diluted the pills to provide a drinkable mixture. She drank it and was dead the next morning. “The primary project in her life was to be independent,” Mr. Delury said, and so she exercised that independence one last time on July 4. She was, he said, a “considerate hero”—that is, an elderly person “who, facing serious illness, says, ‘This money would be better spent elsewhere.’ ” The story is actually not quite so simple or straightforward. Delury was not as sympathetic a figure as many at first supposed,