We nodded because we understood. The leader of the training program was named Bethanny, and she was somewhere in her fifties. She wore a long flowing skirt and had silver hair tied in the kind of braid that cascaded over her shoulder and down the front of her blouse. She asked us to give space to Andrew’s grief. There are so few places to allow for breakdowns or other kinds of outbursts of emotion, Bethanny said. She wanted this space to be one of them.

Displays of vulnerability by others made me anxious and even a little bit disgusted. In some ways, it felt like whatever these people were going through could be managed and they were just bad at managing it. I didn’t like to see anyone’s weakness and worked hard never to show my own. Even here, where we were supposed to feel free to be sad without judgment.

We held space for Andrew, who was no more than twenty-four. I did, too. He stared at me while he talked about the terrible things his girlfriend did to him. About how he felt like a man who was pegged as a victim from the very beginning of his life.

I wanted to have sex with him so he could feel better. The way I looked at him felt hungry, and I thought he could see that in me. I wanted to take his pain away, obliterate it through momentary pleasure. I wanted to tell him he could transfer his pain to me because I could endure it. I could endure anything.

People were speaking freely here, often through tears, about the weight of their loss and the opportunities they had missed to tell their loved ones how important they were. So instead they told us. And here I was, joined in mourning with people I had never met before. About a marriage to someone who did not know what was coming his way, and the inevitability of my own parents’ passing. I observed the grieving. I thought it would help me sleep. If I’m being honest, I had been in rooms like this before—ones that housed support groups, which worked for me until they didn’t.

But this room was different. This was job training.

Bethanny said she was deeply committed to helping people die consciously and to creating an army of empaths who could be sent out into the world to spread the word of death acceptance. We were doers. We were performing a service, and she had chosen us through our carefully filled-out applications. She said she could tell that there were some applicants who were not in it for the right reasons and so they didn’t make the cut. We were handpicked to perform this service for others. She wanted us to know we were special.