Knocking on Heaven’s Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death Audiobook (Free)

“A thoroughly researched and compelling mixture of personal narrative and hard-nosed reporting that captures precisely how flawed care at the end of existence is becoming” (Abraham Verghese, THE BRAND NEW York Times Publication Review).

This bestselling memoir-hailed a “triumph” by The New York Times-ponders the “Good Death” as well as 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 much loved seventy-nine-year-old about Knocking about Heaven’s Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death father had suffered a crippling stroke. Katy and her mother joined the a lot more than 28 million People in america who are shepherding family members through their last declines.

Doctors outfitted her father using a pacemaker, which kept his center going while doing nothing to avoid a slip into dementia, near-blindness, and misery. When he said, “I’m living too much time,” mother and daughter confronted wrenching moral queries. Where may be the line between saving a life and prolonging a dying? When do you say to a health care provider, “Allow my cherished one go?”

When doctors refused to disable the pacemaker, condemning her dad to a lingering death, Butler set out to realize why. Her search had barely started when her mother, faced with her very own grave disease, rebelled against her doctors, refused open-heart medical procedures, and met death the old-fashioned method: head-on.

Part memoir, part health background, and part religious information, Knocking on Heaven’s Door is a map through the labyrinth of the broken medical system. Technological medicine, enthusiastic about maximum longevity, can be creating more suffering than it prevents. Butler chronicles the rise of Gradual Medicine, a movement bent on reclaiming the “Great Fatalities” our ancestors prized. In families, private hospitals, and the public sphere, this visionary memoir is definitely inspiring the difficult conversations we must need to light the path to an easier way of death.

“A lyrical deep breathing written with extraordinary beauty and level of sensitivity” (San Francisco Chronicle).