“My mother died well because she was willing to die too soon rather than too late.” In this provocative personal essay, Katy Butler weaves together a heartfelt account of her elderly mother’s refusal of open-heart surgery at the age of 84 with “big picture” insights and statistics about medical over-treatment at the end of life. Although many of the facts are drawn from Butler’s book “Knocking on Heaven’s Door” the majority of the writing and some of the reporting in this piece is original.
