Summary: Katy Butler's "Knocking on Heaven's Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death" looks at her parents' deaths and explores how to have a good death in the modern age. At 79, Butler's father suffered a devastating stroke. A year later, a cardiologist installed a pacemaker, allowing his heart to continue functioning indefinitely even as his overall health deteriorated. When doctors refused to disable the pacemaker, Butler set out to understand why medicine was prolonging her 84-year-old father's suffering. In the meantime, her mother rebelled against her own doctors, refused open-heart surgery and insisted on meeting death the old-fashioned way.
