The dirt was dry and tasted like iron, and I was having trouble choking it down. I started coughing and dirt flew out. I covered my mouth as the woman with the plastic grocery bag came back in and stood over me. We stared at each other. She knew what I was trying to do.

Months after the trip, my mother started saying she was going to leave my father. All I could think was: Where are you going to go? It felt like a betrayal for her to leave him now. How would she survive? How would he? I knew what it felt like to want to save yourself—to feel like someone else’s decline was directly tied to your own—but, still, I didn’t want her to leave. It felt like a pre-emptive move—a distancing from the pain that was coming. A kind of pre-grief she wanted to give herself before the actual bad thing, which was most certainly coming as my father continued to drink more heavily. In casual conversation he would say, “I’m trying to die quickly,” or “I want to be dead, but it’s taking longer than I thought.”

My mother and I would roll our eyes.

I had grown up with his desire to die on view. He did not try to hide it even from me, his child. He would say things like “I’d planned on being dead by forty, but it didn’t work out that way.” My mother had been pre-grieving for the entirety of their marriage. And I joined her when I was born.

8.

I decided to take a seat in the back row when I came to our next training session.

When Bethanny breezed in, she told us we were nearing the end of our self-assessment training and soon we’d be trainees in the field, each of us paired with a seasoned partner.

She gave us tips that we wrote down, including making sure to enter a room silently and not say anything for a few minutes. She said this was so we could pick up the energy of the room, the tenor of a person’s suffering. Each person was at a different level of pain and acceptance.

“Hold the room,” she said. “People push you away as they’re dying. Let their feelings have space so you can gauge your approach in how you’ll help them through it. Death isn’t something that happens to you, it’s something you do.”

Bethanny kept driving home that we were active participants in how we chose to die, and I couldn’t help but think about how we chose to be active participants in the way we were living, too—or not. Sometimes it felt nearly impossible to step out of that inertia once you were in it.