As They Lay Dying

Six weeks after his father died of a brain tumor, Philip Roth dreamt that the old man returned from the dead, furious that his son had buried him in a shroud. “I should have been dressed in a suit,” the elder Roth scolded. “You did the wrong thing.” When he awoke, Roth understood that his dream-father had been angered not by his son’s choice of burial clothes, but by his writing of Patrimony (1991), the memoir in which Roth recounts the dream: “In the morning I realized that he had been alluding to this book which, in the unseemliness of my profession, I had been writing all through his illness and dying.”

Roth is not the only writer who has taken notes at a parent’s deathbed. Simone De Beauvoir’s A Very Easy Death (1985) is a classic memoir about a parent dying, and the last several years have seen a boom in this sub-sub-genre: Blake Morison’s And When Did You Last See Your Father? (1998), Donald Antrim’s The Afterlife (2007), Robin Romm’s The Mercy Papers (2007), and Meghan O’Rourke’s The Long Goodbye (2011) are but a few. This past year, two excellent books joined the growing list: Katy Butler’s Knocking On Heaven’s Door: The Path to a Better Way of Death and Douglas Bauer’s What Happens Next: Matters of Life and Death.

When my own parents died—my father in 2004 and my mother in 2009 —I felt a strong desire to write about them. Many needs fueled this desire: a need to make sense of my parents’ lives and of my relationship with them; a need to expiate the tremendous guilt I felt in being unable to prevent their demise (the fact that I am a doctor compounded this guilt); and a need to face, on the page anyway, the inescapable message of my parents’ declines and deaths, that my turn is next.

Surely people have always felt such emotions when losing their parents. So how to explain the rising numbers of memoirs about that experience just now?

Part of the explanation is the popularity of memoir generally, but the popularity of this particular kind of memoir reflects a demographic reality: people are living longer and dying more slowly than ever. Baby boomers, and the generations following them, are more likely to spend a prolonged period of time with dying, elderly parents than their ancestors did. During these months—or years—family conflicts intensify or resolve, long-hidden secrets are revealed, and parents and their adult children who have lived apart for decades may find themselves in newly intimate proximity. In other words, dying parents are good material for memoir. Or, to put it in less “unseemly” terms (to borrow from Roth), dying parents offer a memoirist an opportunity to tell a story that is both intensely personal and broadly resonant—i.e., what all memoirists hope to do.

Katy Butler’s Knocking on Heaven’s Door is both personal and resonant. Her account of the eight agonizing years between her father’s stroke and his death is an ambitious hybrid of memoir, history, and self-help. She uses her family’s unique circumstances as a springboard for a thoughtful discussion of why we subject people at the end of their lives to painful, expensive, and often futile medical treatments—and how we might avoid doing so.

In 2001, Butler’s parents, Jeffrey and Valerie, seemed to be enjoying the perfect retirement. In their 70s they were both in excellent health and their home in Middletown, Connecticut, allowed easy access to the cultural and intellectual attractions of Wesleyan University, where Jeff had taught history. Their daughter Katy, a freelance...