Bob told me the news in 1991. We were having a cigarette outside the office park where I worked. Cancer, he said. Non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. I left work early and we went straight to a bar.

After that day, I prepared myself for Bob's death. I imagined what it would be like to sit beside his hospital bed, making him laugh. I found myself doing nice things for Bob. On Halloween I made him sugar cookies, little white ghosts with eyes made of mini chocolate chips.

Bob refused chemotherapy and radiation. He said if he only had a short time to live, he intended to enjoy it. He told me to keep his illness a secret. Eventually the cancer went into remission, and I stopped imagining Bob in the hospital.

I left town for college. But Bob and I saw each other when I came home to visit my parents. He would meet me at the boat dock on the lake behind our house, a pack of Kools in his pocket and...
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INTRO: Earlier this year the Supreme Court upheld Oregon's death with dignity act, which allows terminally ill patients to obtain prescriptions to end their lives. So far no other state in the U.S. has such a law on the books. Next year California will re-consider its own death with dignity act. If passed, it would make California the largest jurisdiction in the world to allow physician-assisted death. Kelly McEvers sent us this essay about what such a law could have meant to her friend, Bob.