This July 24, 2016 photo provided by Niels Alpert, Betsy Davis, third from left, has a laugh with her friends during a going away party in Ojai, Calif. In early July, Davis emailed her closest friends... (Associated Press) 
 
 SAN DIEGO (AP) — In early July, Betsy Davis emailed her closest friends and relatives to invite them to a two-day party, telling them: "These circumstances are unlike any party you have attended before, requiring emotional stamina, centeredness and openness." 
 
 And just one rule: No crying in front of her. 
 
 The 41-year-old artist with ALS, or Lou Gehrig's disease, held the gathering to say goodbye before becoming one of the first Californians to take a lethal dose of drugs under the state's new doctor-assisted suicide law for the terminally ill. 
 
 "For me and everyone who was invited, it was very challenging to consider, but there was no question that we would be there for her," said Niels Alpert, a cinematographer from New York City. 
 
 "The idea to go and spend a beautiful weekend that culminates in their suicide — that is not a normal thing, not a normal, everyday occurrence. In the background of the lovely fun, smiles and laughter that we had that weekend was the knowledge of what was coming." 
 
 Davis worked out a detailed schedule for the gathering on the weekend of July 23-24, including the precise hour she planned to slip into a coma, and shared her plans with her guests in the invitation. 
 
 More than 30 people came to the party at a home with a wraparound porch in the picturesque Southern California mountain town of Ojai, flying in from New York, Chicago and across California. 
 
 One woman brought a cello. A man played a harmonica. There were cocktails, pizza from her favorite local joint, and a screening in her room of one of her favorite movies, "The Dance of Reality," based on the life of a Chilean film director. 
 
 As the weekend drew to a close, her friends kissed her goodbye, gathered for a photo and left, and Davis was wheeled out to a canopy bed on a hillside, where she took a combination of morphine, pentobarbital and chloral hydrate prescribed by her doctor. 
 
 Kelly Davis said she loved her sister's idea for the gathering, which Betsy Davis referred to as a "rebirth." 
 
 "Obviously it was hard for me. It's still hard for me," said Davis, who wrote about it for the online news outlet Voice of San Diego. "The worst was needing to leave the room every now and then, because I would get choked up. But people got it. They understood how much she was suffering and that she was fine with her decision. They respected that. They knew she wanted it to be a joyous occasion." 
 
 Davis ended her life a little over a month after a California law giving the option to the terminally ill went into effect. Four other states allow doctor-assisted suicide, with Oregon the first in 1997. 
 
 Opponents of the law in lobbying against it before state legislators argued that hastening death was morally wrong, that it puts terminally ill patients at risk for coerced death by loved ones and could become a way out for people who are uninsured or fearful of high medical bills. 
 
 Marilyn Golden of the Disability Rights Education & Defense Fund, said her heart goes out to anyone dealing with a terminal illness, but "there are still millions of people in California threatened by the danger of this law." 
 
 Davis spent months planning her exit, feeling empowered after spending the last three years losing control of her body bit by bit. The painter and performance artist could no longer stand, brush her teeth or scratch an itch. Her caretakers had to translate her slurred speech for others. 
 
 "Dear rebirth participants you're all very brave for sending me off on my journey," she wrote in her invitation. "There are no rules. Wear what you want, speak your mind, dance, hop, chant, sing, pray, but do not cry in front of me. OK, one rule." 
 
 During the party, old friends reconnected and Davis rolled in and out of the rooms in her electric wheelchair and onto the porch, talking with her guests. 
 
 At one point, she invited friends to her room to try on the clothes she had picked out for them. They modeled the outfits to laughter. Guests were also invited to take a "Betsy souvenir" — a painting, beauty product or other memento. Her sister had placed sticky notes on the items, explaining each one's significance. 
 
 Wearing a Japanese kimono she bought on a bucket-list trip she took after being diagnosed in 2013, she looked out at her last sunset and took the drugs at 6:45 p.m. with her caretaker, her doctor, her massage therapist and her sister by her side. Four hours later, she died. 
 
 Friends said it was the final performance for the artist, who once drew pictures on a stage with whipped cream. 
 
 "What Betsy did gave her the most beautiful death that any person could ever wish for," Alpert said. "By taking charge, she turned her departure into a work of art." 
 
 Her guests agreed to meet again on her birthday in June to scatter her ashes. ||||| Terminally Ill California Woman with ALS Throws One Last Party Before Ending Her Life 
 
 Niels Alpert via AP 
 
 Niels Alpert via AP 
 
 In early July, Betsy Davis sent out invitations to a party she referred to as a "rebirth.""These circumstances are unlike any party you have attended before, requiring emotional stamina, centeredness and openness," her e-mail invitations read, according to AP Davis, a 41-year-old artist from California, spent the last three years losing control of her body due to the debilitating illness of ALS or Lou Gehrig's disease, and had been planning one final gathering that concluded with ending her life with medication prescribed to her by her doctor, something that is perfectly legal under the state's new End-of-Life Option Act.A little over one month before Davis' party, a law was passed in California giving terminally ill patients the option to hasten death. It is only granted to individuals by state law in Oregon, Vermont and Washington, and by court decision in Montana."Dear rebirth participants you're all very brave for sending me off on my journey," she wrote in her invitation. "There are no rules. Wear what you want, speak your mind, dance, hop, chant, sing, pray, but do not cry in front of me. OK, one rule."Davis invited over 30 friends and family to join her at a beautiful home in Ojai on July 23-24. She had put together a fun-filled weekend with every hour detailed with activities for her loved ones who arrived from New York, Chicago and across California.Throughout the evening, Davis, seated in her electric wheelchair, interacted with each companion and was looking forward to a fashion show for which she had picked out clothes for each guest to model.Love and laughter filled the house as guests enjoyed cocktails, pizza from her favorite eatery as well as a screening in her room of one of her favorite movies, The Dance of Reality.As the final hours counted down, friends and family kissed her goodbye and gathered for a group photo. "The worst was needing to leave the room every now and then, because I would get choked up. But people got it," said Davis' sister Kelly, who wrote about her sister for local news outlet Voice of San Diego. "They understood how much she was suffering and that she was fine with her decision. They respected that. They knew she wanted it to be a joyous occasion."Davis was wheeled out to a canopy bed on a hillside, where she looked out at her last sunset. Dressed in a Japanese kimono she bought on a bucket-list trip she took after being diagnosed in 2013, she swallowed a combination of morphine, pentobarbital and chloral hydrate prescribed by her doctor at 6:45 p.m.Betsy died four hours later surrounded by Kelly, her caretaker, her doctor and her massage therapist.Guests called the gathering Betsy's final performance as friend and cinematographer Niels Alpert explained that "what Betsy did gave her the most beautiful death that any person could ever wish for.""By taking charge, she turned her departure into a work of art," he concluded.All those invited have promised to gather again next year for Betsy's birthday in June to scatter her ashes. ||||| Diane Rehm “brings a level of reason and sanity to this discussion that is severely lacking when you look at the opponents of death with dignity,” said Howard Ball, a University of Vermont political scientist. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post) 
 
 Diane Rehm and her husband John had a pact: When the time came, they would help each other die. 
 
 John’s time came last year. He could not use his hands. He could not feed himself or bathe himself or even use the toilet. Parkinson’s had ravaged his body and exhausted his desire to live. 
 
 “I am ready to die,” he told his Maryland doctor. “Will you help me?” 
 
 The doctor said no, that assisting suicide is illegal in Maryland. Diane remembers him specifically warning her, because she is so well known as an NPR talk show host, not to help. No medication. No pillow over his head. John had only one option, the doctor said: Stop eating, stop drinking. 
 
 So that’s what he did. Ten days later, he died. 
 
 For Rehm, the inability of the dying to get legal medical help to end their lives has been a recurring topic on her show. But her husband’s slow death was a devastating episode that helped compel her to enter the contentious right-to-die debate. 
 
 “I feel the way that John had to die was just totally inexcusable,” Rehm said in a long interview in her office. “It was not right.” 
 
 
 
 Diane Rehm and her late husband, John Rehm, wrote a book about their marriage. John died last year after suffering from Parkinson’s disease. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post) 
 
 More than 20 years after Jack Kevorkian jolted America with his assisted-suicide machine, Rehm is becoming one of the country’s most prominent figures in the right-to-die debate. And she’s doing so just as proponents are trying to position the issue as the country’s next big social fight, comparing it to abortion and gay marriage. The move puts Rehm in an ethically tricky but influential spot with her 2.6 million devoted and politically active listeners. 
 
 Now 78 and pondering how to manage her own death, Rehm is working with Compassion & Choices, an end-of-life organization run by Barbara Coombs Lee, a key figure in Oregon’s passage of an assisted-suicide law and a previous guest on the show. Rehm will appear on the cover of the group’s magazine this month, and she is telling John’s story at a series of small fundraising dinners with wealthy donors financing the right-to-die campaign. 
 
 If asked, she said she would testify before Congress. 
 
 Rehm’s effort comes less than a year after Brittany Maynard, a 29-year-old woman suffering from terminal brain cancer, moved to Oregon to legally end her life, giving the issue a new spin. That she was young and beautiful helped proponents broaden their argument, making the case that it is a civil right, not just an issue for graying Baby Boomers. 
 
 
 
 Brittany Maynard was 29 when she died in Oregon last year. She had brain cancer and moved to Oregon because of the state’s death with dignity law. (AP) 
 
 The Maynard case prompted a surge of activity among state lawmakers pursuing so-called death-with-dignity laws, including in Maryland, New York, Florida, Kansas, Wisconsin and the District. Progressive politicians and voters say the country is ready for the conversation. 
 
 “Kevorkian was before his time,” Rehm said. “He was too early. The country wasn’t ready.” 
 
 Public opinion on the issue depends on how it is described, according to Gallup, which has found strong support for doctors helping patients end their lives “by some painless means,” but a far slimmer majority in favor “assisting the patient to commit suicide.” Not surprisingly, groups such as Compassion & Choices studiously avoid using the word suicide. 
 
 Laws granting the right to die exist in only three states — Oregon, Washington and Vermont. New legislation faces staunch opposition from religious groups and the medical establishment. 
 
 In Massachusetts and other states where legislation has failed, proponents faced well organized public campaigns from the Catholic church, whose American bishops call suicide a “grave offense against love of self, one that also breaks the bonds of love and solidarity with family, friends, and God.” 
 
 Pushback from the American Medical Association has been equally fierce, with the organization saying that “physician-assisted suicide is fundamentally incompatible with the physician’s role as healer, would be difficult or impossible to control, and would pose serious societal risks.” 
 
 Both sides of the debate see Rehm’s entry into the debate as an important development. 
 
 “She brings gravitas, she brings her experience and she brings a level of reason and sanity to this discussion that is severely lacking when you look at the opponents of death with dignity,” said Howard Ball, a University of Vermont political scientist and author of “At Liberty to Die: The Battle for Death with Dignity in America.” 
 
 Ira Byock, a palliative care physician and vehement opponent of assisted death, has argued against the movement on Rehm’s show. Though he credits her for having him on, he said her story and influence distracts from the conversation the country should be having about improving end-of-life care. 
 
 “It sucks all of the oxygen out of the room,” he said. 
 
 ‘I don’t want comfort’ 
 
 They met in 1958. John was a lawyer at the State Department. Diane was a secretary. 
 
 “Physically, she was a knockout,” John wrote in a book they published about their marriage. But there was more. “It became clear, for example, that Diane had a fierce intellectual curiosity.” She never went to college, but had a copy of “Brothers Karamazov” on her desk. 
 
 Diane recalled his crew cut, his physique, his own intellectual curiosity. 
 
 “We loved taking long drives into the countryside,” Diane wrote, “and then going out for pizza and wine at Luigi’s, talking about our dreams, our fantasies, our attraction to each other.” 
 
 They wed and had two children, but marriage wasn’t as easy as falling in love. John was a loner, a workaholic. Diane was more outgoing, centered on family. They disagreed about so many things, nearly breaking up. 
 
 One thing they agreed on: Death. 
 
 “We had both promised each other we would help each other when the time came,” Diane said, “if there was some incurable or inoperable disease.” 
 
 The end of John’s battle with Parkinson’s last June was that moment. They had a meeting with his doctor. Their daughter, Jennifer Rehm, a physician in the Boston area, listened on the phone. She said, “Dad, they can make you comfortable.” Her father replied: “I don’t want comfort.” 
 
 The doctor made it clear he couldn’t help, but offered the self-starvation option, which the Supreme Court has ruled legal. John, living in an assisted-living community, didn’t immediately make the decision. The next day, Diane went to visit. 
 
 “I have not had anything to eat or drink,” he told her. “I have decided to go through with this.” 
 
 “Are you really sure?” Diane asked. 
 
 “Absolutely,” she said he told her. “I don’t want this.” 
 
 Diane stayed by his bedside. A couple days later, he went to sleep, aided by medication to alleviate pain. She read to him, held his hand, and she prayed. 
 
 “I prayed and prayed and prayed to God, asking that John not be suffering in any way as his life was ebbing,” she said. 
 
 Like his wife, John was Episcopalian, a church that has passed a resolution against assisted suicide and active euthanasia. She didn’t think God minded very much. 
 
 “I believe,” she said, “there is total acceptance in heaven for John’s decision to leave behind this earthly life.” 
 
 As John edged closer to death and the end of their 54-year marriage, a priest friend came to visit. Diane got a glass of red wine for a service of Holy Communion next to her husband’s bed. She put a drop of red wine on his lips. The priest performed last rites. 
 
 She spent the night with him, and in the morning she went home for a quick shower. Then she received a call — come fast, he’s slipping away. She missed his death by 20 minutes. She is still angry about that. If he could have planned his death, she and his family would have been there. 
 
 “That’s all I keep thinking about,” she said. “Why can’t we make this more peaceful and humane?” 
 
 John donated his body to George Washington Medical School. At his memorial service, some 400 people packed St. Patrick’s Episcopal Church — journalists, academics, policy makers and religious figures, including Marianne Budde, bishop of the Washington Episcopal Diocese. 
 
 Diane returned to work not long after. She told her producers she wanted to do another show on assisted dying. 
 
 It wasn’t until the last few minutes that Rehm told listeners what her husband had done: “John took the extraordinarily courageous route of saying, ‘I will no longer drink. I will no longer eat.’ And he died in 10 days.” 
 
 Richard from Florida called in. “You have my deepest sympathies and empathies with the loss of your husband,” he said. And then: “I’ve got to get to the state that gives me the choice.” 
 
 Rehm said she knows that as a journalist, she must be careful. 
 
 
 
 Diane Rehm, right, during "The Diane Rehm Show" at WAMU-FM in Washington.. (Matt McClain/The Washington Post) 
 
 “As strongly as I feel, I don’t want to use the program to proselytize my feelings,” she said. “But I do want to have more and more discussion about it because I feel it’s so important.” 
 
 Sandra Pinkard, Rehm’s producer, said she appeals to listeners, in part, because she is so open about herself. She and John discussed their marriage on the air. She detailed his struggles with Parkinson’s. 
 
 Rehm came back to the assisted death topic in late October after Brittany Maynard announced plans to end her life. 
 
 Byock joined her on the show, knowing, he said, that “on this issue, she is clearly an advocate.” Though she didn’t mention her husband, he said he had to be “very assertive” to counter the focus on Maynard’s undeniably dramatic case. 
 
 Still, he said he would go back on the program “in a heartbeat” because it’s becoming a forum for the debate. 
 
 “It’s people like her listeners that I want to talk to,” he said. “I am sincerely grateful for giving me access to her listeners.” 
 
 Her last moments 
 
 They still talk, Diane and John. 
 
 “I miss you so much,” she’ll say out loud, alone in her apartment. When President Obama awarded her the National Humanities Medal last year, she told John, “It just breaks my heart you weren’t there.” 
 
 She could hear his voice: “Don’t worry, I’m there.” 
 
 Wherever he is, Rehm has plans to join him. But she doesn’t intend to die the way he did. Shortly after John’s funeral, Rehm made an appointment with her doctor to talk about her death. 
 
 “You have to promise,” Rehm told the doctor, “that you’ll help me.” 
 
 The doctor, Rehm said, was “receptive” to the request. “I think over a period of time he or she would provide me, if I were really sick, with the necessary means,” she said. 
 
 Rehm can’t fathom being in the “position where someone has to take care of me. God forbid I should have a stroke, I want to be left at home so I can manage to end my own life somehow. That’s how strongly I believe.” 
 
 Like John, she is donating her body to GW medical school. Once students finish learning from her remains, her family will take her ashes to the family’s farm in Pennsylvania, spreading them near the same hickory tree that shades John’s ashes. 
 
 Rehm can vividly see her last moments. She is in her bed, at her home, unafraid. 
 
 “My family, my dearest friends would be with me holding my hand,” she said. “I would have them all around me. And I would go to sleep.”
– Betsy Davis spent the last years of her life losing control of her body as her illness worsened—but she could still control how she died, and she "turned her departure into a work of art," friend and cinematographer Niels Alpert says of the California artist's death. The 41-year-old, who in 2013 was diagnosed with ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease, threw a party for more than 30 friends and family that lasted through the weekend before her doctor-assisted suicide late last month, People reports. Davis, a painter and performance artist who invited guests from across the country to what she called a "rebirth," died under the state's physician-assisted suicide law, which took effect on June 9. "You're all very brave for sending me off on my journey," she wrote in her invitation, which warned guests that "emotional stamina" would be required, the AP reports. "There are no rules," she wrote. "Wear what you want, speak your mind, dance, hop, chant, sing, pray, but do not cry in front of me. OK, one rule." After a weekend that included music, pizza, cocktails, individual chats with every guest, and a screening of favorite movie The Dance of Reality, most guests departed and Davis' bed was wheeled out to a hillside at sunset. Accompanied by her sister, her doctor, her massage therapist, and her caretaker, she took a lethal combination of drugs and died around four hours later. (Assisted suicide is legal in four other states and Canada, where the law won't cover American visitors.)