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The “best guide” out there to maintaining a high quality of life—from active living to final breath—by the New York Times bestselling author of Knocking on Heaven’s Door.
The Art of Dying Well will help you live well as possible for as long as possible and adapt successfully to change.
With groundbreaking insights and inspiring true stories, award-winning journalist and prominent end-of-life speaker Katy Butler shows how to thrive (even if coping with a chronic medical condition), get the best from our fragmented health system, and make your own peaceful, well-supported “good death” more likely. This handbook of step by step preparations—practical, communal, physical, and spiritual—will help you make the most of your remaining time, be it months, years, or decades.
You will learn how to successfully age in place, to deepen your passions and community connections, to marshall a “tribe” to support you or a seriously ill friend, and to seize the power to make any death a sacred rite of passage rather than a medical event.
This down-to-earth manual for living, aging, and dying with comfort, meaning, and even joy is inspired by the medieval death manual Ars Moriendi, or the Art of Dying. It’s the definitive update for our modern age.
Reviews
“The best guidebook I know of for navigating the later stages of life. Simple and practical, but the impact is profound.”
—Ira Byock, MD, author of Dying Well and The Best Care Possible
“Katy Butler shows how, and I am profoundly grateful.”
—Barbara Ehrenreich, author of Nickel and Dimed and Natural Causes
“A book to devour, discuss, dog-ear, and revisit … Wise counsel for the final decades of our ‘wild and precious’ lives.”
—Lucy Kalanithi, MD, widow of Paul Kalanithi, and editor of When Breath Becomes Air
“Like a wise friend explaining exactly what you need to know about getting what you need from your medical care, including all the insider stuff your doctors and nurses don’t always want to say. I wish all my patients would read this book.”
—Anthony Back, MD, Oncologist and Palliative Care physician, University of Washington Medical School.
“Filled with deep knowledge, this is a guide for staying as healthy and happy as possible [while staying] medically informed in order to stay in charge of our lives and therefore less afraid of the future. I wish I had read it ten years ago!”
—Margareta Magnusson, author of The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning
“Katy Butler has clear eyes and speaks plainly about complicated decisions. Chock-full of good ideas!”
—Sallie Tisdale, author of Advice for Future Corpses
“A brilliant map for … getting from the health system what you want and need, while avoiding what you don’t. Armed with this superb book, you can take back control of how you live before you die.”
—Diane E. Meier, MD, Director, Center to Advance Palliative Care
A much needed GPS. Warm, wise and straightforward, hugely helpful to anyone—everyone—who will go through the complex journey to the end of life.”
—Ellen Goodman, Founder, The Conversation Project