Member-only story
The Art of Departure
It was like a wedding, except the bride dies in the end
I’d never known exactly when someone was going to die… until one Sunday a few years ago. I was with my friend Betsy and I struggled to put on a red Donna Karan wrap dress that belonged to her. I knew I was doing it wrong because Betsy kept groaning in frustration. She couldn’t tell me how to fix it because she was no longer able to talk — her voice was lost to the final stages of ALS, a neurodegenerative disease, along with her ability to move, eat, and eventually, breathe. Betsy tried her best to explain the fabulous, complex frock by nodding out the letters of the alphabet, literally spelling it out for me in a game of involuntary charades.
“A…B…” she nodded. I guessed aloud what she was trying to spell.
“B! Bow? You want me to tie a bow right here?”
No.
“A… B.”
“B — backward? Oh. It’s on backward.”
After 10 minutes of trial and error, I got her approval. I was ready for the rebirth ceremony. Two hours later, Betsy would die, exactly as planned.
Let me explain.
On June 9, 2016, the End of Life Options Act, a law that permits terminally ill adults to request and take a medication which allows them to die in a…
