Maybe it would all have been sort of strangely exhilarating if he had been someone I didn’t know or care about; or if he had been a member of the writing community with whom I felt competitive or jealous. But when you’ve sat by the river with a man and listened to him grieve the end of his marriage, it’s ever so slightly harder to get off on his ruin.

Normally, I enjoy a little group Schadenfreude as much as the next narcissist — I keep remembering the line of an old poem by Charles Bukowski that ended, “Thank God it’s you baby, and not me.” But a picture keeps coming up on the screen in my mind, of him with his family outdoors in the winter, the older children making angels with their bodies in the snow. I tried to cheer him up that day by the river, with assurances that all was not lost — he still had these beautiful daughters. Retrospectively — if the allegations are true — I must have seemed like Hayley Mills trying to cheer up Robert Maxwell over a bounced check notice from the bank.

Cottonwood fluffs flocked upward through the sunbeams as if hearing a call, and children ran around the edge of the river like little bankers, gathering stones and pebbles, grasses and twigs. He had to have been in a chronic state of dread by then. The jungle drums must have been beating loudly as we sat in the sun. I remember learning that in Sweden they call 4 a.m. the hour of the black dogs, for those who are awake in the dark, and it must have been the hour of the black dogs most of the time for Michael. If the allegations against him are true, his visible life was secretly one of utter ruin. And yet there is all that good he did for all those poor women and children, in all those benighted households that had no voice except for his. Certainly there are times when I could feed off a story like this — hero to goat, and oh how the mighty have fallen — I just normally love that kind of thing, because I participate in the human condition. But I sat with Michael beside the river that day, and now I’m so troubled. I am most troubled by all of my feelings of disgust toward him. He is still an innocent man. Maybe he was the human condition in its gravest perspective, but most of his dark stuff is present to a greater or lesser degree in me, too. I wish I were more like Jesus more of the time, but I’m not. I am more often more like the poem by Carl Sandburg on the wilderness within; that deep down inside me there is a wolf, and there is a lion, too. And if there wasn’t, would you want to read the stuff I write?

In Idaho this year, the moon rose so full and burned so yellow that it colored the sky green between itself and the snow-capped mountains. This was where I recently started to hear that all sorts of posthumous tributes to Michael were going to be rescinded, this was when I began to feel most troubled. Everyone suddenly seemed to feel, “Well, yeah. We don’t dedicate to, bestow upon, endow in the name of,” a man said to do what Michael has been accused of. What about all the good he did, too? Has someone without my knowing it pushed the great delete key on his good works, literary and political? God, the mob reaction is terrifying, like the crowds in Julius Caesar roaring their approval for Marc Antony one minute, then just as loudly for Brutus. But this mob is made up of people like me, people who write, media types, and I do not know many of them who are in any position to judge Michael Dorris.

Don’t even get me started on the double lives of writers. You want to hear some really bad shit about damage to spouses and children? You want stories of cruelty, infidelity, child abuse and neglect? I mean, thank you for stopping by, but bore me later — bore me three weeks from now. Start with me, with nice sober Christian princess me, you’ve got enough material for a nice long magazine article or two.

Now, if what Michael is charged with doing to his kids is true, it’s objectively — whatever that means — worse than anything I’ve done. It’s experiences they’ll never recover from, that burden them with stuff they had the right not to be burdened with. They had the right to expect their dad to protect them from evil, and instead, he may have perpetrated it against them. But he was my friend, and he was bleeding to death: I think back to the day by the river, and I remember Alan Arkin in the movie version of “Catch 22,” hearing the frantic voice over the intercom in his bomber.

“Help him,” the voice says.

“Help who?”

“Help the bombardier.”

“I AM the bombardier.”

“Then help him.”

And each time this conversation starts up again, we find Arkin getting closer and closer to discovering the extent of the tail gunner’s wounds. First he finds that it is in fact the tail gunner who needs help, and then that the man has a horrible leg wound. Arkin bandages it with a real sense of tenderness and purpose, but when he is done, he notices a tiny trickle of blood at the top of the soldier’s flak suit. You know even before he does that it’s going to be bad. It’s going to make the leg wound look like child’s play. And of course when he finally unzips the flak suit, 20 pounds of viscera pour out.

No one knew to unzip Michael’s flak suit. No one knew how badly he was injured, damaged. But now that stuff is spilling out, I see around me — and sometimes in me — a mesmerized and almost pornographic response. Such disgusted rejection! And I want to find less poisoned ground to stand on.

Elie Wiesel says there are some events so heinous that the only appropriate response is to stand before them in silence. But this one is so hard to stop talking about. It’s so — juicy. I mean, thank GOD it’s you baby and not me. But in this imperfect world, we only know a small part, and knowing that to be true, it ought to leave room for mercy and it ought to leave room for humility, and I would have to say that I am only now beginning to feel angstrom units of either. I’ve been having a very noisy judgmental opinion for just about everyone involved, except for all those little children making angels in the snow.

This is one thing I know for sure: Feeling contempt and judgment closes the door on my being able to notice the tendrils or tiny green shoots of redemption or grace that would almost certainly spring up out of this man’s sorrow. I don’t know how that will happen, but it will, it could, it may. If all the answers were in the world, we wouldn’t need to have sought God. If we hadn’t — if you ask me — we would be fucked unto the very Lord. Because then we would be at each other’s mercy.

Maybe Michael just ran out of time. I keep thinking that if he’d lived, he would have found a way to rectify some of the damage he’s said to have done in the world. But I don’t think he believed in God; most of my friends don’t. Or rather they seem to feel that if they can’t believe in a God who finds you parking spaces, what’s the point?

Here’s what I think the point is: that there’s no sin too grave to be forgiven. Or there’s only one, at least according to old Uncle Jesus. It is to have bad intentions, and refuse to have them lifted. It is to have a total resistance to love, it is to come in kicking and shouting, “Screw you! I’m innocent, I’m fine.” A manic-depressive Irishman I know put it, “The only unforgivable sin is to avoid God until you’re in good enough shape to fool him.”

But I don’t believe Michael had bad intentions — I don’t think he was as depraved, say, as the Sean Penn character in “Dead Man Walking,” who got lucky and did not run out of time. Lots of people find their way out of all that darkness of double lives. I know a lot of drunks and addicts who came into recovery after a lifetime of bad behavior, all self-justification and self-contempt. Believe me, no one came in on the wings of victory. A lot of people like me came in with not much left of us but buttons and hair, believing that everyone would always hold the bad things we’d done against us. I think this must have been how Michael felt. But all the sober drunks and clean addicts and ex-hookers who were there to greet me just said, No heroes here, and no demons; just us people. Just us people who are accepted exactly the way we are, and the one fly in the ointment is that you’ll need to be sober to believe it. In the meantime, we welcome you and have no taste for any excuses you may have, nor any patience for bad words said against you.

I’m almost sure that someday we are all going to move into compassion for Michael, as soon as we are done with all this bullshit. I think we will move into a place where we stand silent before this, humbled, saddened, because lives have been lost, the lives of children, some grown. I’m thinking that I may move toward that place now, and wait for the trunks and satchels to arrive. I know that over and over terrible stories change into something beautiful. A little time must pass. Just yesterday up here, for instance, looking at one mountain peak in daylight, I saw something very masculine, American, a craggy snow-covered peak. Hillsides swelled beneath it like a lion’s claw ball, but later, in the moonlight that turned the sky so green, I no longer saw it dimensionally, no longer saw its muscles. I saw instead a pristine mountain, delicate and feminine as Fuji, or a deer.

From your perspective, what are the ramifications of this decision? Smith: I think this decision is great news for patients. We are about to move into a very detailed discussion of the whole issue of end-of-life care. We have been so focused on whether or not doctors should be legally allowed to kill patients that we have ignored the fact that rather than having to choose between an agonizing death and assisted suicide, doctors and hospices and other professionals can give tremendous care and comfort to a patient. A lot of people don’t know that there is such a thing as a board-certified pain control specialist, people who are very advanced in their ability to treat pain.

The problem is that the medical profession is not doing a good enough job. Not enough doctors are trained in pain control. We’ve got HMOs that are putting tremendous financial pressure on doctors to restrict care. The wrong people are making health-care decisions — health insurance executives. We’ve got to get doctors to take good care of their patients.

Do you think the media has done a fair job covering this debate? Smith: The media has been so caught up in the sensationalism of Kevorkian that they’ve missed a big part of the story — pain management — which I think now will come to the forefront. Brooke: The one thing that has bothered me about the coverage is that every newscast about the decision led with the response of Jack Kevorkian’s attorney. Really, what we are proposing would provide regulation and protocols established in law, rather than being left to an individual physician, however well-meaning. Without these laws, that leaves the decision up to the paternalism of one physician, with no review, which greatly increases the risk for abuse. On Friday, The New York Times described the decision as “a tentative first step, rather than a definitive final ruling.” Do you agree? Smith: This decision is by no means “a tentative first step.” It is the beginning of the end of the euthanasia movement. This is the first blow against euthanasia, because there is no constitutional right to be killed by a doctor. Already I’m noticing a positive change in the way the matter is being discussed. I noticed in the New York Times and other papers that there is a lot more talk of the positive alternatives, and even Dr. [Timothy] Quill [one of the plaintiffs in New York] said we have to focus more on the alternatives. This is not a minor case. It is a very important and historic case. Brooke: I agree completely with the New York Times’ summation. It’s not an ending but a new beginning of the debate on this issue. I think that in the past, state legislators have been reluctant to deal with the issue at all, because it was perceived as a “no-win” issue for them to take a position on. Now the level of the debate has been raised by the Supreme Court, which basically said this matter should be adjudicated by the states. Will this decision drive doctors who are in favor of assisted suicide — Jack Kevorkian being the most prominent example — underground? Smith: First of all, Kevorkian is not a doctor — his license was taken away. Hopefully now, instead of killing patients, doctors will realize that they have to take care of patients. Do you realize that only five medical schools out of about 126 have mandatory end-of-life medical training in pain management? We need to call on doctors to start doing more residencies in hospices. It seems to me that a doctor who says, “The only thing I can do to help a patient is to kill that patient” needs to send that patient to a better doctor. Brooke: Any physician who assists a patient in death will continue to be in the position of being a closet felon and risking their career. I don’t foresee anyone being any more underground than they already are. This decision simply maintains the status quo. Are there any situations where physician-assisted suicide should be allowed? Smith: No. If you talk to the really well-trained end-of-life doctors, they say it is not necessary. They tell me that there is always something that can be done to alleviate suffering. I’m a hospice volunteer, and I notice that when people know they are cared for, that they are not going to be abandoned, then they reach a level of acceptance. It’s just remarkable how people respond to being loved and cared for in the dying process. Hospice is about life. Euthanasia is about death. Are there any situations when physician-assisted suicide should be outlawed? What are they? Brooke: Of course there are situations where assisted suicide should not be permitted. I think those who are in support of this issue draw it very narrowly. Assisted suicide should only be available as an option for people who are in the dying process, who are competent to make a decision for themselves and who are subject to a number of safeguards, such as receiving more than one opinion by a doctor on their diagnosis. They should also be offered every other option of hospice and palliative care available. There also should be waiting periods to make sure the patient’s decision is not an impulsive one. Is it difficult to be a clergy member advocating the right to die? Brooke: I think there is much more support with the religious community and among the clergy than you would guess — even within the Catholic church, where the hierarchy has been strongly opposed but the clergy is just about as split as among Protestants. I’m from the progressive wing of Protestantism and I would say that the folk who agree with me on issues of social justice and peace, by and large, would agree with me on this.

With his simultaneous acknowledgment of the impossibility of reconciling oneself to an untimely death and his insistence that remembering is a necessary and valuable project, Schama aptly described the mood of the service as a whole. Dorris’ friends adopted a tone that might be termed celebratorily mournful, capturing the full weight of Dorris’ absence by talking about the pleasure they had taken in his presence.

Even as they remembered their friend, the speakers challenged — in some cases subtly and in others more explicitly — the wave of bad press and scandal that followed Dorris’ suicide. It’s almost certainly true that one memorial service is very much like another. Grief may be always original, but the words we use to express it are not. But this service seemed different, as much a reaffirmation of Dorris and of his friends’ faith in him as it was a memorial.

The Michael Dorris who emerged from his friends’ recollections was, unsurprisingly, a complicated figure. A committed activist and a serious novelist whose early work, in particular, was well-received critically, Dorris was also a man obsessed with the business of buying and selling books. Bill Shinker, his publisher at HarperCollins, described Dorris as “a dream author” who could, nevertheless, be “maddening as hell to work with.” For Shinker, Dorris was at once a “real operator,” a man who served as his own agent, publicist and marketing director, and someone who retained “a naive, even childlike quality about him” long after he had become famous.

More tellingly, the speakers at the service stressed Dorris’ thirst for human contact, his appetite for conversation and exchange. They described a man who needed people, perhaps, too much. Kate Wimmer, a producer at ABC’s “20/20″ who met Dorris while producing a segment on fetal alcohol syndrome (the subject of Dorris’ book “The Broken Cord”), said of him, “He needed talk the way others of us need food or need air.” What Wimmer left unspoken was the question, “What happens to someone who needs talk when the person he most wants to talk to leaves him?” Schama answered that question: “I think in the end he could not imagine a life without the woman he loved best of all.” Dorris’ wife, Louise Erdrich, left him almost a year before the suicide and had custody of their children.

Schama, the evening’s most eloquent and moving speaker, spoke most explicitly to the responsibility he felt for Dorris’ decision. “I curse my sluggish obtuseness, my cowardly laziness,” he said. While Schama described Dorris as a man of “incredible douceur,” he did not shy from the torment that must have racked Dorris at the end of his life. In those last months, Schama said simply, Dorris “was certainly in deep water.”

Erdrich did not attend the service, but a letter from her was read. In it she wrote of her attempts to figure out how to speak to “our children” about their father’s death, and suggested that each time the story was told it came out differently. “His death,” she wrote, “leaves us gasping.”

Hovering over the service, of course, was the specter of the barrage of negative stories that filled the pages of the national press in the weeks after Dorris’ suicide, stories that included allegations of child abuse, revelations about Erdrich’s decision to end their marriage and rumors about other scandals in Dorris’ past. ( Salon ran a story about these charges and rumors.) If Dorris’ suicide was, as some have suggested, an attempt to spare his family the ordeal of public examination, it obviously failed. But those who spoke on Tuesday were resolute in their insistence that recent press accounts offered only a reductionist and distorted picture of their friend’s life. Schama was visibly upset at the idea that Dorris, whom he described as “trying to find the good or at least the saving complexity” in things others had long since abandoned, should have “his innocence called into question.” Erdrich, meanwhile, suggested simply that Dorris’ existence added up to “much more than the notoriety and confusion of the last few months.”

The strongest attack on the media came from Bob Edwards, a reporter for National Public Radio who befriended Dorris after meeting him on an early book tour (curiously enough, Edwards and Dorris had also gone to the same high school). “In the last month, there have been more positive words printed about Timothy McVeigh than about Michael Dorris,” Edwards said. He labeled the recent stories “fiction,” while blasting “the media buzzards and the lawyer buzzards” who were circling over Dorris’ grave. As a counter to “the man the revisionists have invented,” he offered a vivid picture of a man invested in the minutiae of the everyday, a man dedicated to his family, a man who “loved everything about being a writer.”

One might say that Dorris’ suicide stands as mute testimony to the fact that the picture was more complicated than that. But one suspects that enough has been written about Dorris’ shadow side. On this day, for his friends, it was a time for remembering something different.

It’s not a question I’d given endless thought, but like most people I know I pretty much assumed that Dr. Jack Kevorkian was, well, right. That is, though Doctor K seems like a certifiable loon, it seemed logical to me that people nearing the end of their lives should be able to choose to kill themselves. More, it seemed logical that they should. Now I’m not so sure.

One of the first stories in Peck’s book concerns a young Air Force sergeant with a brain tumor whom Peck treated 30 years ago in his early days as a military doctor. Tony slipped into a coma, breathing through a respirator. He was kept “alive” only by massive doses of adrenaline, but he was clearly dying: “What disturbed me more than anything was the copious amount of frothy light brown liquid that had begun to ooze out along the edges of his tracheotomy. It seemed to me that Tony’s body had clearly begun to rot.”

So, disobeying a direct order from the Army doctor above him, Peck clamped the IV tube supplying Tony’s body with drugs, and 10 minutes later Tony was dead. Peck defends such decisions squarely; he is no advocate of “heroic measures,” and in the past few decades most other doctors have joined him — pulling the plug is no longer unusual practice in most cases. Peck and his wife have living wills asking that medical technology not be used to prolong his life “at the expense of our humanity by maintaining us as ‘vegetables.’”

So he is not in any way an absolutist, nor is he a sadist — the next chapter of his book is devoted to physical pain, and it reads like a script and a screed. The script is for morphine, Demerol, codeine. The screed is against the many doctors and hospitals that dole them out in stingy, inadequate doses and on inflexible timetables that leave patients shivering in fear. Everyone should read this section, whatever their interest in questions like euthanasia; it is a valuable user’s guide to the hospital and its pharmacy.

Left to their own devices, with a handy pump that allows them to deliver their own dose of morphine, Peck says patients often use less of the drugs than a doctor would supply; even if they use more, the fear of addiction is insufficient cause to deny them relief from pain. In fact, he writes, it is “torture,” “malpractice” and “a crime.” “If I ever encountered a patient suffering serious chronic pain for which there was no hope of relief, I would consider euthanasia — physician-assisted suicide — a valid option,” says Peck. But that justification is “purely theoretical for me” since “I’ve never actually encountered such a patient.”

So far, so good — all right-minded people can agree. But why does Peck go on to say that sometimes he hopes for a lingering death? His answer lies in the realms of theology and psychology, and in some sense it is aimed at those Americans who feel they have souls — something inside them connected to a larger reality. Which, as he points out, is the vast majority of this professed religious society — even a great number of those who would never go to a church buy books about caring for their souls. But as he also points out, we simultaneously live in an essentially secular society, where even most of those who identify themselves as religious are in fact good materialists. Peck thinks euthanasia may be the best issue to shake that secularism a bit — to make the culture think seriously about something beyond convenience and comfort.

To take seriously the notion that we are creations of God, he points out, imposes certain limits on us. “This is not solely my life to do with as I see fit. To kill myself is to deny God, to deny Her timing and right to my life,” he writes. Peck argues not that we can’t kill ourselves — free will gives us every opportunity to do so — but that we shouldn’t.

But why on earth not? Is there any really convincing reason, one that might infect even a non-religious person with doubt? Peck doesn’t take the intuitive (and hideous) Protestant position that dying is one more trial that God throws at you and you should show your toughness by dealing with it bravely. No, his argument is considerably weirder. For Peck, dying is, well, educational. In fact, it’s “the opportunity of a lifetime for learning and soul development.”

This is not glib happytalk. All Peck’s books are pretty fierce, especially for therapeutic bestsellers. They are about relinquishing one’s illusions, about “doing the work of depression.” They are about giving up parts of ourselves: arrogance, unrealistic fantasies, a habit of sarcasm. This one in particular is about defeating the very ego that most of his psychological colleagues stoke and soothe. It’s about killing off parts of yourself before you die.

Peck says that the stages of dying that Elisabeth Kubler-Ross identified in her book “On Death and Dying” (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance) are the schema for any of these kinds of ego-death — in individuals, in marriages, even in national traumas like Vietnam. (Of Vietnam, he writes, “Only recently, 25 years after the fact, does it look as if we have done some portion of the work of that depression by learning to relinquish a shred of our arrogant desire to control the world and come to some modicum of humility in our international relations.”)

Of all the opportunities for denying the ego, for reaching the religious understanding that “ego is its own worst enemy,” none is so powerful as one’s death. Kenosis, which Peck describes as “the process of the self emptying itself of self,” is the exact opposite of a consumer understanding of the world, and so in this culture it is hard for most of us to engage in it short of extremity. But at its end is a kind of acceptance that he claims is beautiful to watch — and that many of us have had the privilege to see in those deaths we call “good.”

Why not simply plan your death so as to cut off the last few weeks of unpleasantness, by orchestrating your demise so as to make it neat? Because in two or three or four weeks at the end of your life, with your physical pain controlled by morphine, hopefully in your own home or a hospice, you might learn about “how to negotiate a middle path between control and total passivity, about how to welcome the responsible care of strangers, about how to be dependent once again … about how to trust and maybe even, out of existential suffering, at least a little bit about how to pray or talk with God.”

To me, that is a powerful idea — it is not even necessary to share Peck’s belief in some form of afterlife to feel its power. It accords with all that I intuit about the world: most crucially, that our survival as a species and our happiness as individuals demands that we mature beyond the mindless consumerism that we currently identify as “human nature.” A culture that begins to understand death in new ways would almost certainly begin to understand life in new ways, too.

Peck has not solved every issue about euthanasia. In fact, he’s not convinced me that it shouldn’t be a choice for those who don’t care about any of the questions he discusses. And there are cases (ironically, many of those addressed by Kevorkian) that do not fit his model: people who may linger helplessly but consciously on the edge of death for years or decades, which seems rather a long semester to learn these lessons. There are difficult economic questions, too, in a society that feels it can’t afford to provide decent basic health care for Americans with many potentially happy years ahead.

But I’ve never read anything that made me think more seriously about my own death and what it might involve, and for that I am very grateful. Death — God willing a long ways away — scares me a tiny bit less than it did before I picked up this book.