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

by Katy Butler

Book Overview

Like so many of us, award-winning writer Katy Butler always assumed her aging parents would experience healthy, active retire-ments before dying peacefully at home. Then her father suffered a stroke... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1451641982
• ISBN13: 9781451641981
• Release Date: June 2014
• Publisher: Scribner Book Company
• Length: 368 Pages
• Weight: 0.77 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.0" x 5.5" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Excellent well written

This is an excellent book for anyone to come to understand the complexity of death and how difficult it is to discuss with our family and doctors. Katy Butler's acknowledgement and struggle she has and her witnesses of her parents struggle with their deaths provided me with a deeper understanding of my own ambivalence towards my mother's death, my own aging, and acceptance of mistakes I made in my struggle to care for my own mother dying with dementia. It allowed me moments of forgiving myself as I read and empathized with her struggles. Her description is an honest look at her, her parents and family's own emotional journey as well as a well researched and clarifying account of how modern medicine has complicated this process. She does not demonize modern medicine but provides an insight on how we now all have a new paradigm of ethics and acceptance of death that we must all confront. She leaves the reader not only with her own historical account but provides the reader with well researched resources and services that she has gathered to assist in the decision making of how to take care of our self and our family throughout the process of dying being it our own or a family member.