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It's to the best of our knowledge. I'm Anne Strain Champs. Today, exit plans. Part two of our series on death.

A good death. That's the phrase we use to describe what we hope for at the end of life. I mean, none of us wants to die.

But if we have to, we'd like to go peacefully, at home, surrounded by people we love.

The problem is everything about the modern medical system conspires against us.

My father had a major stroke at the age of 79 that really obliterated the quality of his life.

He couldn't really finish a sentence or fasten a belt.

And unfortunately, two years after that devastating stroke, he was given a pacemaker.

So he lived into a time of dementia and near blindness and misery and not even being able to make a phone call when really a natural death would have been a blessing to him.

Katie Butler's experience of her father's death was everything we're afraid of.

Long, drawn out, and expensive. It's a story of what's not working about the way we

die, and there's some lessons to be learned from it. Essentially, I want to tell you first

three very important things my father said after he had that stroke. After he entered what I'm now

calling the gray zone between living and dying, he said, I don't know who I am anymore. He said,

I'm not going to get better. And finally he said, I'm living too long. Now what happened was that he developed a hernia and in order to get a cardiac clearance

for the hernia surgery.

The cardiologist told my mother and father that he would first need to get a pacemaker because he had a slow heartbeat.

So the slow heartbeat had actually never given him any health problems,

but it was sort of a just-in-case thing because of the stress of the surgery.

My mother took care of him till the very end of his life.

It was six and a half years after his first stroke.

...