he Rhode Island medical examiner kept the body for just a few hours, long enough to inspect it externally and draw some blood. No autopsy was done, and the results of the blood tests would not be available for weeks.
      Cathy Bedard, Earley's hospice nurse, would later describe his passing as "a perfect death." In mid-December she had come to Earley and begged him not to kill himself. She pledged to keep him comfortable to the end. He declined the offer, but she believed he did think about it, and trusted her to carry through.
      Earley ended up receiving the very best in end-of-life care -- something that only a fraction of dying patients enjoy.
      Bedard had trouble sleeping during the three days that Earley was unconscious. After it was over, she said she was proud of the comfortable ending she had arranged for him. The drugs she gave him to reduce secretions worked exceptionally well. He did not "drown," as he had feared. Nor did he struggle or moan. He simply stopped breathing.
      No question, it was a peaceful death.
      But if Nöel Earley could return to tell of it, how would he assess this departure?
      During his last two weeks, he was an unhappy man; the mischief and passion were gone from his eyes, replaced by sadness, panic -- or the awful blankness of sedation.
      What was it like for him to lie there throughout that Monday, at least partially aware of the hubbub around him, but "commandeered" into unresponsiveness by sickness and drugs? Did he consider this "a good death"?
      Why didn't Earley kill himself? He said he had the drugs to do so, and three friends reported having seen a syringe and bottle of liquid in his apartment. Earley had originally said he planned to jab his thigh with the syringe, a simple procedure. In late December, he said he'd found out that he would need to get the needle into a vein; that would require considerable dexterity -- dexterity Earley had lost months before.
      Did he fail because of misinformation and miscalculation, which would not have occurred if physician-assisted suicide had been legal?
      Or did he really want to live, despite all he said?
      Reid Mendenhall said that Earley had asked him, as recently as two weeks before he died, whether Mendenhall would inject the drugs if he asked him to. That would not have been an assisted suicide but a direct killing, which could lead to murder charges. Mendenhall, who has two small children, said he couldn't take the risk. But he believes that Earley found someone else willing to do it. He doesn't know whether that person could not get time alone with Earley, or was never summoned.
      Despite his constricted and uncomfortable existence, did Earley find value in his last days? Did his dedication to his cause, ironically, push him to stay alive until he could no longer carry out his plan? Or did he fall prey to an innate survival instinct, which kept him from letting go?
      If physician-assisted suicide had been legal, and Earley could have killed himself with a doctor's guidance and his dearest friends at his side, would he have chosen that route, and preferred it? Or would the doctor's assistance somehow have pushed him too quickly into a death that, deep down, he did not want?
      Does Earley's experience show that physician-assisted suicide should be legal to spare people predicaments like his? Or does it show that no sane person wants to die?
      Or, perhaps, does it show nothing more than what happened to one particular individual in one particular set of circumstances?

alter Earley, the brother abused and unforgiven, had his day.
      It was a fiercely cold day, but still a soothing one for the small group that came to the Rehoboth Village Cemetery to weep and remember and put their struggles to rest.
      There was Steven Ames, who had expected to spend his old age sitting on a park bench with Nöel, as in the Simon and Garfunkel song. The Vietnam vet Reid Mendenhall and his wife, Beth, who together had been the mainstay of Nöel's care. Bob and Deb Zuck, who had been his "adopted family." Nöel's girlfriend, dark glasses covering her eyes, with her sister. Cathy Bedard and another nurse. Rita Senna, his tender caretaker. Marilyn Schairer, the Channel 6 reporter who had become a friend. Fran Ross, the old girlfriend who had found him "compelling."
      Nöel Earley had not wanted a funeral, but his brother arranged one anyway, saying that at least inside the Rebello Funeral Home he could keep the cameras away. One sensed the mourners' gratitude for this privacy.
      But at the gravesite, the media circus that Walter had feared never materialized. There was one still camera, one video camera, one reporter's notebook -- left blank by a pen that quickly froze. Walter Earley towered over the gathering, accompanied by his wife and his two handsome sons -- one of whom bore a striking resemblence to Uncle Nöel.
      A sprig of red carnations rested on the big pine "Halloween coffin."
      "Dear Lord," said the Rev. Carleen R. Gerber, "help us to take from Nöel's life some inspiration that will invigorate and rekindle our own lives. . . . Give us a portion of Nöel's rebel spirit that enables us to fight for what we believe in and to know the joy that awaits us at the close of a battle well waged. . . .
      "Help us to remember that Nöel has imprinted on our hearts some part of himself, and that we will be forever changed by knowing him."
      It was a dignified ceremony. Walter Earley agreed to be photographed; he looked solemn, perhaps even proud.
      That Saturday afternoon, Jan. 18, the mercury hovered at 0° Fahrenheit -- too cold to pour the concrete needed to complete the burial. The granite gravestone that Nöel Earley had ordered would be installed during spring's first thaw, bearing an epitaph as simple and charming as any of his best sound bites: