No one doubts Gardner will get the necessary signatures. And anyone with a political memory going back to 1991 expects the fight for votes to be fierce. The ’91 contest over a referendum similar to Gardner’s was, at the time, the most expensive ballot campaign in the state’s history. Polls showed the law about to pass, but in the final weeks a barrage of television advertisements helped to defeat it. In one ad, a healthy-looking man with a rural twang to his speech recounted that four years earlier doctors told him he had two weeks to live; if a death-with-dignity law existed back then, he said, he might have chosen a quick death. In another ad, a hospice nurse warned: “Those who can’t afford health care and insurance could be pressured to have their lives ended. It could become the ultimate in discrimination.”

Gardner was governor during that battle, but, bafflingly to him, he can recall nothing about it. “I was completely oblivious to it,” he told me. “I couldn’t have been, but it’s as if it never happened.” Nothing compelled him, as governor, to take a public position, and it appeared that he kept silent, yet this didn’t explain the void in his memory. His Parkinson’s does frequently rob him of short-term recall and may deplete his long-term recollections, but this particular and perfect blank was an improbable symptom. Was it possible that he was completely oblivious at the time? The opening of his speech, to the union leaders and tonight at the cocktail party, offered a way of understanding this strange emptiness in his mind. “I was on a roll,” he told his audiences about the years before his illness. “I was on the fast track. The world was good. I thought I was indestructible.” Perhaps, to an extreme degree, this athletic and powerful man hadn’t wished to hear, to admit, that anything else was possible.

“But then,” he went on with his speech, “I lost control of my life.” He saw his campaign not only as a way to give his life purpose but as a mission of morality, a final gesture in a career of public service, a career he traced back to his early 20s, to coaching a community football team for kids in one of Seattle’s poorest neighborhoods. In 2003 he was honored for this work of half a century ago; the trophy, with a bronze bust of Jimi Hendrix above the words “Jimi Hendrix Foundation Humanitarian Award” and “Inspiring Our Youth,” sits in the basement of Gardner’s house on Vashon Island.

Hendrix, as a young teenager, was on the team, Gardner told me, and somehow the foundation discovered this. “He had a forerunner of his famous Afro, and he didn’t have an athletic bone in his body,” Gardner said. Gardner wanted to cut him, but the other kids asked the coach to keep him on, and during the season, when Hendrix missed a series of practices, Gardner went to his house. He found the utilities shut off and the boy upstairs in his darkened room fingering chords on a broom. Gardner persuaded him to return to the team and, as he remembered it, sent him in at running back at the end of the season’s last game. “On the first play he got clobbered,” Gardner said. “So I called time and told the kids to block hard and the next time he gained eight yards.”

Soon after declaring that he’d lost control of his life, Gardner, standing in front of the 30 cocktail-party guests, lost control of his speech. He gazed out at his audience, out at the mayor of Everett and at the editor of the Everett newspaper. His eyes weren’t leprechaunlike or hard-set, but soft and scared, bewildered. He couldn’t remember what he meant to say, and several seconds went by before he recovered. “This law is the moral thing to do. No one knows better than ourselves when we’re ready to go.”

He paused again, eyes now in full panic, Parkinson’s ravaging the paths of recall. At his side sat a white-haired woman, Arline Hinckley, from Compassion and Choices, who accompanied him to all his presentations to answer questions — about the specifics of the statute or statistics from Oregon — that were beyond him, but also to prompt him when he stopped, disoriented, in the middle of his speech, which wasn’t written out; to read his speech wouldn’t have fit his concept of who he was. At the meeting with union leaders two days earlier, he asked her several times, “Give me a word,” and she said, “safeguards,” and later, “dignity,” to stir his brain to produce his next sentences. But tonight he wasn’t using her in this way, perhaps because she, too, didn’t fit his concept.

He found words at last. “I wish we could do a more liberal law, but we’re going to pattern it after the Oregon law because it passed. We’re not going to go farther than that now.” Another protracted silence. “My goal is to lessen the pain of dying.”