My cellphone dinged — it was an Instagram reel from my sister, Glynn. I opened the link and glamorous 1950s movie star Cyd Charisse filled my screen, dancing ecstatically in a shimmering yellow dress, surrounded by perfectly synchronized dancers.

“I see a new sun, up in a new sky, and my whole horizon has reached a new high,” India Adams’s dubbed voice crooned through Charisse’s lips. “Yesterday my heart sang a blue song, but today, hear it hum a cheery new song.”

“Me in the afterlife,” Glynn wrote.

She couldn’t have picked a better video to share at that moment. In less than one minute, she’d showcased her sense of humor, her appreciation of campy movies and her relief at being able to take control of her life and avoid future suffering.

She had been approved to initiate medically assisted death.

There are several essentially interchangeable terms used to refer to the concept of willfully and legally ending your life — assisted death, assisted dying, physician-assisted suicide, assisted suicide, medical assistance or aid in dying (which is also known by its initials, MAID) and death with dignity, which is also the name of an organization that supports legalization efforts and has served as a helpful resource for my family.

Whatever you call it, assisted suicide is only legal in 10 of the United States, as well as the District of Columbia. Lawmakers in 19 additional states are considering bills this year, according to a report in Axios. But the very concept remains controversial, even as it provides a welcome option for some terminally ill people who want to make their own end-of-life decisions.

Such was the case for my sister, Glynn Chesnut. She had ovarian cancer. Over the course of nearly four years, she received various treatments, each of which eventually stopped working. One made her sick and sapped her quality of life to the point where she said it wasn’t worth taking. She’d always exercised and stayed in shape, but by the time she turned 72, she’d become thinner. Her appetite and energy were waning. Rather than visiting museums, planning cruise vacations and creating art, she began spending most of her days lying in bed or on the couch.

After running out of feasible treatment options, Glynn enrolled in at-home hospice care and began to make plans for medically assisted death. She was firm in her decision and comforted by the fact that she could take control of her situation. Everyone in our family supported her choice.

In California, where my sister lived, the assisted suicide process requires that the individual be at least 18 years old, be a state resident and have a terminal illness that is expected to cause death within six months. To get approval for the process, Glynn met multiple times with hospice care representatives. She also needed to obtain approval from a doctor with whom she had an ongoing professional relationship; one of the doctors she contacted refused to sign off on her request. One never responded. The third said yes.

Soon, the forms were complete. What Glynn called the “death drug” arrived at her home in Glendale. But, upon receiving the medication — a powder that would be mixed with liquid — she decided it wasn’t doable, since she was already having trouble swallowing. She chose an alternative: a combination of morphine and lorazepam, which would take longer but would be easier to ingest.

My husband Angel and I live in New York City. At first, Glynn didn’t want us to travel to California for her death. She wasn’t even going to tell us the date; only her husband, Smitty, would know and be present (along with a licensed visitation nurse, whose presence was required).

Her reason for not advising us — or anyone else — about the date made sense. “It would be weird to tell people exactly when I’m going to do it,” she explained when we spoke by phone. “First of all, I don’t like goodbyes. And it also could put people in a weird position. How are you supposed to react when someone tells you that they’re going to kill themselves — say congratulations? Plus, there’s always a chance that the medication won’t work. I might start throwing up as soon as I take it — and it would be really weird if I text people the day after I was supposed to die.”

We both laughed.

But then, a couple weeks later, she changed her mind and decided to share the date after all.

Her revised strategy made sense, too. Glynn decided it would be better for her husband not to be alone when she started the medication. If Angel and I would be willing to be present, she’d initiate the process during our next visit, in just two weeks. Her son, Rory, would be around, too, since he lived in nearby Burbank, and there would be nurses working 12-hour shifts to monitor her condition and manage the medication, which she’d take every 12 hours.

I said yes, of course. Angel and I would be there.

Realizations

As the two-week countdown started for our next visit and Glynn’s initiation of the end-of-life medication, I found myself adjusting to several realizations:

• It’s hard to know what to say. Glynn and I started texting each other almost every day during the final two weeks of her life, but I sometimes struggled with the opening lines of our chats. Typical conversational questions — like “how are you?” — seemed pointless.
• It’s tricky to explain to others. When I became too stressed out and had to depart early from a work convention in Acapulco, I explained to the organizers only that my sister was getting sicker. It’s hard to tell random people, “My sister is scheduled to die precisely on April 20, and I need time to navigate my anticipatory grief.” It reminded me of the early days of being gay; I was nervous about who to be open with, for fear of negative reactions.
• There is no ideal terminology. Even when I was open with people, I couldn’t quite find the appropriate vocabulary. I didn’t like saying that my sister was going to commit assisted suicide. The verb “to commit” tends to carry negative connotations, especially when paired with the word “suicide.” Instead, I tried the phrases “doing assisted suicide” and “doing the death with dignity thing.” They don’t sound perfect to me, either, but they worked.
• Pressing questions don’t always pop up. After a loved one dies, surviving relatives often think of questions they wish they’d asked. When you know the exact date of someone’s death, there’s no excuse not to prepare those all-important queries in advance, right? That, of course, increases the pressure — so, of course, I could barely think of anything to ask.

I was always curious about our family history, sure, but Glynn wasn’t big on that. She tended to think that at least half of our deceased relatives were idiots (a belief that wasn’t true, as far as I was concerned).

Nevertheless, I made up a list of questions for her — things like where she slept during childhood visits to our grandparents’ house in Louisville, and what she enjoyed doing there.

I also wondered what TV programs one watches when they know they won’t live much longer, and whether it feels strange to see travel commercials on TV and know you’ll never go anywhere again.

She said she couldn’t remember the answers to my first two questions. I never asked the second two.

• I appreciated the advantages. Knowing exactly when a life-changing event is going to take place makes it easier to plan visits and set the tone for conversations. Glynn was very matter of fact and encouraged an open and realistic dialogue, and her sharp sense of humor often made our interactions entertaining.

She joked (I think) about trying to communicate with me and some of her friends after she died; she was atheist but believed in the possibility of the dead contacting the living; she also loved Asian and Mexican religious imagery, and both often made their way into miniature altars and wall décor that she created.

Another big advantage of scheduling medically assisted suicide was the certainty. It was comforting to know that Glynn wouldn’t deteriorate further. She’d never have to be in a hospital or a nursing home like my mother had been. And we could have enjoyable and even funny conversations, right up until the end.

The days crawled during the final week before my husband and I traveled to Glendale. Those days seemed like a waste. I felt like I wasn’t doing the emotional homework that was necessary to prepare for Glynn’s death. But what are you supposed to do? I searched for information online but couldn’t find much about the experiences of relatives of people who’ve died with medical assistance — perhaps because not that many people have actually gone through it. Only 1,300 people in the United States died by assisted suicide in 2021, according to a report in Statista.

When we arrived at Glynn’s apartment in Glendale on the Friday before she was to initiate the process, she was lying in a hospital bed in the middle of her living/dining room. Her bed was angled toward the window, she explained, so that she could appreciate the view of the Verdugo Mountains, and the TV, so that she could watch “Jeopardy.” Rory brought brimming bags of Cuban food from a nearby restaurant, and Glynn ate more than she had in days, she said.

We spent all day together on Saturday. That gave Glynn time to call my questions about our family’s past “stupid” (in a joking tone, of course, but I knew she was serious). She praised the men that both of us had married, a positive note that quickly morphed into a discourse about how unlikeable our father was. She railed against his bad sense of humor, his quick temper, how bad a husband he was to our mother and how he’d scolded and embarrassed Glynn in front of her friends when she was young. Our father died in 1969, more than 50 years earlier, when she was 16 and I was four. But even today, she still needed to vent.

Sunday

Angel and I arrived at Glynn’s at around 8 a.m., right when the nurse was preparing the first doses of morphine and lorazepam. She explained that Glynn would take the medications in pill form as long as she was awake enough to swallow. After that, the liquid would be absorbed under her tongue.

Glynn swallowed the first pills and stayed awake. Smitty, Rory, Angel and I sat around her bed.

“Now’s the time when we go around the room, so each person can say what they love the most about me,” Glynn joked.

I took her up on the opportunity. “Thanks for all the postcards,” I said, referring to the missives she sent me when I was a child living with our mother in Brockport, New York, and she was already an adult, living in Fort Lauderdale and then Tucson.

Eventually, she drifted off to sleep.

At one point she opened her eyes and looked at the television, which was tuned to a music channel with generic images of beaches.

“Why are you forcing our guests to watch a TV show about the beach?” she asked Smitty before dozing back off.

The nurse said that the longest time she’d seen someone stay alive during this process was 14 days. Angel and I couldn’t stay indefinitely in California. But we did decide to extend our stay by two extra days.

Monday

I was angry when I woke up the following morning in the Airbnb rental in Glendale. Angry that we’d had to fly so far, all the way to California, to watch my sister die. Angry that Glynn shot down my questions about our family history and fixated on how horrible our father was (it wasn’t just an end-of-life rant; she had always criticized him whenever his name came up). Angry that I was probably being an asshole for getting annoyed about this now, when she was in her final days.

But most of all, I was angry about having to say goodbye.

I told Angel I needed to walk to Glynn’s apartment alone. I took a longer route, speed walking while listening to fast-paced music that helped me to work through negative emotions.

I’d worked hard this year to avoid our typical sibling arguments. We were both opinionated, and even though our worldview was remarkably similar, it was never hard to find something to disagree about. But Glynn was intelligent, funny, creative and genuinely interested in the lives of her family members (including me). She cared about us, and we cared about her. I needed to focus on that, not on the sibling annoyances.

I kissed the sleeping Glynn hello when I arrived, and Angel showed up soon after.

The experience so far hadn’t been quite what Angel and I had expected. We’d imagined one dramatic, final moment, during the first dose of medication — a time to say goodbye as she swallowed the pills and immediately sailed off to sleep and beyond. I didn’t expect the continued conversations, gradual sleepiness and occasional awakenings. There wasn’t a time that felt like the real moment to say goodbye.

Rory had the wise idea to ask the nurse if she’d step outside for a few minutes so that the family could have some private time with Glynn. That gave us a chance to say goodbye. We cried. She stayed asleep.

As soon as we arrived at our Airbnb apartment after dinner at In-N-Out Burger, we saw a text from Smitty: “Call me NOW!”

Glynn had passed away.

We Ubered right over. Rory and Smitty were standing by her body. The nurse was sitting at the dining room table, counting pills and mixing them with water and soap so they could be safely discarded. Smitty described what had happened: he and Rory had been watching TV when the nurse was checking on Glynn’s vitals. She advised them that the final moment was “imminent.” They stood and watched as her breaths became more drawn out and eventually stopped. Smitty said it was peaceful, quiet.

The perfect planner, Glynn had arranged in advance for her body to be donated for medical research, so all it took was a phone call to arrange the pickup. A couple hours later, two men wearing black suits (not unlike those worn by some characters in “Pulp Fiction,” we said) arrived at the apartment. The four of us went upstairs, and within a few minutes we noticed that there was no more noise coming from downstairs. Rory went down and advised us that they were gone.

Thursday

As the JetBlue plane taxied to the runway at LAX a couple days later, Angel and I stared out the window and held hands. This had been unlike any other death in the family. Glynn’s assisted suicide had been calmer, and as comforting as a death in the family could be. She’d taken care of so many details — and avoided putting herself in what would have likely become a much more painful situation. We already missed her, but we were content that she had taken control and made her own decisions. She found comfort, and so did we, in her decision.

This experience with Glynn cemented Angel’s and my determination to maintain control of our own end-of-life decisions, too. We live in a state where there are no such rights, at least for now, and as we make plans to move following my husband’s retirement, states that offer legalized death with dignity are at the top of our list.

Even in her final days, Glynn's signature wit and irreverence never left her. And it continued even after she was gone. Two days after we returned home, she appeared briefly in one of my dreams, parked in her familiar blue armchair. I was about to head to the bathroom when she uttered just one line:

"You know we're out of toilet paper, right?"

She and I had always shared a sense of humor that veered from camp to potty, and Glynn’s cameo in my dream was flawless. As I lay in bed, I smiled. Her ability to celebrate the absurd and lighthearted, even in the face of her own mortality, was a testament to the strength of her spirit.