From “Save Me, Stranger,” a cancer patient takes on an odd mission ...Middle East

“Eat My Moose”

Who knows what a euthanizer is supposed to look like, but judging from my clients’ expressions when they answer their doors, they don’t expect a sweat-sopped middle-aged guy in overalls, nauseous from a bumpy flight or a long truck drive on a chip seal highway. Sometimes I’m greeted by a lady with a walker, or an entire family dressed in springtime colors to cheer their soon-to-be-departed loved one. Either way, they’re always relieved to see me, even me. It doesn’t matter what death looks like, acts like, smells like. It only matters that I’m there.

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I’ve assisted 221 suicides all over Alaska. My job: I get a name and address, go there, help them die, and then travel to the next address. I maintain the planes, trucks, and helo, source the materials, and do most of the jobs. When Bonnie was working, she dealt with the clients and money, and she vetted every job to make sure it was euthanasia and not murder. 

Bonnie loved subterfuge, and never gave me an assignment by phone. Instead, she’d write the time, date, and GPS coordinates on a cigarette using a micro-tip felt pen, replace it in the pack, and hand it to me when we met for coffee and muffins. There were usually two or three cigarettes in the pack, and if she wanted to add a stop to a bump run, especially north of the Arctic Circle, she’d Express Mail another pack to me up there. After the job, I’d smoke the evidence under that pearly sky, thinking of her. We had both started smoking again, once we achieved temporary immortality.

There are three reasons people hire me:

1. Life insurance policies don’t always pay out for suicide, even if you’re terminal.

2. The stigma. Some sick clients fear judgment from loved ones who expect them to endure the pain. Pain is easy to understand until it’s yours.

3. Some clients have nobody. They’re afraid to die alone.Although we usually serve families, a number of my clients are lonely subsistence hunters and fisher-folk, hours from roads or towns or other people, scared and sick enough to let a stranger help them die in the agreed-upon manner. Even after Bonnie quit, they still find my number somehow. Some of their cabins are so remote and clotted with forest that I doubt even a bush rat like me can fly back out without bending metal. Some of them change their minds once they see me, their first person in months or years. Then I just fly them back to Anchorage and drop them off at a bar or a hospital so they can live their remaining days surrounded by the humans they didn’t know they needed.

But most folks go through with it and die. I provide the chamber, which is a plastic bag to fit over their head, like a turkey bag with elastic on it. Tubing to funnel the gas in there. A tank of helium, or nitrogen for an extra fee. They work the same and neither one shows up on your general autopsy, but some people like to be expensive. 

I don’t:

I do:

“Save Me, Stranger”

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After they’re dead, I check the carotid pulse with one hand and bag up the kit with the other. Bonnie always said, “Get out of there before the magnitude hits anyone, especially you.” I keep my coat and boots on to make leaving faster. I’m gone inside a minute, lighting Bonnie’s telltale cigarette inside my truck or plane or helo. It’s like flying away from a bomb site. Which I’ve also done. But with these jobs, I feel ephemeral, anonymous once I’m in the air or down the road. Under the roof of clouds, I check my body for pain and find none. Oftentimes I forget the client’s name within miles. Sometimes I sing.

It’s common for clients to offer me whatever they’re leaving behind: a truck, a plane, a shack, jewelry, food. In a ten-by-ten poorly chinked log cabin in the Interior, one man’s last words were, “Eat my moose.” A whole winter’s supply of butchered bull moose hung in his shed; he thought he’d live long enough to eat it all. It became a joke for Bonnie and me. “Eat my moose,” she’d boom randomly and I never knew what she meant, only that it made her laugh. 

But I never take anything clients offer, not even the untraceables like meat or money, not even if they beg. I leave it there with the body, for someone else to find, or never find. I don’t like to take my work home with me.

I first met Bonnie at an Anchorage VA cancer support group four years ago. The group was for terminal patients, stage 4 with months or weeks to live, many of them combat vets like me and Bonnie. Bonnie had deployed five times to Afghanistan, and I was Air Force with four deployments to Iraq and three to Afghanistan. We only talked about it via our cancers, the chemicals we had inhaled in theater, the nightmares we still got.

My cancer was pancreatic, Bonnie’s a brain tumor, both inoperable. We were in our fifties, a couple of years apart, retired from service. Everyone in the VA support group had quit their civilian jobs. I had been flying for the Postal Service. Four out of five Alaska towns are only reachable by plane or boat, no roads in or out; bush carriers like me kept them connected to the world, even as we floated above it. Bonnie had been running a high-stakes underground poker game that sent her back and forth between Anchorage and Fairbanks until she began to forget where she was.

Bonnie’s chemo did squat besides steal her hair. Without eyelashes or eyebrows, she always looked like she had been crying—almost funny given her hard-edged character. Her nose was continually pink, chafed from the oxygen tubes, with little red lines veining the thin skin under her nostrils. She sometimes forgot her last name but never forgot to bring doughnuts. Even with the monster eating her brain, she said things like, “The only reason we need this shitty support group is because no one else can love killers like us.” It’s like the things inside my head came out of her mouth. I had three ex-wives I had shredded on the altar of my viciousness, my drunkenness. Bonnie had the foresight never to marry at all. “And now I’m too bald to wear the veil,” she said.

By the first time Bonnie asked me to kill someone, I, too, was on oxygen and Bonnie had stopped chemo. I was at home trying to decide between Raisin Bran and stale bread, knowing I’d barf up either one, when I heard her knock on my door. Bonnie wore a green dress soiled at the hem, pulling her own oxygen tank in a trolley behind her. She stood at the bottom of my steps and said, “Wyatt needs a spot of help.” 

Wyatt was the other vet I liked at the support group. Stubborn like me and Bonnie, an old sourdough. Leukemia. Bonnie said, “He wants to go out on his own terms.” She explained the mechanics he wanted, the gas and the chamber and everything. “It’s kind of cool, actually. No pain, just a little panic. Et voila, it’s over!”

I have to explain something special about Bonnie: she always gets her way. Bonnie ran that underground poker game for six years and it was the most peaceable business in all of Alaska, because you don’t say no to Bonnie. You can only try, and grumble, and fail.

“Why doesn’t he just take pills or something?” I asked, but I already knew the answer. Wyatt was twenty years sober. And why shouldn’t a man die any old way he wanted? How you die should be up to you. How you live is usually up to everyone else.

It was not a small favor. Bonnie and I were likely weeks from death ourselves, and could barely go a few hours without a nap. Bonnie used a cane because her balance was fucked, plus both of us had our oxygen trollies. It was spring, with snow and rain and snow and rain, and it all added up to sticky, half-frozen mud. I still had the same damn pain that had alerted me to the cancer in the first place, a bizarre burning that radiated outward from my belly and back, like a pulsar inside me. It got so it made me stop drinking, and even three wives couldn’t make me do that.

So we drove to Wyatt’s cabin and hobbled inside. He showed us how he wanted it done, but he was too weak to turn on the gas himself, so Bonnie twisted the knob. It took a couple of tries, but we finally got him dead. It wasn’t nearly as horrible as anything we’d seen or done in theater, me or Bonnie. The only really bad part was that we were next and we knew it and so had Wyatt, so fuck him for asking us. But who else did he have? He barely had us, and now he was just a bunch of cells beginning to decompose. Nevertheless, when we pulled the bag off his head, his face bore the smirk of a man who had gotten his way.

“He’s lucky we’re still around to help,” Bonnie said, staring at Wyatt’s empty body. “Maybe we should consider going out this way.” But nobody would ever help us besides each other. Which meant one of us would be left alone in the end, literally and figuratively holding the bag.

We called 911 and left the phone off the hook by Wyatt’s hand. Then we drove away in silence. At a Fred Meyer, we parked to wipe down the tank and plastics and dump them out back. Bonnie walked inside the store without even using her cane, and emerged a few minutes later with a bag of apples and wrapped tuna sandwiches. We sat on the bumper of my truck and ate like healthy people.

“Are we going to hell now?” Bonnie asked.

I thought we were already in hell. Except at that particular moment, pain had hit a miraculous pause. That pulsar was gone from my abdomen, my head. None of the shakes, none of the nausea.

“You know what?” Bonnie said. “I feel kind of amazing. I’m not even dizzy right now.”

“Adrenaline? Or maybe we’re rallying,” I said. They called it “terminal lucidity” in our support group and I had come to anticipate it, that last flame before death, like the fire of maples in autumn.

“The end is nigh,” Bonnie said.

We smoked and ate apples, and then I drove Bonnie to her place and went home alone to recover from what we’d done. But the sickness didn’t return. I spent the next days and then weeks cleaning my house, scrubbing all the grime that had accumulated while I was feeling so damn awful, airing out the old man smell. I rose early each day, packed all my belongings into boxes, and scribbled “For Goodwill” on the side. There was nothing worth sending to my ex-wives. They wanted to forget me. Anything that remained of my life was best left for strangers.

Three weeks after Bonnie and I helped Wyatt die, my place was all packed up and I still felt tremendous. I even started running five klicks a day like I used to. I waited for the crash, and waited. Finally, I visited my doctor, who gave me blood tests, ultrasounds, x-rays, and a CT scan, and then said, “I’m sorry, but you still have stage 4 cancer. Your tumor is the same size. The good news is that it hasn’t grown as of late.”

“Aren’t I supposed to be dead by now? Or at least sick?” The doctor began to explain terminal lucidity, but I cut him off. “All this time, though? A month ago I was on oxygen. And now?” Like a dork, I dropped to the floor and did some rapid pushups. “Explain that, doc.”

He said, “I’m glad you feel good. We’ll schedule a follow-up in seven days.” He hesitated, hand on the doorknob. “Just…what comes up must come down. Have a good week.” The way he said it made it sound like a week was all I had. 

I didn’t think so, though. I knew what dying felt like. This sure wasn’t it.

I only wanted to talk to one person. But how do you explain your good luck to someone with such bad luck? I had stopped going to the support group after Wyatt, and I waited to call Bonnie for so long, I worried there wasn’t a Bonnie to call anymore. When I finally dialed her number, she answered on the first ring. “You’re still alive!” she exclaimed.

“I’m feeling better. Like…all the way better.” At her silence, I said, “Ever since we did Wyatt. The cancer’s there. I’m just not sick.”

I winced, waiting. Bonnie’s laugh bubbled. “What the everlasting fuck.” 

“I’m sorry. I feel funny—”

“No. I’m saying, I haven’t been sick since Wyatt, either.”

“You’re better?”

“Well, I probably couldn’t parachute out of a helo. But I did just clean my gutters and eat most of a pizza. Meat lover’s.” 

I don’t know why relief feels so damn funny, but we were like kids, laughing until tears, until urine threatened, until we felt empty and scared. I stared at the Goodwill boxes stacked against the wall. “How much longer do you think it’ll last?”

Her voice was dryly amused. “A day, forever, who knows? You and I defy science.”

“But we’re assholes. People like us don’t deserve miracles.”

“This is no miracle. We still have cancer,” Bonnie said. “It’s a stay of execution. We’re on loan to God.”

“Okay, so what does God want us to do with the rest of our lives?”

“It’s obvious, dummy,” Bonnie said. “He wants us to kill people.”

Erika Krouse is the author of four books of fiction and nonfiction, including her new collection of short stories, “Save Me, Stranger,” and her recent memoir, “Tell Me Everything: The Story of a Private Investigation,” which was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and winner of the Edgar Award, the Colorado Book Award, and the Housatonic Book Award. Krouse  mentors for the Book Project at Colorado’s Lighthouse Writers Workshop, where she won the Beacon Award for Teaching Excellence.

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