Lost At Sea Part 48

"Sorry but no way," I say. "That's the last thing I want to see."

George is in Seattle for a private meeting of international right-to-die activists. The biggest names in the movement are here, such as Derek Humphry, a former British Sunday Times journalist who wrote a best-selling memoir, Jean's Way, about helping his terminally ill wife commit suicide in 1975. Jean's Way pretty much began the movement: A network of right-to-die groups inspired by it sprang up across the world in the late 1970s. These activists meet once a year in an anonymous hotel somewhere to discuss advances in suicide technologies.

"It's very hush-hush," George says. "I'm surprised they're letting you in."

The delegates sit around a table in a conference room. George begins by announcing, with a somewhat dramatic flourish, his intention to kill himself rather than face extradition. When he finishes he falls silent and awaits the outpouring of shock and sympathy, or whatever. But there's none. The other right-to-die activists look unimpressed and unemotional. In fact, they seem much more interested in discovering which method he's intending to go for. George says liquid Nembutal.

"My curiosity is why would you go with a drug approach?" one delegate asks. The others lean forward, paying attention.

George's reply is that when one uses helium, the person killing themselves often tries to involuntarily remove the bag once they're unconscious, and he consequently has to forcibly hold their hands down.

"I don't want to involve anyone else in my pa.s.sing," he says.

He changes the subject. He says Rosemary Toole Gilhooly in Dublin had promised to send him a message from beyond the grave. The message would somehow take the form of roses. And she fulfilled the promise the day after she died.

"What happened was Thomas and I flew out the next morning to Amsterdam," he says, "and a man brushed by us on the street. He had roses flung over his shoulder. I've never seen anybody with so many roses. There must have been ten dozen roses! And Thomas said, 'There she is! There she is!'"

There's a silence. Then Dr. Pieter Admiraal, a pioneering Dutch advocate of euthanasia, coughs. "Oh, dear George," he says. "To meet somebody with roses in the Netherlands is not so extreme, because we are growing them to export to the world." There's muted laughter from the others. "And now you are in trouble," Dr. Admiraal continues. "Maybe G.o.d can help you."

"Maybe so," snaps George.

That evening I get to talking with Dr. Admiraal about George's idealism.

"He's too good for this world," Admiraal says. Then he adds, "I've been observing him for a long time, and I've asked our psychiatrists to observe him. He is, in my opinion, enjoying the death of another person. And that's dangerous. I have the strong impression that he wants to be there and see something dying. Well, he cannot help that. It's his character. It's a kind of phobia to enjoy death. And that's why he says, 'I will commit suicide.' Because he will want to die at that moment."

(Later, Admiraal clarifies this. He says he doesn't mean George derives psychopathic pleasure from being around death. Instead he thinks George is too in love with the afterlife. He believes in it too much and the pleasure he gets is from clapping and cheering his clients to a better place.)

I'm beginning to feel the same way about George. I've noticed that very few of his clients are terminally ill. Most are depressed or suffering from psychosomatic diseases. When I ask him about his client list, he says, "Many of my colleagues will avoid such persons like the plague, but I feel a very strong ident.i.ty with the story of the Good Samaritan. I stop while others walk by and ignore their pleas."

How, I wonder, do George and his clients find each other?

After the conference I visit Derek Humphry, author of Jean's Way and the father of the modern right-to-die movement. He's from Wiltshire but now lives in Oregon, where we sit in his cabin in the forest.

"Once or twice a week," he tells me, "I get very strange people on the telephone who are anxious to commit suicide because of their depression or sad lives. When they get your number they want to talk and talk. And they call again and again. And they also call all the other right-to-die groups, who say, 'We can't help you. It's not within our parameters because you aren't terminally ill.' But they pursue you. They call and call. And eventually someone will say, 'George Exoo will probably help you.' And that gets them off the phone and on to George."

"Isn't that terrible?" I ask.

"Oh, yes," he says.

So George is like the backstreet abortionist of the a.s.sisted suicide world, getting under-the-counter referrals from the more respectable mainstream.

Three years pa.s.s. Even though the Irish government has been pressing the FBI to arrest George, they don't. Meanwhile he's traveling around America, helping nonterminally ill people die.

In the spring of 2007 a package arrives at my house. Inside is a videoca.s.sette. The postmark on the envelope is Beckley, West Virginia. I close my office door. I put it into the VCR and I press Play.

IT IS AN EMPTY ROOM. It's a mess. It's overflowing with detritus-paperweights, books, novelty ornaments, papers, coffee cups. Then George appears in the shot from behind the camera. He looks like he's been awake for days.

He says to the camera, to me, "Now. What I'm going to do is call my friend Shirley, who is out in a western state in a motel."

He picks up the phone and dials. He says, "Hey, Shirley. This is George. The hour has come that we've been planning." He hasn't bugged the phone, so I can only hear his end of the conversation. "I know you're nervous," George says. "You've never done this before. But that's all right. We're going to get through this. It's time for you to"-he sighs-"drink the potion that's in front of you. It's bitter and horrible-tasting, so it's important that you chugalug it right down. I ask you to raise that gla.s.s and I want you to know how honored I am to be with you at this moment. "

There's a silence of perhaps ten seconds. Then George's voice hardens impatiently: "I know it's bitter. Just keep drinking. Put your finger over your nose and chugalug it all down."

He's talking to Shirley like someone would talk to a child who had disobeyed them. Then he chants a Buddhist chant: "Gate, Gate, Paragate, Parasamgate ..."

(Gone. Gone. Gone completely beyond.)

Then: "Shirley? Can you hear me?"

He looks into the camera. "I think I heard the phone drop. Which would mean she is probably now gone."

He shrugs slightly. "And that's it. That's the way it's done."

He turns off the camera.

In May 2007 George begins teaching a friend, Ca.s.sandra Mae, the ropes. He says he needs an a.s.sistant in case he's arrested or kills himself. I arrange to meet him at Ca.s.sandra's house in North Carolina. I arrive before George. Ca.s.sandra lives alone. Her house is filled with plastic lizards. She's in her forties. While we wait, I ask her how they met.

"I was bitten by a brown recluse spider in 1993," she says. "It was so painful I wanted to die."

She says she called the official right-to-die groups, "but they wouldn't help me."

"Because you weren't terminally ill?"

"Yeah, they rejected me. But then somebody said, 'You might want to call George.' Kind of like under the counter."

Ca.s.sandra says she would have killed herself with George's help-he was perfectly willing-but she couldn't find anyone to look after her pet snake. Eventually, they got to talking. If she wasn't going to be his client, perhaps she should be his a.s.sistant.

GEORGE ARRIVES. He has a second job now, buying up houses that have been seized by the banks, and then selling them on for a quick profit, although he hasn't managed to sell any yet.

"You could provide the full service," I say. "You could sell them a house, and when the banks foreclose, you could help them kill themselves."

We laugh. I say to him, "In the Arizona tape, Shirley said, 'It's bitter,' and you snapped, 'Drink it!'"

"Absolutely," he replies. "Because I'd been through that argument with her before."

"She'd tasted it before?" I ask.

"Yeah," he says. He's getting annoyed with me. "I'd been with her twice before in person. What kind of bull twaddle is that? If you're serious, you're going to drink it and not whine about it!"

"But this is somebody who doesn't know whether to kill themselves," I say.

"Just drink it," he says, exasperated. "Three or four swallows and you're going to go to sleep. Permanently. In ten minutes you'll be off this planet. Yes, I was probably pressing her to some extent. But I was pressing her to make up her mind one way or another because I can't go flying across the country week after week and have nothing come of it. I want her to either go on and live her life, or check out. But it's her choice. It's not mine."

We go for lunch. Ca.s.sandra has told me that her multiple chemical sensitivities (triggered by the 1993 spider bite) were so severe, there is only one local restaurant she can eat in where the atmosphere does not set off her symptoms. But we eat in another restaurant-an all-you-can-eat buffet-and she is fine. She eats all she can. I begin to see Ca.s.sandra as living proof that George really shouldn't help people like Ca.s.sandra kill themselves.