I looked at his fingers typing and noticed he was no longer wearing his wedding ring. I looked down at mine, still there, and felt foolish in front of him.

23.

I finally called Bethanny toward the end of July, not long after my encounter with Bobby. She told me to come to a Saturday session.

“As a refresher,” she said.

When I did, I parked on the street so I wouldn’t have to smile and nod at anyone in the parking lot. I watched people who had not been in my training group mingle with each other. I didn’t know how far along they were, but I saw they had already gotten the packets that held their own end-of-life directives. I made sure to pick a row no one else was sitting in so I didn’t need to interact with anyone. I wasn’t quite like Lorraine or Nathan, but I had been out in the field already, so I knew more than these trainees did. I did not have their same vibrant excitement about being “helpers.” I felt a hand on my shoulder and turned to see Bethanny standing there. Reactively, I got up and let her embrace me.

“It’s so good to see you,” she said. “I have your check. Hold on.”

She went to her purse and brought me back an envelope.

“Thanks,” I said.

“I can sense you’ve been having a hard time, but it’s part of the process.”

“It is?”

“A rabbi once told me that we all live with a certain cognitive dissonance as we navigate the challenges of this world. We struggle with a duality that’s rooted in the foundation of our existence. We are drawn between the realness of the body—the mundane, if you want to call it that—and the soul, which is the divine. The challenge and hope in our lives is to unite the two in order to bring about transcendence. In death, we are finally freed from the limitations of the mundane.”

She smiled at me benevolently.

“That’s what we’re helping people do. But we’re left behind with all these confusing and painful feelings—until it’s our turn to go and be free,” she continued.

“All right,” I said. “That makes sense.”

“Good.”

Someone else tapped her on the shoulder and she said, “We can talk more after.”

She wafted toward the front of the room. Because she wore dresses that reached the floor, it felt like she was hovering above it. She started on her speech about pain-avoidance techniques, and I watched people try to determine their own pain levels as they asked each other “How do you avoid pain?”