INVITING DEATH IN

For readers Atul Gawande's Being Mortal and Hadley Vlahos's The In-Between, the idea for this book came from a piece that journalist Deprez wrote for Bloomberg Businessweek that tells the story of how she helped her terminally ill father qualify for an assisted death, and then held his hand as he ingested the drugs that would hasten the end. An intimate and heartfelt meditation on love and loss, it wasn't the kind of story one would expect to find in Bloomberg Businessweekbut Esmé's tribute to her father was also a masterpiece of investigative journalism, weaving analysis of health policy and end-of-life care into a broader examination of a controversial but rapidly growing field of medicine.

Writing the story sparked a new journalistic obsession for Esmé, sending her on a multi-year reporting journey inside the world of "medical aid in dying" (MAID). Thus began her work on this bookan intrepid work of narrative journalism that lays bare how the medically and ethically complex practice of assisted death actually plays out on the ground, while raising important questions about bodily autonomy, agency, and control at life's end. INVITING DEATH IN will center medical aid in dying as the purest, most direct, and most extreme legal method we have to express our desire for control and autonomy in our final days. It explores the history, evolution, and future of hastened death in its myriad forms, and chronicles what is happening and could still happen to this still new but fast maturing field. Grounded in the stories of two MAID usersEsmé's father Ron Deprez, and Sandy Morris, who, fighting the clock against ALS, became the lead plaintiff in a first-of-its-kind lawsuit to expand California's aid-in-dying lawthe book ultimately transcends the world of assisted death to ask: Who, as death approaches, gets to have agency? To whom do we surrender control at life's end, and why? And how would a wider range of end-of-life options shape how we chose to live? As this book will show, the answers to these questions are being litigated across the country by MAID doctors and patients, advocates and critics, lawmakers and academics, and their effects will be felt far beyond MAID users. Though assisted death can be hard to look at, we can no longer look away. The normalizing of the practice is taking place amidst a rapidly aging population, and in the wake of a pandemic that forced us all to consider the deaths we don't want: isolated, afraid, powerless. Ultimately, Esmé hopes her book will spark more contemplation and conversations among families about death and end-of-life care, so that more people are empowered to die in ways that honor their wishes. Esmé Deprez is a journalist based in California. She spent 14 years at Bloomberg News and Bloomberg Businessweek, most recently as a senior reporter on the investigations team and prior to that as a breaking news and features correspondent covering national and state politics and policy. She has been a guest on CNN, C-SPAN, CBS, MSNBC, the BBC, and NPR affiliates nationwide, and her work has been the recipient of awards from the American Society of Magazine Editors, National Press Foundation, and elsewhere. She was named the Best New Journalist by the Newswomen's Club of New York in 2012 and a finalist for the Livingston Award for her 2013 story about the legislative assault on the business of abortion. Her Businessweek feature "How I Helped My Dad Die" was a finalist for the 2022 National Magazine Award in the essay/criticism category.