I never set foot in the nursing home. The place was under lockdown—and so, unusually, I had to report the whole 16,000-word story from afar. You know, it was OK. It doesn’t necessarily take longer to build intimacy over the phone. I think phone calls can be very intimate, especially when they are two or three or four hours long. And many of the elderly people who I interviewed are used to using phone calls as their primary tools of communication and connection. I spent the first month interviewing about two dozen Life Care residents, family members and nurses. I spent all day on the phone. 

Building a visual sense of things was more difficult. Early on in my reporting, I got hold of a floor plan for the nursing home and started asking residents for their room numbers. Later, family members sent me cellphone photos of different rooms. I mapped out as much as I could.

Well, usually it’s not the health problems themselves that are sensitive subjects. It’s the feelings that form around them. Despair. Regret. Very often, anger. So for instance, in this piece, Debbie was OK talking about the particularities of her mother’s dementia. It was much harder for her to discuss her own behavior: say, the fact that she hadn’t visited her mother since December. I take these conversations really slowly.

I have reported a lot on ageing and eldercare, and that experience was very helpful. I think I’m able to anticipate sources of grief—and ask about them in a way that doesn’t make people feel ashamed. I’m able to understand the gravity of things. So, for instance, if a daughter mentions in passing that her elderly mother got a urinary tract infection, I’m able to slow down and say, "Oh wow, and did it take weeks and weeks for doctors to properly diagnose it? Yes? And had she started experiencing delirium by them? She had? She must have lost a lot of weight? Yes? I know how bad UTIs can be, in elderly women. I’m so sorry.” I really feel so deeply for people who are ageing with difficulty, or watching a parent age. I bring that empathy to the interviews.

I write, in my conclusion, that I could have filled my book with confessions. For years, I had this very strange experience over and over. I would mention—at a work function, or a dinner party or wherever—that I was writing a book about the right to die. Then, later, near-strangers would pull me aside and confess the most private things. About deaths they had witnessed. About loved ones who died terribly, in ways they did not want and that confused them. Violent deaths. Ugly deaths. Long deaths. Or about family members who ended their own lives—and the other family members who helped them do it.

I learned, in my reporting, that all across America, sick and elderly men and women are meticulously planning their final hours: sometimes, with the help of clandestine organizations and Internet activists. Still, we don’t talk about it. Because we don’t like talking about death. Or because we have anxieties (some, very justified) about reporting on suicide. Or because the idea of “rational suicide” challenges and tests our assumptions about the world and its meaning. I try to throw all that aside and show readers what is happening right under their noses.