The Emotional Tasks of the Last Chapters of Life:  Creating a Vision for Your Own Good Death

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Thank You to Our Featured Guest:  Katy Butler, Award Winning Journalist and Thought Leader

Thank You to Our Host: Susi Stadler, Executive Director of AHWGO, Architect

About the Conversation:

There is nobody better than Katy Butler to empower each of us to have agency to the very end and to trust our own instincts. This is a unique opportunity to be inspired by and engage with Katy in an intimate setting.

More About Katy Butler:

Bestselling author Katy Butler has written two groundbreaking books about the end of life and is a thought leader in the national movement to improve medical care in the last chapters of life. Her first book, Knocking on Heaven’s Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death, a national bestseller, was named one of the 100 Most Notable Books of 2013 by the New York Times. Her latest, The Art of Dying Well, has been praised as “the best guide I know” to the spiritual, emotional, medical, and practical challenges of later life. 

Katy was already an award-winning journalist when she published her groundbreaking 2010 New York Times Magazine article, questioning medicine’s role in her family’s prolonged and difficult end-of-life experiences (“What Broke My Father’s Heart.”) The piece hit a nerve, went viral, hit the Times’s “most emailed” lists, and won the Science in Society prize from the National Association of Science Writers. It was the basis of her first book, Knocking on Heaven’s Door.

An inspiring public speaker, Katy offers trenchant practical guidance on how to best navigate the emotional and spiritual challenges of later life. Her views are informed by:

• Extensive research into advanced technological medicine, and how to access its strengths without succumbing to its pitfalls. 
• Interviews with more than 200 experts in palliative care, geriatrics, hospice, cardiology, pharmacology, nursing, ritual, spirituality, and other disciplines relevant to aging people.
• Seven years as a family caregiver and member of the “rollaboard generation” of baby-boomers who travel extensively to help care for their aging parents.
• Decades of Buddhist practice, including a nine month sojourn in a monastery founded by the Vietnamese Buddhist monk and peace activist Thich Nhat Hanh.

The original, live conversation was recorded on:  Thursday, January 6, 2022 at 5:30 PM PST.