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

I there received,
    I climbed the rope to the boat of understanding.
    While in the dark sea,
    I slept, and not overwhelmed there,
    dreamt: a star blazed in my womb.
    I marveled at that light and grasped it,
    and brought it up to the sun.
    I laid hold on it, and will not let it go.
    —Makeda, Queen of Sheba, translated by Jane Hirshfield
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    Contents
    Prologue 000

Part I
Redemption 000
    Chapter 1 Along Came a Blackbird
    000
    Chapter 2 The Tyranny of Hope
    000
    Chapter 3 Rites of Passage
    000

Part II
Fast Medicine
    000
    Chapter 4 Fast Medicine
    000
    Chapter 5 Inventing Lifesaving and Transforming Death 000
    Chapter 6 My Father’s Open Heart
    000

Part III
Ordeal 000
    Chapter 7 Not Getting Better
    000
    Chapter 8 Dharma Sisters
    000
    Chapter 9 Broke-Down Palace
    000
    Chapter 10 White Water
    000
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Part IV
Rebellion 000
    Chapter 11 The Sorcerer’s Apprentice
    000
    Chapter 12 The Business of Lifesaving
    000
    Chapter 13 Deactivation 000

Part V
Acceptance 000
    Chapter 14 The Art of Dying
    000
    Chapter 15 Afterward 000

Part VI
Grace 000
    Chapter 16 Valerie Makes Up Her Mind
    000
    Chapter 17 Old Plum Tree Bent and Gnarled
    000
    Afterword: The Path to a Better Way of Death
    000
    A Map through the Labyrinth
    000
    Notes for a New Art of Dying
    000
    Notes 000
    Author’s Note
    000
    Acknowledgments 000
    Permissions and Credits
    000
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    Knocking on
    Heaven’s Door
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    Valerie Joy de la Harpe and Jeffrey Ernest Butler,
    Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa, 1946.
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Prologue
On an autumn day in 2007, while I was visiting from Cali-
    fornia, my mother made a request I dreaded and longed to
    fulfill. She’d just poured me a cup of tea from her Japanese tea-
    pot shaped like a little pumpkin; beyond the kitchen window,
    two cardinals splashed in her birdbath in the weak Connecticut
    sunlight. Her white hair was gathered at the nape of her neck,
    and her voice was low. She put a hand on my arm. “Please help
    me get your father’s pacemaker turned off,” she said. I met her
    eyes, and my heart knocked.
    Directly above us, in what was once my parents’ shared bed-
    room, my eighty-five-year-old father Jeffrey—a retired Wesleyan
    University professor, stroke-shattered, going blind, and suffer-
    ing from dementia—lay sleeping. Sewn into a hump of skin and
    muscle below his right collarbone was the pacemaker that had
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    katy butler
    helped his heart outlive his brain. As small and shiny as a pocket
    watch, it had kept his heart beating rhythmically for five years.
    It blocked one path to a natural death.
    After tea, I knew, my mother would help my father up from
    his narrow bed with its mattress encased in waterproof plastic.
    After taking him to the toilet, she’d change his diaper and lead
    him tottering to the living room, where he’d pretend to read a
    book of short stories by Joyce Carol Oates until the book fell
    into his lap and he stared out the sliding glass window.
    I don’t like describing what the thousand shocks of late old age
    were doing to my father—and indirectly to my mother—without
    telling you first that my parents loved each other and I loved them.
    That my mother could stain a deck, sew a silk blouse from a photo
    in Vogue, and make coq au vin with her own chicken stock. That
    her photographs of Wesleyan authors had been published on book
    jackets, and her paintings of South African fish in an ichthyolo-
    gists’ handbook. That she thought of my father as her best friend.
    And that my father never gave up easily on anything.
    Born in South Africa’s Great Karoo Desert, he was a twenty-
    one-year-old soldier in the South African Army when he lost his
    left arm to a German shell in the hills