George Exoo considered taking his own life rather than facing up to 14 years in an Irish prison, he tells Denis Stauntonin Lewisburg, West Virginia
The service was held in a living room at the back of a rundown motel and the music came from a tinny CD player, but the mood was as festive as on Easter Sunday in a great cathedral yesterday morning when George Exoo returned to his tiny Unitarian congregation in Lewisburg after four months in prison.
There were just 10 of us, including Exoo and his friend Thomas McGurrin, and the service sometimes seemed more like a chat among friends as the congregants spoke of their joy at last Friday's decision to deny Ireland's request for their minister's extradition.
Wearing a blue blazer and khaki pants with a clerical collar and a burgundy shirt, Exoo read from the letters of Dietrich Boenhoffer, the German Lutheran theologian who was imprisoned and killed by the Nazis, before talking of his own experience in jail.
Wanted in Ireland for assisting a suicide five years ago, Exoo said he considered taking his own life rather than face a possible 14-year term in an Irish prison.
"I think the main concern was that I wasn't going to have any contact with anyone I knew. I was going to be all by myself in this foreign country and subject to God knows what kind of hatred and animosity," he tells me later, as we drive across the mountains of southern West Virginia, covered in forests of magnificent, autumnal reds and golds.
"That was my impression, that I was going to be there until I was 78 years old. And what would I do then when I got out? If I survived it."
Until Ireland withdraws its extradition request, Exoo could be arrested if he visits any of the 25 US states where assisted suicide is a crime, although he believes the FBI has more pressing tasks than chasing him around the country.
"I suppose I have to be a little careful," he says.
Exoo says he feels no animosity towards the Irish authorities who pursued him, but he also feels no regrets about helping Rosemary Toole to end her life in a Donnybrook apartment in 2002.
"Not at all," he says.
"But, you know what, if I had to do it all over again, I'd have said, Rosemary, you'll go buy yourself a damn airline ticket and you'll fly over here. We're going to do it over here. We're not going to do it over there."
Exoo insists that, among the dozens of people he has helped to die, Toole was the most thoroughly prepared and the most determined to succeed.
When I ask him if there is a danger that, after so many assisted suicides, the task comes too easily to him and with too little reflection, he demurs, "Most of the time, I tried to convince people to hang on unless they had a really strong case," he says.
"I never push anybody over the edge. Does it become easier? Of course it becomes easier. It's like writing a newspaper article. The first time, you might be nervous as hell and then the next time it gets easier and easier. Yes, it gets easier. But I really don't push people into doing this."
Far from abandoning his mission to assist those who want to hasten their own deaths, Exoo is thinking about setting up a hospice geared specifically towards assisted suicide, possibly in West Virginia, which has no law against it.
"What I'm really there for is to provide concrete pastoral services for people so if I created an institution where people could come legally and end their lives with a hastened death, people from Ireland could do that as well as people from Michigan and Saskatchewan to whatever the state is that I do it in," he says.