Transcript for the Piece Audio version of Final Exit

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 a cooler of beer and peel-and-eat shrimp under his arm.

I graduated college and moved away. Bob got a masters in environmental studies. He got a job at his university and began restoring a plot of farmland to a tall-grass prairie.

When I listened to the voicemail a couple years ago, I realized my borrowed time with Bob had ended. "Call," the message said. "It's about Bob."

What I wasn't prepared for was how Bob would die. He had gone into the bathroom, laid down, and ingested a cocktail of chemicals that included cyanide. Police found him two days later.

Bob's family and co-workers were shocked. None of them had ever known that Bob was sick. They expected us, the handful of friends who knew, to explain. Was Bob depressed? they asked. Was he secretly gay? All we could say was, No, he was sick, and maybe he had just gotten tired of being sick.

Bob didn't want a funeral. So we threw him a party at a bar outside town, in the cornfields near the restored prairie. We propped some tall grass on the bar next to a picture of Bob, a glass of beer, a lit cigarette, and a plate of shrimp.

Afterward Bob's sister asked a few of us if we wanted to see his apartment .. the place where Bob died. We agreed and bought a six-pack on the way. At the apartment we played Bob's CDs. I scanned his bookshelf.

One book caught my eye. I spun around to look at Bob's sister.

"You found it," she said.

The book was called "Final Exit" and was written by an advocate of the so-called right to die. The book said a person should tell a trusted friend or family member before committing an act of quote "self deliverance."

"I guess he forgot to read that chapter," I said, and Bob's sister laughed. We all laughed.

I needed to use the bathroom. The others had been fine with going in there. I was nervous.

It was just a normal bathroom, except the closet was full of pharmaceuticals, rubber gloves, syringes ... signs that Bob had gotten pretty sick.

I looked at the bath-mat on the floor where Bob died. I looked at the corny poster on the wall. The image was of a man on the beach at sunset, walking toward the horizon. I figured there wasn't much more to unravel about Bob's mystery.

Now that a couple years have passed, I've had time to think about the thousands of people in this country who face the same choice as Bob did.

Oregon is the only state where it's legal for terminally ill patients to end their lives. Two doctors have to approve your decision. Sick people there say it's reassuring to have the bottle of pills at your bedside ... just to know you can take the pain away if it gets too bad.

That night at Bob's apartment I left the bathroom pretty quickly. We said goodbye to Bob's sister. We bought a couple of bottles and decided to made a night of it.

It was New Year's Eve.

In New York City, I'm Kelly McEvers.