KNOCKING ON HEAVEN'S DOOR

This exquisitely written and expertly reported memoir and exposé of modern medicine calls for more humane, less intrusive end of life care—based on the author’s acclaimed New York Times Magazine piece.

Never before has medicine resisted death so fiercely—and made it so prolonged, intrusive and difficult. Like millions of sons and daughters across the country helping to care for elderly parents, Katy Butler and her stoic, well-educated, upper middle-class parents thought that their clear wills, clear values, close relationship with their internist, and durable power-of-attorney documents would help them to face death without medical overdoing. They were wrong. In Knocking on Heaven’s Door, award-winning journalist Katy Butler describes in vivid and poetic prose what happened to her family as her parents were moved from a ripe and vigorous old age toward a long and protracted phase of dying. After suffering a stroke at age 78, Butler’s father Jeffrey, a retired professor, was left entirely dependent on the care of his wife, Butler’s mother. Six years later, with a heartbeat managed by a pacemaker put in by an unthinking cardiologist, Jeff’s body had outlived his brain and his wife was exhausted, sick and depleted from nearly a decade of full-time caregiving. When Butler and her mother appeal to doctors, ethicists and lawyers for help getting the pacemaker turned off, allowing Jeff a natural, painless death rather than the extended, diminished life provided by the pacemaker, they are seen as monsters. A mix of medical memoir, investigative reporting and an exploration of the sacred and forgotten art of dying, Knocking on Heaven’s Door documents the rebellion brewing against a morally adrift medical system that has morphed from saving lives to prolonging dying. Butler shows how our culture turns to technology to solve the spiritua problem of death, and how we are ignorant of the ancient and modern realities of dying.

Katy Butler, an award-winning journalist, has written for the country’s most respected publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, The San Francisco Chronicle, Vogue Magazine, and more. She is a contributing editor at Tricycle, The Buddhist Review, and a features editor for the Psychotherapy Networker. She has been twice-nominated for a National Magazine Award and her writing has been included in The Best American Science Writing and The Best Buddhist Writing. Born in South Africa and raised in Oxford, England and Middletown, Connecticut, she graduated from Wesleyan University and lives in northern California.