The Art of Dying Well

The Art of Dying Well by Katy Butler is about making honest choices that provide the kind of support for each person and each situation. It is about

living as well as possible for as long as possible and adapting successfully to change. Packed with extraordinarily helpful insights and inspiring true stories, award-winning journalist and prominent end-of-life speaker Katy Butler shows how to thrive in later life (even when coping with a chronic medical condition), how to get the best from our health system, and how to make your own “good death” more likely. This handbook of step by step preparations—practical, communal, physical, and sometimes spiritual—will help you make the most of your remaining time, be it decades, years, or months.

Butler explains how to successfully age in place, why to pick a younger doctor and how to have an honest conversation with her, when not to call 911, and how to make your death a sacred rite of passage rather than a medical event.

Michael Dirda writes in the Washington Post:

this “practical guide to a good end of life” delivers on its subtitle, offering detailed advice on dealing with — in poet Philip Larkin’s phrase — “age, and then the only end of age.” Butler’s factual, no-
nonsense tone is surprisingly comforting, as are her stories of how ordinary folks confronted difficult medical decisions. In short, if you’re coming up on three score and 10 or have already passed that biblical term limit for earthly existence, you will want to read “The Art of Dying Well” and keep it handy, if only for its lists of what to do as one’s physical condition changes.

Overall, Butler’s advice can be summed up in the Boy Scouts’ motto: Be prepared. If you’re merely approaching the end zone, do all you can to preserve your well-being. Exercise. Keep your weight down. Eat lots of vegetables. Control your blood pressure, cholesterol and sugar, ideally without medications or with the smallest dosages possible. Stay mobile, but watch out for falls. Be sure, too, that your financial and medical records are organized, comprehensible and digitally accessible to the appropriate people in case you are incapacitated....Throughout “The Art of Dying Well,” Butler stresses the vital importance of having what she calls a “tribe.” A tribe can be one’s extended family but might also include the neighbors you socialize with, or your bridge club and fishing buddies, or members of your church — in short, the people you care about and who care about you. What matters is that a tribe’s members are mutually sustaining: They help each other out. Loners don’t do well in old age.