In December 1997, Cheri Tremble committed suicide with the assistance of Dr. Jack Kevorkian. What follows is a merging of fact with fiction: the external details of Cheri's life and illness are as accurate as possible, gleaned from interviews with her friends and family, while the internal details—her thoughts, her memories, and what occurred after her loved ones saw her for the last time—are imagined.

They come slowly down the street, two boys on bicycles, riding side by side through the glare of a summer afternoon. She's on the curb and the sun is so bright and hot it feels like her hair is on fire. If she glances down she can just see the rubber toes of her sneakers and the skirt of her sundress, the color of root beer. The boys are playing tug-of-war, leaning away from one another, front wheels wobbling, each grasping one end of a long black snake. They have pale matching hair that stands up like the bristles of a brush and their mouths are open in silent, gleeful shouts. The snake is dusty and limp, but as they sweep past she sees its eye, wide awake, and the sudden flat ribbon of tongue, scarlet against the boy's white wrist.

This is the way Cheri's life is passing in front of her eyes, in random unrelated glimpses, one or two a day. They come from nowhere, the bottom of her brain, and are suddenly projected, intense and silent as the Zapruder film, while she watches. This morning as she was eating her oatmeal what passed in front of her eyes was her first husband, shirtless against a blue sky, tying up tomato plants. And now tonight, climbing into bed, the Riley boys with a river snake, circa 1955.

The bed feels like a boat on choppy water. She pulls her foot out from the covers and rests it on the floor for ballast. That's what they used to say to do if you were drunk and had the whirlies. The phone rings in the living room and she hears Sarah's voice against the sound of the television. In those old TV shows and movies, way back when, the husband and wife had to keep one foot on the floor during the bed scenes. It meant everything was friendly instead of passionate. Well, it's working here tonight, the nausea is receding.

A wand of light appears and then widens; Bone's head is framed in the doorway. He pads across the room on velvet cat paws and freezes when he sees her bare foot on the floor. He stares at it in the dark with wide terrified eyes, then takes his place next to Nimbus at the foot of the bed. The girls were helping her burn leaves all afternoon and now the cats smell like marijuana smoke. In this morning's vision, her first husband was standing waist-deep in some unkempt garden of theirs, hair in a ponytail, a small frown on his face, and a joint behind his ear. Back in New York one of her chemo doctors had discreetly mentioned marijuana for nausea, and some kind soul had given her a plate of pot brownies which she had taken like medicine, eating one each morning for breakfast. She had wandered her Brooklyn apartment in a state of muffled calm, straightening bedspreads and dish towels and staring slack-jawed out the window until the monster awoke, nudged her back into the bathroom, pushed her face in the toilet.

Cheri stretches her toes reflexively under the covers, making sure they still work. She's seen pictures of her spine, ghostly negatives resting against a light box, and the cancer looks tiny, like a baby's grasping fingers. The doctor used a pencil with bite marks on it to show her the metastasis: here, here, and a tiny bit here. Her relaxation is so complete that the bed now has the soothing, side-to-side rocking motion of a sleeping car. Scenery floods past, mostly clumps of rocks and little hillocks scattered with dark green trees. Here, here, and a tiny bit here. A farm, a collie dog loping next to the tracks, and then the sudden startling face of a long-dead uncle. It seemed like he had shouted something but she couldn't catch it.

"What?" she says into the dark.

"Nothing," Sarah whispers from the doorway. "I was just standing here for a second."

How had she done it, raised these exotic wild-haired daughters? They were back in Iowa City temporarily, crowding their personalities into her little house, blearily eating bowls of cereal each morning before raking the leaves into bright piles or spading the flower beds. The rest of the time they lounged on the front porch where they kept their packs of cigarettes, smoking and having long murmured squabbles, going from flannel shirts to tank tops and back to flannel shirts again as the fall afternoons waxed and waned. Every evening one of them would ease out of the house and clunk away in motorcycle boots and vivid lipstick, down the street and into the neighborhood tavern. They mostly took turns, one of them swigging beers, shooting pool, and punching up embarrassing, elderly jukebox songs, the other at home sprawled in front of the television, pale as a widow, drinking cups of fragrant tea and eating malted milk balls by the handful.

Tonight it's Sarah, standing silent against the door frame, staring intently at the floor, hands gripping elbows, listening to her mother breathe. Cheri feels the stirrings of a cough deep inside her lungs. It's the monster, locked in the basement, and eventually it will storm up the stairs and burst forth, attacking her in her own home, swinging a mallet at her chest over and over. Once she can breathe again, she makes a joke out of it: I'm Buddy Hackett, I'm Gene Hackman. Nobody even pretends to laugh at this anymore; they're too tired.

"I thought you were sleeping," Sarah says. "The phone was for you."

Cheri nudges a cat away from her hip, making room, and Sarah climbs in beside her. It's a slumber party minus the fun. She was awake, she could have taken the call.

"He said you should rest," Sarah answers.

Who said?

Besides terminal and cancer, there are no more final sounding words in the English language. Jack Kevorkian. That's who.

And then, despite themselves, they are starstruck for a moment at the idea of this spry ghoul from the evening news picking up his phone in Michigan and dialing Cheri's own little house in Iowa, with its polished floors and eccentric armchairs. Backlit from the hallway, the cats' ears are almost transparent, like parchment lampshades. They watch the humans in their giddiness, faces sharp and impassive.

They'll be wide awake alive and I'll be dead, Cheri thinks suddenly. Not just the cats, but everyone. Sarah, Katy, her best friends Linda and Wayne. Linda and Wayne's children, the lady at the pharmacy who calls her Churry instead of Cheri, the man covered in dirt and desperation who sometimes slept on her stoop back in Brooklyn. Her first husband, her second husband, her own mother, all those medical professionals.

His nickname is Doctor Death, and yet when it's over, he'll still be alive.

(to read the rest of this story, buy Tin House #12)