They have three weeks to get used to it. After some consideration, Cheri chooses a Tuesday, the most nondescript day of the week. She calls Kevorkian’s assistant, Neal, then books a flight to Detroit for December 16 and a night’s lodging in a Bloomfield motel. According to the plan, that’s where the suicide will occur. Her body will be taken from the motel to the hospital and then to the morgue, where somebody—the coroner?—will perform an autopsy.

She wants cremation, a small service, no flowers. Katy goes with her to make the arrangements and they try not to be too surreal about it but have to keep consulting their list.

The funeral director is a young man with intensely sincere eyes and pure, palpable compassion. Cheri grows sleepy in his presence, forgetting some of the things she meant to bring up.

“What about transporting my body if I should die elsewhere?” she asks.

“If you’re choosing cremation,” he says carefully, “then that can be done at a facility near where the death occurs.” He pauses, thinks. “And we’ll work directly with them to receive the, uh, from there.” He stares at the backs of his hands for a moment, turning his wedding ring one way and then the other, an absentminded gesture that gives her time to fill in the blank. Her body, reduced to a mound of kitty litter in a biscuit tin.

“Okay, then,” she says, and they all stand, formally, and stare at one another. Katy is wearing the miserable look of someone waiting for a tetanus shot, determined to be brave for the nurse’s sake. The funeral director touches Cheri’s arm and looks into her eyes; his own are red-rimmed, which takes her by surprise.

People are so kind! She reels from it sometimes, the mute commiseration, the gestures of support and assistance so subtle she barely recognizes them as such. Katy, the first time she helped her mother take a bath, had seemed merely to be idling, recounting an anecdote, sitting on the closed toilet seat with her legs crossed, eyes roaming around the edges of the room. When Cheri had finished bathing, Katy lifted her out of the water—casually, still talking—and wrapped her in a towel. Never in the whole process (holding out the underwear to be stepped into, retrieving sweatpants warm from the dryer, tugging a pair of thick cotton socks onto the feet) did either of them let on that they’d performed a transposed version of this twenty years before.

Linda telephones people in their circle, urging them to visit now if they want the chance. A few friends stop by during the afternoons and evenings, bearing casserole dishes or loaves of bread. Putting the food away in the kitchen gives them time to compose themselves—they were warned, of course, but nevertheless it takes a moment. The deterioration has accelerated in the last days, ravaging her body but leaving her face as translucent and still as frosted glass. They kneel next to her rocking chair as they leave, keeping it together, promising to call in a few days, see how it’s going.