Bethanny looked up and asked if we were ready. There were murmurs in the group. One person broke the tension by saying, “I’m pretty sure my family’s not going to like this.”

We all laughed.

I settled on 50 percent. Final answer. I didn’t want to be bedridden or to need assistance, but I also didn’t want to seem like a person who gave up so easily. Simply thinking about relinquishing that kind of control gave me anxiety.

It was true that I had become an observer in my life, of my life. Go with it was a mantra. Going with it meant I never had to be held accountable for anything because nothing was ever my choice—or, at the very least, not my idea. But making this my new life path was my idea.

Though here, too, we were still just observers. Some in the group confided in us that they had been nurses frustrated by how long you had to wring out the last drops of life, whether the patient liked it or not. We wanted to learn another way to be helpers.

One woman’s father had committed suicide, and then her boyfriend did, too. Finally, her mother had traveled to Switzerland to end her life with Dignitas, the group at the forefront of the death-with-dignity movement. Her mother was not terminal, the woman said. She was chronically depressed, though to me that felt like a terminal illness. The woman didn’t find out her mother’s plans until after her mother was dead—and learned it from a letter she received postmarked Airmail. In it, her mother apologized, but said she saw no alternative. And she hoped her daughter could understand. How could someone quantify the daughter’s grief? What were the people left behind supposed to do with the knowledge that their need wasn’t enough to stick around for? Bethanny told us to focus on the client, but all that collateral damage needed a place to go, too.

Bethanny said people struggle with the idea that some big final revelation will come as they prepare for the end, that the dying will finally make sense of the suffering faced in their lives. But who can say if that moment will ever come? Often, it’s just small understandings that come too late—after a parent is already dead and gone, or an ex-wife has moved on. That’s what the letters were for: the people who survived the dead.

“Those of you who have been in recovery—and you don’t have to self-identify—know that making amends is very powerful. It gives you relief,” Bethanny said. “Making amends before you die allows you to exit peacefully.”

She walked around us and put her hand on Nathan’s shoulder.