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64
NOV / DEC 2013
I
Healthcare Journal of NEW ORLEANS
Re v i ews by
The Bookworm
Your mind’s
made up.
There’s no
going back
once you’ve made a choice between
Door Number One or Door Number
Two. You’re not a waffler, you weighed
pros and cons, and you’re confident
you picked correctly. Or not.
Indeed, the worst part about making a decision can be the
regret that’s possible at the end of the choice. And in the new
book “Knocking on Heaven’s Door” by Katy Butler, a seem-
ingly no-brainer decision tears a family apart.
Jeff Butler cheated death many times.
As a child, he narrowly missed dying in a car accident. In
WorldWar II, he lost an arm, but not his life. And in Novem-
ber 2001, at age 79, he suffered a stroke that nearly killed him.
A year later, he received a pacemaker.
And that, says his daughter Katy, kept him alive but didn’t
“prevent his slide into dementia, incontinence, near-mute-
ness, misery, and helplessness.”
Jeff and his wife Val were forward thinkers. He was a col-
lege professor. She was a perfectionist with fierce drive. They
Book
Corner
had been “in control of their lives, and they did not expect to
lose control of their deaths.”
But that’s exactly what happened: as Jeff’s health continued
to decline, his abilities dwindled and his cogni-
zance weakened – all of which he was aware. He
indicated dismay at his diminished life and said
that he’d “unfortunately” lived too long.
On the other side of the country, Katy Butler
worried. She’d always been closer to her father
than to her mother, but arguments and old hurts
continued to sting. Still, she flew home to Con-
necticut to help because she was, after all, their
daughter – statistically, the one who bore the
brunt of parenting a parent.
But as Jeff’s dementia worsened, so didVal’s tol-
erance and her health. She was “stoic,” but impa-
tient, snappish, and exhausted, and only accept-
ed outside help when she became overwhelmed.
Butler says she knew her mother “clouted” her
father, and shouted at him in frustrated anger.
By this time, Butler was convinced that the
pacemaker her father had wasn’t the medical
miracle it was meant to be. And she learned that
pacemakers could be turned off…
So much went through my mind as I read this beautiful,
emotionally brutal book.
With sorrow, grace, and growing exasperation, author Katy
Butler writes of her father’s long, messy death; her mother’s
quiet, dignified passing; and the parallel story of how mod-
ern medicine, drug companies, and government rules pro-
moted the former.
That’s a lot of hard reading, made gentler with Butler’s Bud-
dhist values and serenity. And yet, it’s not easy to avoid out-
rage as she points out the unfairness of aging, the cruelty
of physical decline, and the knowledge that those – and the
surety of caretaking – are somewhat inevitable for many Baby
Boomers today.
This is a stunning book, truthful and 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.
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