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A few hours before she died, Margie Cohen wrapped me in a hug just outside her bedroom door. I could feel the tumors on her back through her green blouse. “It’s like I’ve known you my whole life,” she whispered into my ear. I began to cry.
It was early September. Margie and I had met that summer as I was reporting a story on Medical Aid in Dying in Colorado. A Denver Health physician named Kerri Mason—who leads the hospital’s MAID clinic—texted me Margie’s number one day and said I should give her a call. “You are going to love this human,” the doctor wrote.
She was right.
Margie lived about a mile from my house, in Douglas County. She was 76 and a widow. When I showed up at her door for the first time this past June, a woman with short, gray hair bounded across the wooden floor to greet me. Margie was so full of energy that I thought she was a hospice nurse.
She planned for me to stay 30 minutes, but we talked for nearly three hours that first time. Margie told me about growing up in Colorado, how she went to George Washington High School, how she got a psychology degree from Colorado State University and later earned a master’s degree from the University of Denver. She’d worked for years as a corporate recruiter.
We were both Catholic, so we chatted about our faith. Margie worried MAID would be seen as an act of suicide, and she wanted to see her husband in heaven. She’d been married to Larry for 53 years when he died in 2023. After Larry’s death, Margie started seeing white feathers everywhere. To her, each feather was a sign her husband was still with her, still watching over her. Margie collected dozens of feathers over the years and sealed them in sandwich baggies that she kept in her bedroom.
Margie told me about her breast cancer diagnosis, in 1993. She told me about her second diagnosis, in 2015. She now was facing cancer a third time. Her doctor said there was no coming back from this one. Margie said she wanted to die before her pain became too much, before her suffering was all anyone remembered of her life.
“I want to die as me,” she said.
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I met lots of Margies this past summer. Each was Mason’s patient, and each had chosen to end their lives with a prescribed cocktail of lethal drugs.
Like Margie, they all had a terminal illness. Many of them had cancer. One had ALS; another had a rare disease that was working its way through the patient’s spinal cord. Several were living through the slow suffocation that came with Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, also known as COPD.
The first woman I met, at a care facility in Denver, showed me the white sleeping gown in which she’d be cremated. Another, north of Denver, said she’d spent months in her family room recliner with nothing to do but wait. “Nobody tells you how boring dying is,” she said. A woman in Pueblo who’d trained horses told me she wanted to ride again before she took her prescription. A couple weeks later, she texted me a photo of her atop a horse. “Just like it used to be…,” she wrote.
I sat at kitchen tables. I sat in living rooms. I sat in rooms overlooking beautiful gardens. I listened to men convince their wives that this was the only humane way for their pain to end. I listened to a woman catalog her purses and tell me which of her favorites would go to her friends. I saw oxygen bottles and pill bottles.
The last time I saw Bob Moore, a 73-year-old retired mason who lived on a former commune in Huerfano County, he was waiting for a FedEx driver to show up with his MAID prescription. It was mid-July, and Bob had been living with COPD for years. Bob; his wife, Nancy; and Bob’s brother, Dennis, huddled around the kitchen table and swapped stories. Koda, Bob’s Great Pyrenees, lazed on the floor next to a portable oxygen bottle. “Been with Bob all day long,” Nancy said and motioned toward the dog.
A procession of friends and family had showed up at Bob’s house over the past couple weeks. Friends from New Mexico drove up to say their goodbyes; neighbors stopped by often. One of Bob’s buddies cleaned the chicken coop. Bob’s brother was leaving for home in Pennsylvania the next day, and the two men knew they’d never see each other again. Bob joked about how he used to tease Dennis when they were children, how he couldn’t believe his little brother would show up after all that torment.
“I’m surprised he even speaks to me,” Bob said and laughed. “And yet he comes out here….”
“Well, when you’re a friendless fuck, you don’t have much choice,” Dennis teased back. The men wiped tears from their eyes.
Bob cried a lot. He didn’t know when he might use his MAID prescription. “I’m trying to take this one step at a time,” he told me during one of our visits. “Maybe I’m deluding myself to think that I have more time than I really do.”
Bob still had things to do. He needed to show Nancy how to start the generator and open the spring to water their garden next year. He hoped Nancy might hire someone to paint the kitchen. He said he felt like a burden these past few months. He could barely make it around the house without taking a long break to catch his breath. Cooking had become an impossibility. Even going to the bathroom was a chore for which he sometimes needed Nancy’s help. “I’m taking this medicine as much for her as I am for me,” Bob said. “I know she’s going to miss me, but she’s going to do a lot better without me.”
With his MAID prescription in transit, Bob said, everything was suddenly more real than it had ever been. The prescription was an acceptance COPD was killing him, that there was no getting better, that Nancy would soon be a widow. “I’ve now committed to this,” he said. “I know it’s inevitable.”
This is what I learned from people who knew they were going to die: Do not hold back. Say what you need to say to the people you love. Make friends and keep them in your life forever. Don’t hold grudges. Apologize. Apologize again. Go to the party. Take the trip. Be yourself.
The conversations made me think about people in my life—whether I’d said the things I needed, whether they knew how important they’d been to me. My parents and my in-laws are creeping toward 80. I explained my reporting to my 75-year-old mother. I described the final moments of a woman named Astrid Marlow, who was living with ALS. I told my mother that I continued to speak to Astrid’s daughter, Sam—how this young woman had sat in bed next to her mother when she died, how she had been so calm and supportive in such a stressful and sad moment. There was a completeness to the relationship, a confidence in the end. Sam later told me that part of her calm came from knowing that nothing had gone unspoken between her and her mother. Sam was grateful that she and her mother knew when the end would happen, that Astrid had taken control of perhaps the most meaningful moment of her life. “We said everything we needed to say to each other,” Sam told me later. “There’s real comfort in that. There were no regrets between the two of us.”
I won’t bore you with thoughts on the fragility of life, but I will say that no one I interviewed talked to me about the car they owned or the expensive watch they had or the fancy dinners they ate. They spoke about their spouses, their children, their grandchildren, their nieces and nephews, their friends, their dogs and cats and horses. One woman talked about going to beaches in California and watching the waves. One woman remembered her father skiing the slopes at Breckenridge. One man talked about the sunrise from his house and the hunting trips he’d taken with his sons and grandsons.
Alan Koziel talked to me about his friends in Colorado and New York and New Jersey. He had three adult sons and had taken in neighborhood kids back in the day—young men and women who, Alan said, “were on the wrong path” but eventually found their way. These were members of Alan’s extended household, now-middle-aged adults stopping by the house at all hours to laugh and cry and talk about days long past. “I’m not afraid of dying,” Alan said. “I’m at peace.”
I still get calls and texts from people I interviewed who tell me the day they’ve picked to die. I’ve gotten messages as I was driving on the interstate and walking my dogs and watching television with my wife.
“Hello,” one message reads. “Just wanted you to know that it’s time for me to go….”
“She’s declining and wants to do the MAID,” one woman’s niece texted me. “Are you available possibly today?”
“Margie Cohen has picked her day….” Mason, the Denver Health doctor, wrote.
I went to Margie’s house the afternoon she died. Thirty-or-so friends and family were there. Don Julio tequila was on the counter near some chocolate-chip cookies and chocolate-dipped strawberries and cold-cut sandwiches. Few people were in the mood to eat.
Margie pulled me aside and said she was thinking of ways to lighten the mood. She was a prankster. Margie said she might go into her bedroom and pretend to take the medicine, then jump from behind the door and surprise everyone. She figured that would be too cruel, though. Margie considered writing notes on postcards and then having me mail them to friends and family a year, five years, 10 years after her death. I’m living my best life on a beach with a cocktail in my hand, she’d write. Don’t try to find me.
We laughed. She told me that she’d left her white feathers in the sandwich bags and put them in her purse. Margie wanted me to tell her granddaughter to collect them after she’d taken the medicine.
I told Margie to drop a feather on my lawn sometime, just so I knew she was in a good place.
“I’ll see what I can do,” she told me.
Margie’s son, Jeremy, gave a speech and said he didn’t know what he’d do without his mother. “My heart is shattered,” he said. “I never thought this day would come.” Friends offered prayers. Around noon, someone cracked champagne. The song “Celebration” played over a phone’s speakers and folks sang along and swayed to the music. Afterward, they took photos.
Mason arrived soon afterward. Margie and I hugged goodbye. Her family filed into her bedroom a little after 1 p.m. and closed the door.
I cried the entire drive home. I called my wife. I called my mother. I leashed my dogs for a quiet walk with my thoughts. I got a text from Mason: Margie was gone.
I stepped out my front door and into the sunlight. In the middle of my lawn were two white feathers.
Read More: The Coloradans Exercising Their Right To Die—and a Doctor Who Helps Them Find Peace
