I am not surprised to hear her say this. First of all, it’s something she has said before. I had an idea that I understood, that I had accepted that probably this was how it would be. But a whole other feeling floods me now when she reveals that she is in possession of a euthanasia drug.

I don’t know what to say.

I’m hoping you’ll say yes.

Yes—to what?

To my asking for your help.

My hel—? My larynx spasms, causing me to gulp cartoonishly. And her to smile.

I’m not talking about help dying, she says. I know what to do. It’s not complicated.

What is complicated is what should happen between now and then.

First of all, she says, I can’t say for sure how much time that will be.

Understood that she wants to suffer as little as possible.

But I also want things to be as calm as possible, she says. I want everything to be in good order.

She wants to go somewhere, she says. I don’t mean travel. Travel would be a distraction. That’s not what I’m looking for. And if I did go back to some place that I loved or where I was very happy (Greece, for example, where she’d had the romance of her life, or Buenos Aires, where she’d had her best-ever vacation)—well, you know what they say. Never return to a place where you were really happy, and in fact that’s a mistake I’ve already made once in my life, and then all my beautiful memories of the first time were tainted.

I could have told her that I’ve made that mistake too. More than once.

Not that she’d be against taking some little trip, she says. But what I really want is to find some quiet place, it doesn’t have to be far away—in fact it shouldn’t be too far—and it doesn’t have to be anything particularly special, just somewhere I can be peaceful and do the last things that need to be done. And think my last thoughts, she adds as her breath runs out. Whatever they might be.

I relax my grip on my glass. So all she’s asking is for me to help her find this ideal place. I ask her whether she’s sure about wanting to be in a strange place rather than home.

I think it will make it easier, she says. So long as it’s a comfortable, safe, attractive place. I’ve done a lot of my best work—my best thinking—away from home, on visiting fellowships, for example, on meditation retreats, even in hotels. I think it will be easier to prepare—to focus on letting go—if I’m someplace where I won’t be surrounded by intimate, familiar things, all those reminders of attachments, and so on.