“Not anymore.”

“Doesn’t suit me, either.”

“Yeah.”

“But then, when you’re really in the shit alone, that’s when you start thinking, Maybe I made a mistake.”

“There are nurses for that, I think.”

“Not the same. What you want is someone who will lie down next to you, not afraid to catch what you have, and just be there with you. That’s it right there.”

“What you have isn’t contagious,” I said.

“No one wants to be around sick people. They don’t want to catch the sadness.”

He studied my face in a way that made me uncomfortable.

“But you do,” he said.

“I just want to help you with your self-deliverance.”

“I know. All you benevolent souls. Selfless acts.”

“So we have to go through the tasks now,” I said. “Seeking forgiveness, giving forgiveness, and saying goodbye.”

“The letters. I started some of them already,” he said.

He struggled to get up off the sofa, and I told him I’d get the letters if he told me where they were.

“Bedside table.”

I went into his bedroom and found his coverlet on the floor. I made his bed quickly and noticed he had probably not washed his sheets in months. More orange pill-bottles crowded his bedside table. I picked some up and studied the labels, but none of the drug names sounded familiar to me, and the expiration dates were well past.

I brought his papers to him, and he tried to put them in order.

“Most everyone’s gone anyway.”

“It’s still good to write them out. That way we can work our way to gratitude.”

“Oh, is gratitude what we’re working toward here?”

“So you can let go of these resentments before you go, yes.”

“Sometimes I go back into the bargaining phase of dying,” he said.

“I get it. It’s a process.”

“Is this how you’re going to go?”

“Through self-deliverance?”

“Yes, with a hood and a gas tank from the party store.”

“I think I prefer the Seconal route.”

“Very feminine.”

I sat with him while he wrote out his letters of forgiveness. He struggled with the one aimed at his father. He told me the top-line notes of his childhood and memories of America after the Depression. He told me about the first time he saw the Pacific Ocean. He walked into the water with all of his clothes on.

“Is that a memory you can’t let go of?” I asked him, looking down at how the question was phrased on the questionnaire.

“It’s one I come back to a lot. Everyone staring at me like I was crazy, but I was experiencing total freedom. I drank the ocean water. Can you believe it? I gulped it.”

“That must have tasted awful.”