes. This book is touching, well-written, and thought provoking. The narration, by the author, was excellent.
    • 5/5
      A wonderfully revealing look at how we (all, at some point) die, through Butler's experiences with the deaths of her parents. Butler has an exhaustive list of things to consider---again, from her own incredible experiences. There is no such thing as "perfection" in any of this---you do the best you can but she emphasizes how much we have lost over time and how hard it is to get back to the idea of a Slow approach to the subject of dying---the avoidance of medical help when, in all too many situations, that intervention will not help with quality of life but will, instead, often cause more suffering, not only for the dying person but for all the caregivers involved.
    • 5/5
      How to describe a book that had such a profound effect on me! [Knocking On Heaven's Door] was a difficult book to read, only because its subject matter is death. The death of a loved one, a family member, and ultimately, one's own death. But the author, Katy Butler, as she talks about the deaths of first her beloved father and then her treasured mother, is clear and concise while still compassionate and vulnerable. She providees a plethora of information throughout the book and in the notes at the end. If you are currently a caregiver for an elderly parent or a family member, please buy or somehow obtain a copy of this book. It will be one of the finest things you can do for yourself and them. You should own it, I think, as I can imagine much of it being re-read and frequently referenced for the well thought out advice from someone in the difficult position of having to care for aging parents as they transition into the end of their lives. The book was brought into being based on an article about the installation of her father's pacemaker, after a debilatating stroke, first written for the New York Times. Butler is a respected journalist, best known for her prize winning science writing and articles on Buddhism. And while those are both incorporated into [Knocking On Heaven's Door] what shines through most clearly is her love and respect for her parents, and the compassion and grief she experiences with them and for them as they approach the end of their lives, plagued by health crises and in the case of her mother, guilt at the handling of her husbands final days. In his eighties, her father experiences a debilitating stroke and because of the decision they make for him to have a pacemaker implanted, his decline into dementia is prolonged. He is aware enough to state that he feels that he has lived long enough, and as he loses control of his bodily functions, as well as his mental acuity, both Butler and her mother realize their mistake in having the pacemaker implanted. Because a bioethics committee has determined that the deactivation of a pacemaker is neither suicide or assisted death, they are eventually able to have it deactivated, but that decision comes with great regret and difficulty. Butler provides several instances of similar family crises, with various circumstances and outcomes and talks about the people whose care for her father helped them survive the challenges her family faced both before and after his death. Her difficult relationship wth her mother is balanced by the moments of tenderness they share and I was particularly impressed with their shared interest and enthusiasm for the practice of Buddhism, and believe that it often helped them to survive the emotional backlash a failing family member can unwittingly cause. So although the book is meant to help the reader with resources and information, it also provides a sense of joy that can be found in the simplest of things, a tea ceremony, a set of calligraphy pens, a memory.
    • 4/5
      I spent 3+ years a decade and a half ago taking care of my dying mother. I wasn't sure I wanted to read this book--it was a difficult time that I'm generally happy to keep in the closet. However, I took the plunge into Katy Butler's book, and found out that what I felt and went through was not unique and it was wonderful to hear echoes of what I experienced in her story. She is very open with her feelings, and her frustrations, with her family, the tremendously mysterious and maddening medical army you must take on in the process of helping someone in decline and death (though Butler finds ways around it as time goes by), and the modern version of dying that has taken all the sacred away and piled up too many procedures, patches, and invasive entrances to our bodies and our lives. Butler, a Buddhist, believes that things can be different, and she shows us what is so wrong, and what can be righted, if we are willing to stand up for a better death. This is a book that most people need to read, for their family and for themselves.