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| End of Life Article by Clay Evans, Part 1 of 3 parts Boulder Daily Camera columnist |
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Good article - this is the first of a series of 3 articles, mainly dealing with advanced directives and the issues that occur when they are not followed. Click here to visit the resource page. |
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| End of Life Article by Clay Evans, Part 2 of 3 parts Boulder Daily Camera columnist |
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2nd in a series of 3 articles on Death and Dying. This part covers more detail about advance directives. Click here to visit the resource page. |
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| Knocking on Heaven's Door 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.
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| Life Before Death - Collection of Films about living well and dying better |
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HOW WILL YOU DIE?
LIFE Before Death is a multi-award winning documentary series that asks the fundamental question underpinning our mortality.
This beautifully filmed journey takes us to 11 countries as we follow the remarkable health professionals battling the sweeping epidemic of pain that threatens to condemn one in every ten of us to an agonizing and shameful death. Through the eyes of patients and their families we discover the inherent humanity that empowers the best of us to care for those beyond cure.
This is an intimate, hopeful and life-affirming story of living well and dying better, advocating for making the most of every moment in our life before death. Click here to visit the resource page. |
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| The End of Life Advisor - by S Dolan & A Vizzard |
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In this simple guide, you’ll find both practical step-by-step advice and compassionate, heartfelt guidance to dramatically improve the last days of life. Written by a mother-daughter team of hospice volunteers with experience in nursing, law, and psychology, The End-of-Life Advisor will show you the remarkable benefits of hospice care.
If you’re a healthcare or legal professional, you’ll discover the important ways you can advise your patients and clients. If you’re caring for a loved one, you’ll learn how you can help make their last days much more comfortable. If you’re planning for yourself, you’ll understand the decisions you need to make now – so you can find greater peace down the road. |
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