“You can’t learn this through books. There are hundreds of books on detachment. Go look for yourself! I’m sure you have. But you can’t really feel it until you have to experience it yourself. Then you can help people find their way through it. People think there’s something noble in suffering. Let me tell you, there is not.”

Lorraine pulled into a parking space so she could sip without distraction.

We offered clients two methods: plastic hoods with helium tanks or Seconal cocktails. She told me it was our client’s choice and she had worked with both but preferred the cocktail.

“It just feels less gruesome,” she said. “Sometimes they reach to take off the hood and you have to hold their arms down.”

“Because they changed their mind?”

The idea of a mistake made me nervous.

“They signed a waiver,” she said. “We tell them their initial reaction will be to take off the hood. We ask if they want us to stop them from pulling it off, and they say they want to be stopped. They provide us with written confirmation.”

She was silent for a minute, staring off into space.

“It’s hard to watch that reflex toward self-preservation,” she said.

She saw my face and said, “Bethanny administers those. You don’t have to.”

“Okay,” I said, grateful.

We had gone over all of this in the room as a possibility, but Lorraine said she always tried to talk clients out of a hood by giving them the details.

After my first training session, I read online message boards full of comments saying that what we were doing was not providing a conscious way to die. Commenters said you’d actually have to break down each of those Seconal tablets to truly understand what you were undertaking. Different religions had mixed messages about whether or not it was morally wrong. Putting on a hood and twisting a knob, or sipping a cup to make you go to sleep was the ultimate act of control. In some ways, it was an act of defiance. I will say when I’m ready to go, not you, God.

Lorraine reiterated how I was to behave with a family, how close to get to the client. We had binders full of questions for each client to answer, in order to help prepare them for their deaths. Not just “Who would you like to have listed in your death directive, to handle your remains, to make the arrangements?” but questions like:

What is the thing that you must forgive yourself for?

and

What day of your life would you like to live over again?

and

Why?

And we were supposed to ask, “How do you define God?”