I also logged in to my account each morning to see all the money I had pulled out of my 401(k). The apartment wasn’t inexpensive, and the first month plus security deposit had made a dent. I knew I had to go back to Bethanny.

She called me one afternoon to say that she had a check waiting for me—from my work with Daphne. She said she could mail it if I wanted to give her my address but she’d love it if I came to the sessions she was having so we could chat. I told her Bobby and I had separated. She said big life changes like this weren’t uncommon because what we did was clarifying. She ended the call with “We are here when you’re ready to come back.”

I was tired of just drinking and getting high. I was also spending too much time looking at strangers’ grief blogs. I knew I was a helper, not just someone sleepwalking through life anymore. On some death blogs there was a focus on final breaths, how they were so important and meaningful. But I knew they weren’t. Daphne was gone well before she exhaled her final breath. I touched her as her breath became raspy and her hands were already starting to feel cold. Consciousness had already left her, I could tell.

Bethanny said there was such a fetish around final breaths, but the person was already gone by then and their spirit had gone with them. The body was doing something natural by expelling air, and when we waited for it—focused on it—we missed the real final moments that indicated the end. It was like people’s fixation with the final fight of a marriage: the end had come long before that final fissure, yet people always wanted to know what the breaking point was.

Still, I didn’t wade in and say anything on the comment boards. People got really touchy about that stuff. Also, I wasn’t going to be judgmental about what people wanted to hold on to. The only thing I cared about was not letting people die alone. I read stories on the boards about family members who weren’t found for days, the kind of guilt that comes with not having checked in for a while, the kinds of things that happen to a body in that time. I was worried that would be me one day.

Without Bobby as an anchor to “the real world,” my preoccupation with death ballooned. I watched YouTube videos of other people involved in final exits, testimonials from patients in Switzerland before they passed. Nathan had called me twice, and though it felt nice to know someone cared about where I was, I couldn’t bring myself to call him back. Maybe Bethanny had told him I was going through something.