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Knocking on Heaven's Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death, by Katy Butler
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In this visionary memoir, based on a groundbreaking New York Times Magazine story, award-winning journalist Katy Butler ponders her parents’ desires for “Good Deaths” and the forces within medicine that stood in the way.
Katy Butler was living thousands of miles from her vigorous and self-reliant parents when the call came: a crippling stroke had left her proud seventy-nine-year-old father unable to fasten a belt or complete a sentence. Tragedy at first drew the family closer: her mother devoted herself to caregiving, and Butler joined the twenty-four million Americans helping shepherd parents through their final declines.
Then doctors outfitted her father with a pacemaker, keeping his heart going but doing nothing to prevent his six-year slide into dementia, near-blindness, and misery. When he told his exhausted wife, “I’m living too long,” mother and daughter were forced to confront a series of wrenching moral questions. When does death stop being a curse and become a blessing? 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 prolonged and agonizing death, Butler set out to understand why. Her quest had barely begun when her mother took another path. Faced with her own grave illness, she rebelled against her doctors, refused open-heart surgery, and met death head-on.
With a reporter’s skill and a daughter’s love, Butler explores what happens when our terror of death collides with the technological imperatives of medicine. Her provocative thesis is that modern medicine, in its pursuit of maximum longevity, often creates more suffering than it prevents.
This revolutionary blend of memoir and investigative reporting lays bare the tangled web of technology, medicine, and commerce that dying has become. And it chronicles the rise of Slow Medicine, a new movement trying to reclaim the “Good Deaths” our ancestors prized.
Knocking on Heaven’s Door is a map through the labyrinth of a broken medical system. It will inspire the difficult conversations we need to have with loved ones as it illuminates the path to a better way of death.
- Sales Rank: #338457 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Scribner
- Published on: 2013-09-10
- Released on: 2013-09-10
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.37" h x 1.10" w x 5.50" l, .0 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 322 pages
Features
- Used Book in Good Condition
From Booklist
“Once upon a time we knew how to die. We knew how to sit at a deathbed.” In this sad yet valiant and exacting memoir, Butler, an award-winning science writer for the New Yorker and other venues, recounts the plight of her elderly father and the toll his many afflictions exacts on herself and her mother. He suffers a stroke followed by progressive dementia, speech difficulty, visual loss, and incontinence. An injury during WWII already cost him an arm. Before undergoing hernia surgery, a permanent cardiac pacemaker is implanted. As his mind and body further deteriorate, Butler and her mother plead with doctors to deactivate the device to no avail. When he finally dies from pneumonia, the pacemaker continues functioning inside the dead man’s chest, a chilling reminder of “our culture’s idolatrous, one-sided worship of maximum longevity.” About a year later, his physically and emotionally exhausted wife expires. Butler looks at the strain on caregivers, feelings of guilt and grief, the untapped utilization of palliative care, and the haziness between “saving a life and prolonging a dying.” --Tony Miksanek
Review
"In this eloquent exegesis on taking control of the end of one's life, Butler defines a "good death" as one that is free from unnecessary medical intervention and faced with acceptance and dignity."(Publisher's Weekly)
“Knocking on Heaven’s Door is 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. My hope is that this book might goad the public into pressuring their elected representatives to further transform health care from its present crisis-driven, reimbursement-driven model to one that truly cares for the patient and the family.” (Abraham Verghese New York Times Book Review)
“This is a book so honest, so insightful and so achingly beautiful that its poetic essence transcends even the anguished story that it tells. Katy Butler’s perceptive intellect has probed deeply, and seen into the many troubling aspects of our nation’s inability to deal with the reality of dying in the 21st century: emotional, spiritual, medical, financial, social, historical and even political. And yet, though such valuable insights are presented with a journalist’s clear eye, they are so skillfully woven into the narrative of her beloved parents’ deaths that every sentence seems to come from the very wellspring of the human spirit that is in her. This elegiac volume is required reading for every American adult; it has about it a sense of the universal.” (Dr. Sherwin B. Nuland, author of How We Die: Reflections of Life’s Final Chapter)
“This is some of the most important material I have read in years, and so beautifully written. It is riveting, and even with parents long gone, I found it very hard to put down. Katy Butler's book will challenge and nourish you. I am deeply grateful for its truth, wisdom, and gorgeous stories—some heartbreaking, some life-giving, some both at the same time. Butler is an amazing and generous writer. This book will change you, and, I hope, our society." (Anne Lamott author of Help, Thanks, Wow)
"Shimmer[s] with grace, lucid intelligence, and solace." (Spirituality and Health Magazine)
"[An] unflinching look at America's tendency to overtreat [that] makes a strong case for the 'slow medicine' movement, which recognizes that 'dying can be postponed, but aging cannot be cured.'" (Mother Jones)
"[A] deeply felt book...[Butler] is both thoughtful and passionate about the hard questions she raises — questions that most of us will at some point have to consider. Given our rapidly aging population, the timing of this tough and important book could not be better." (Minneapolis Star Tribune)
"Butler argues persuasively for a major cultural shift in how we understand death and dying, medicine and healing. At the same time, she lays her heart bare, making this much more than ideological diatribe. Readers…should be sure to pick up this book. It is one we will be talking about for years to come.” (BookPage)
“ A pitch-perfect call for health care changes in the mechanized deaths many suffer in America.” (New York Journal of Books)
"This braid of a book...examines the battle between death and the imperatives of modern medicine. Impeccably reported, Knocking on Heaven's Door grapples with how we need to protect our loved ones and ourselves." (More Magazine)
"A forthright memoir on illness and investigation of how to improve end-of-life scenarios. With candidness and reverence, Butler examines one of the most challenging questions a child may face: how to let a parent die with dignity and integrity. Honest and compassionate thoughts on helping the elderly through the process of dying." (Kirkus Reviews)
“Katy Butler’s science background and her gift for metaphor make her a wonderfully engaging storyteller, even as she depicts one of our saddest but most common experiences: that of a slow death in an American hospital. Knocking on Heaven’s Door is a terrible, beautiful book that offers the information we need to navigate the complicated world of procedure and technology-driven health care. I’m recommending it to all my friends with aging parents or partners, and holding on to a copy for myself.” (Mary Pipher author of Reviving Ophelia and Seeking Peace: Chronicles of the Worst Buddhist in the World)
"Katy Butler's new book—brave, frank, poignant, and loving—will encourage the conversation we, as a society, desperately need to have about better ways of dying. From her own closely-examined personal experience, she fearlessly poses the difficult questions that sooner or later will face us all.” (Adam Hochschild author of King Leopold’s Ghost and To End All Wars)
“Intimate and wise, heartbreakingly compassionate, and critically helpful, this is a truly important work that I hope will be widely read. We have lost our way and Katy Butler’s impeccably researched and powerful tale will help eliminate much suffering on the passage to the mystery of death.” (Dr. Jack Kornfield author of A Path with Heart)
"This is the most important book you and I can read. It is not just about dying, it is about life, our political and medical system, and how to face and address the profound ethical and personal issues that we encounter as we care for those facing dying and death. You will not be able to put this book down. Its tenderness, beauty, and heart-breaking honesty matches the stunning data on dying in the West. A splendid and compassionate endeavor." (Joan Halifax, PhD, Founding Abbot, Upaya Institute/Zen Center and Director, Project on Being with Dying: Cultivating Compassion and Fearlessness in the Presence of Death)
"This beautifully written and well researched book will take you deep into the unexplored heart of aging and medical care in America today. With courage, unrelenting honesty, and deepest compassion, Katy Butler shares her saga of how a family of independent, thoughtful, and complex souls attempt to navigate their uncharted journey through medical institutions and specialties. Here, the degree of individual and family suffering turns on myriad decisions, large and small, coerced by economic and institutional forces. Knocking on Heaven’s Door makes it clear that until care of the soul, families, and communities become central to our medical approaches, true quality of care for elders will not be achieved." (Dennis McCullough author of My Mother, Your Mother: Embracing "Slow Medicine,'" the Compassionate Approach to Cari)
“This book stands as an act of profound courage. It is brutally honest about the nature of relationships, searingly insightful in the potential of healing, and shines and intense light on our ignorance…For that alone, it is an important one to read.” (108ZenBooks.com)
“Knocking On Heaven’s Door is a disquieting book, and an urgent one. Against a confounding bioethical landscape, Katy Butler traces the odyssey of her parents’ final years with honesty and compassion. She does a great service here, skillfully illuminating issues most of us are destined to face sooner or later. I cannot imagine a finer way to honor the memory of one’s parents than in such a beautifully rendered account.” (Alexandra Styron author of Reading my Father)
"Compassionate and compelling." (Shelf Awareness)
"Butler’s advice is neither formulaic nor derived from pamphlets...[it] is useful, and her challenge of our culture of denial about death necessary...Knocking on Heaven’s Door [is] a book those caring for dying parents will want to read and reread. [It] will help those many of us who have tended or will tend dying parents to accept the beauty of our imperfect caregiving." (Boston Globe)
"Knocking on Heaven's Door is more than just a guide to dying, or a personal story of a difficult death: It is a lyrical meditation on death written with extraordinary beauty and sensitivity. (San Francisco Chronicle)
"[Knocking on Heaven's Door is] a triumph, distinguished by the beauty of Ms. Butler's prose and her saber-sharp indictment of certain medical habits. [Butler offers an] articulate challenge to the medical profession: to reconsider its reflexive postponement of death long after lifesaving acts cease to be anything but pure brutality." (New York Times)
"A stunning book, truthful and its dignified, and it could be a conversation-starter. If there's a need for that in your family - or if you only want to know what could await you - then read Knocking on Heaven's Door. You won't regret it." (Appeal Democrat)
“Astonishingly beautiful. [Butler’s] honest and challenging book is an invitation to all people—Christians included—to reconsider the meaning of drawn out deaths and extreme measures in a historic—and eternal—perspective.” (Christianity Today)
About the Author
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.
Most helpful customer reviews
184 of 185 people found the following review helpful.
A physician's perspective.
By SInohey
Once in a while a book comes along that makes a significant impression on our way of life. Katy Butler has written such a book, based on and expanded from her original 2010 article (What Broke My Father's Heart) in the New York Times. In "Knocking at Heaven's Door", Ms. Butler exposes the often tragic end-of-life circumstances, caused by society's unrealistic expectations and/or religious beliefs as to the sanctity of life; prolong it at any cost (usually to the patient's & family's)! This is supported, and frequently encouraged, by the medical establishment out of incompetence, greed or fear of litigation. Other reviewers have given a good synopsis of the book from laymen's point of view; I shall add a perspective from someone who has been in the trenches.
The inexorable advance in medical skills, nutrition, antibiotics, chemotherapeutics and overall technology has resulted in a significant boost to the overall health of society and its longevity; at the beginning of the 20th century life expectancy, on average, was 45 years compared to 78 years today. But a longer life is not necessarily a quality life. And that is where we fail as a society. We have become very adept at prolonging life no matter what, but what we are often really doing is protracting death. Over twenty percent of deaths in the USA happen in the critical/intensive care units "where 10 days of futile flailing can cost as much as $323,000", or to put it differently about 80% of medical expenses occur in the last 2 years of life in patients with debilitating chronic intractable conditions or incurable diseases. The USA is one of the few 'first world' countries where this extravagant waste continues to happen. Other countries, just as medically advanced as the USA, limit the use of expensive technologies to cases where there is a reasonable expectation of cure, many withold sophisticated procedures from the elderly suffering from chronic ailments, and a few have legislated physician-assisted suicides and euthanasia.
In my four decades career in Academic and private practice I have often dealt with end-of-life issues in my work as Director of a large Critical/Intensive Care unit (ICU) in a teaching institution and, later on, as a cancer surgeon. Until the advent and popularity of Hospice care, the only alternative to incurable, terminally ill patients was to die at the hospital or at home; the latter option was sometimes not feasible because of inadequate, unwilling or absent family support. Admission to the ICU was limited by a protocol of strict criteria. Non-salvageable patients were not admitted to ICU and remained on the general wards (for their supportive care). However, in the past two decades there has been a proliferation of ICU at most hospitals, separate units for neonates, children and even teen/adolescents; Adult Cardiac, general medical, burn, dialysis, trauma and surgical units, and "step-down" units. More sophisticated life-support equipment and testing technologies continue to become widely available. Beds have to be filled and criteria for admission to ICU are liberalized. Patients are admitted to hospital and/or ICU only by an order from a physician. Most physicians will heed the patient's and family's wishes as to the end-of-life management. Problems occur when the patient leaves no instructions or there is a discord within the family, when the patient is incapacitated. The physician has to make the decision and discuss the prognosis with the family. The ethical physician will educate the patient and family as to what is best for the patient and many doctors do just that. But unfortunately, some use any and every means to prolong the patient's vegetative existence prompted by ego (can't lose a patient), greed (gets paid for daily visits and procedures), sheer incompetence or fear of litigation (from discontented family). This often occurs even when the patient leaves specific instructions to limit extraordinary measures etc.
The reimbursement method in the health care industry is flawed and encourages the provision of excessive, often unnecessary medical care. Physicians and hospitals are payed to do procedures and perform tests. Every new technique or machine creates its own indications for use (market); to "someone with a new hammer everything needs to be pounded."
The answer lies in a "challenge-proof" health care will with specific end-of-life management instructions, which cannot be disputed or changed by anyone other than the patient; This should be based on an honest conversation with the primary physician, all care givers and family. Also, at any stage of a terminal condition, if an invasive test or procedure is proposed, it is best always to obtain a second opinion (or a even third) from a specialist in that particular field.
The primary physician should act as advocate and gatekeeper for the terminal patient, allowing only tests and/or procedures that would truly enhance the patient's well-being and comfort. He should stand up to consultants, hospital personel and even family members, if their conduct is not beneficial to his patient.
Unfortunately, few are willing to do that for fear of antagonizing their fellow physicians, with resulting loss of referrals and income.
Ultimately, in this country, we need to have a universally agreed-upon, comprehensive set of criteria to dispense end-of-life medical care; not based on financial benchmarks but on reasonable medical standards and targets. (I hear howls about "Rationing" and "Death Panels").
Everyone dies eventually. But, to die in a vegetative state to placate others, while kept alive by machines and artificial (often painful) means, bathed in one's own body fluids and excrement, is an ignominious death.
This terrific book should be required reading for all physicians and be included in the curriculum of all medical and nursing schools. It is a "must read" for all families with ailing or aging members.
The interested reader would find pertinent information on hospice care and end-of-life, in works by Dennis McCullough, MD about `Slow Medicine', Ira Byock, MD `The Best Care Possible', Sherwin Nuland, MD `How We Die' and Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, MD `On Death and Dying'.
125 of 129 people found the following review helpful.
The book all of us should read once and the health professionals who care for us should read twice
By Barbara W. Huntington
Ostensibly, I was eager to read Katy Butler's Knocking on Heaven's Door because I wanted to find a book for my students. I advise students entering the medical professions from a major university. My stated mission is to help them find careers where they will be happy, but lurking behind my mission is a human being who has been hurt and healed by physicians. I want my students to be passionate about medicine, but for me, and the aging members of my generation, I ache with the hope they will be compassionate. Passion can be saving a patient at all costs--costs to comfort, costs to their wishes to die at home among family, costs to their family's need for freedom, and rest and closure. To ensure their passion, I encourage my students to volunteer in the emergency department of hospitals; to ensure their compassion, I ask them to take a deep breath and volunteer with hospice care.
Katy Butler's book is personal--for her and for me. She traces the steps many of us will follow as our parents, and in my case, a spouse, move from vigor to failing health, to death. I started reading for my students, but I soon was reading for me, staying up until dawn, crying and laughing as I recognized the universality of our common plight.
I have already seen many beautiful and accurate reviews of Knocking on Heaven's Door, so I will leave the particulars to those authors I have come to respect and love in the scientific, yet spiritual, field of medicine. Abraham Verghese (I loved his My Own Country long before his best seller, Cutting for Stone), Joan Halifax who writes beautifully about hospice, Sherwin Nuland, Jack Kornfield---their universal approval of this book will open this door to many, so I will only address its appeal to a person who has lost a father to liver cancer, a mother to Alzheimer's, a dear friend to cervical cancer, and a husband to Parkinson's in the last few years.
In this book, Katy Butler introduced me to a new term, Slow Medicine, what I see as the compassionate side of the passion/compassion duality of medicine. She recommends the next book on my bedside stack, which deals with Slow Medicine, My Mother, Your Mother, by Dennis McCullogh.
Butler's book is honest. She deals directly with the complicated relationships of mothers and daughters, the resentments of siblings, the interplay of family when family is now spread across the distances of space and time and responsibilities. Although I identified with her loss of her father, I also identified with her mother, watching her partner's mind slip away, his body kept alive by technology, and medication, even as I watched my own husband take hundreds of pills and drag around oxygen tanks as he talked to non-existent children in his study.
The ego of medicine is so strong, the often unrecognized need to play god and maintain the biology of life so embedded, that all our legal "right to die" and "do not resuscitate" papers we carefully sign and foist on grown children who do not want to think about such things, can be ignored when split second decisions must be made, often by exhausted ER docs, but also by specialists with the latest technological advances. Students are accepted to medical school based on academic ability, scientific knowledge, and clinical experience. Those attributes come first although, in all fairness, medical schools now also look at community service. If you understand the technology and biochemistry that will allow you to keep a patient alive, what is the incentive to follow their wishes and do nothing? If you have thousands of dollars of debt from medical school, do you want to risk a law suit when a patient dies who didn't have to?
All of us are touched by death. If we are fortunate, parents die before children, but the "what if's" and "I wish I had"s will probably always remain. Katy Butler's book is an important document in the Slow Medicine movement. If we as the families and friends pay attention, if we talk to our own children and physicians before decisions about our last days have to be made, if physicians can, without fear of lawsuits or condemnation, be led by compassion, measuring their own success by quality, and not just quantity of life, we can approach death a little more openly and easily.
Yes, I ultimately read this book for me, but I will strongly recommend it to my students, our future healers.
95 of 97 people found the following review helpful.
A must-read for every family
By Rachel S. Houseman
Spoiler alert: Medicare is imperfect and so is your physician. Those are just two of the takeaways from Katy Butler's "Knocking on Heaven's Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death." Butler whipstitches together a personal story of family, life and loss, with a troubling but informative assessment of current medical practices and American cultural norms that surround end-of-life issues.
I first encountered Butler's writing on the subject in a New York Times article in 2010 called "What Broke My Father's Heart." She laid out the multitude of personal and medical issues as her parents entered their 80s - a sudden health crisis of her father's that ultimately laid the groundwork for his years-long decline - stroke, heart disease, dementia, blood clots, brain hemorrhage. She explained how our current system more often than not intentionally draws out the process of dying. Medication, surgical interventions, technology - all of these things led to the shell of the man she knew as her father, simultaneously saving and dooming him. She also lovingly describes the impact his years-long dying had on her mother, who became a round-the-clock caregiver, bather, cook, cleaner and diaper changer.
What stood out most to me, what I took away from that article, is explained more fully in "Knocking on Heaven's Door." That for many, many of us, being forced to make a split second decision in a medical emergency will likely lead to a much longer path of disease, decline, and pain. Your mother has a heart attack? "If you don't agree to a breathing tube/feeding tube/CPR/pacemaker RIGHT NOW, she will die, and it will be because you LET her." Few of us are capable of knowing all what should be known to make truly informed decisions about and for our loved ones - we just know we don't want to let her die in front of us, before the rest of the family can be told there's a decision to make, much less have the chance to say goodbye.
And so I found myself nodding in recognition and understanding of what being part of this sorority of caregivers means. My family was in a similar spot. My mother had entered a hospital in May of 2008 to begin dialysis treatment for kidney disease, which had been treated to that point with medication. She did not return to her home until May of 2009. An endless list of crises emerged: A slip and fall in the hospital, compound fracture, infection, sepsis, endocarditis, MRSA, multiple temporary dialysis ports, cardiac arrest, three temporary pacemakers, one permanent pacemaker, atrophy, neglect, gangrene, amputation, three hospitals, and three skilled nursing facilities. Through the "wonders" of modern medicine, amazing strength on her part and dogged determination on our part, she finally returned home to her husband of nearly 50 years. Meanwhile, I racked up over $20,000 in airfare and expenses, flying back and forth between Hartford, Connecticut and Ft. Myers, Florida to handle the crises as they came. It was like a long distance game of Whack-a-Mole - you smack one down with a mallet, and another pops up over there. I used up all paid time off, and exhausted FMLA benefits. Ultimately, I put them on a plane to their native Michigan, sold their house in Florida, and joined them several months later, leaving a career and friends behind me on the east coast.
The thing about books like this, at least for an average layperson like me, is that I didn't even know they existed. I knew next to nothing about any of my mother's health issues, and even less about Medicare and its rules. Or how to navigate the system. Or how to advocate for a family member. Or the importance of a medical quarterback. I didn't know I needed that kind of information, certainly not in advance of the "iceberg, right ahead!"
But the initial article opened my eyes (mostly in horror) at what might further face us in the future. And why I was so glad to learn that the author was expanding on the article and working on a book. Butler's style of storytelling feels natural and warm. Her research into the professional health care field and the personal and societal costs are well-presented, and her conclusions are reasoned and imparted with empathy.
I hope those who need this book find it before they tumble into the rabbit hole of end-of-life care. Her article in 2010 allowed our family to talk about the pitfalls that may face us in the future, and how we would want to proceed if x, y or z happened with either parent. Her article came two years before my mother's death, and it brought both comfort and clarity when we had difficult decisions to make. If you're a daughter (or son), or you're a mother (or father), use this as an opportunity to open a conversation with your loved ones. It's just one more way to care for each other.
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