Honest and compassionate thoughts on helping the elderly through the process of dying.
A forthright memoir on illness and investigation of how to improve end-of-life scenarios.
"Every day across the country, family caregivers find themselves pondering a medical procedure that may save the life—or prevent the dying—of someone beloved and grown frail," writes journalist Butler. But when is it time to stop intervening and let nature take its course? Should medical procedures be performed to save a life regardless of the monetary costs and the toll it takes on an entire family? These are the questions Butler examines in this honest, moving memoir, as she details the last several years of her father's life after he suffered a severe stroke. The once-vibrant, sometimes-caustic man she knew from her childhood was no longer fully there, and a pacemaker was installed prior to a hernia operation to help ward off complications from this procedure. However, the device didn't prevent a slow, steady decline of body and mind, and Butler describes the often agonizing physical and emotional toll this disintegration took on her father, her mother (who was the primary caregiver) and herself. Her mother gave up having a life of her own as she tended to her husband, who more resembled an adult-sized infant than the husband she had known and loved for more than 40 years. Ultimately, the placement of the pacemaker prolonged a life that possibly should have ended many years before, and it is this decision that Butler struggles with throughout the book. When her mother grew ill, she refused treatments and "died like a warrior. Her dying was painful, messy, and imperfect, but that is the uncontrollable nature of dying." With candidness and reverence, Butler examines one of the most challenging questions a child may face: how to let a parent die with dignity and integrity when the body has stopped functioning.
Honest and compassionate thoughts on helping the elderly through the process of dying.Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-4516-4197-4
Page Count: 336
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: June 16, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2013
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
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The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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