Lorraine was in her sixties, and she usually dressed like she was on her way to yoga and wore a number of beaded bracelets she must have picked up at meditation retreats. I had seen her at the edges of our room before. When she came to our first meeting and introduced herself to us, she had her brown hair in a braided crown. She spent the majority of the meeting slowly unbraiding it and flipping her crinkled locks at the row of people behind her.

10.

Bethanny wanted us to bond outside the confines of the room, so Lorraine wrapped her arm around my shoulders and suggested we go for coffee. She led me to a little sporty Audi, and I wondered how rich she was and how much she was getting paid. She told me she’d gotten into this line of work because she had watched her husband die slowly from ALS. He had been an insurance salesman in Connecticut, where there were few options for how and when to die, so she sat by his side while he deteriorated, and did the best she could.

“I held on too long,” Lorraine told me as we idled in the drive-thru, waiting to order coffee. She wanted McDonald’s coffee (her favorite), but when she saw the face I made, she decided she’d go to Starbucks instead.

“The line’s too long anyway,” she said. “People really love McDonald’s coffee. Not because it’s cheap.”

She was trying to put me in my place, I decided.

“It got to the point where he couldn’t talk and he was just lying in the hospital bed. But I still wouldn’t let them take out the feeding tube.”

“That’s hard,” I said.

“He didn’t want to be that way. I wanted him that way. I wanted him to stay with me longer. In any capacity.”

“I understand.”

“I kept asking him: Tell me if you’re in pain. Blink if you’re in pain. If you’re in pain I’ll tell them to take the tube away.”

She pulled up to the menu.

“What do you want?”

“Venti decaf Americano,” I said.

“That’s not even a coffee.”

I hesitated before saying, “It is.”

She shrugged and ordered it anyway.

“He was in pain. He was whimpering. But I couldn’t detach. I read all the self-help books about detachment, and then, when it happened, I couldn’t detach. I let him suffer. Do you even know what that feels like?”

I knew she wasn’t looking for an answer from me, so I handed her money and she looked at it like it didn’t make any sense.

“I don’t want it.”

“Are you sure?”

She waved me away with her hand and inched toward the window.

“They take so long here.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Bethanny taught me detachment,” she said. She looked at me, not with benevolence, but with something else.