Corinne Gregory Sharpe always had a strong relationship with her parents, Eva and Druse Neumann. “We all were close and tight-knit,” the private professional chef from Port Ludlow, Washington, says. But in 2021, she helped both of them end their own lives with medical aid in dying — a journey she calls a “painful paradox.”

Now, four years after their deaths, the 61-year-old is opening up exclusively to PEOPLE about their last moments together and why she advocated for them to die on their own terms.

For years, Corinne’s parents lived in Long Beach, California. Eva worked as an office manager for a Toyota dealership while Druse worked for a commercial electrical supply company. After retiring, they moved to Washington to be closer to family.

Despite maintaining an active lifestyle, Eva, 92, had a long history of heart health issues, including suffering a heart attack and undergoing surgery for a stent. In May 2018, she was diagnosed with aortic stenosis, a condition where the aortic valve, which controls blood flow from the heart to the body, becomes narrowed or obstructed. With her medical history, Eva’s prognosis wasn’t great.

After months of processing her diagnosis, she finally shared the news with her daughter.

“She sat me down in a restaurant and it sort of felt like a mom sitting the daughter down to tell her that Santa isn’t real. But instead she told me something that was terribly real,” Corinne recalls. “The doctors basically gave her 18 months, maybe two years to live without a pretty invasive surgery.”

Corinne remembers her mom saying she didn’t really want to do it. “And even if she had the procedure, there was no guarantee that she was gonna live any longer,” says. “So her attitude was sort of like, well, let’s just kind of let things go as they go.”

For Druse and Corinne, it was hard to accept that Eva’s body wouldn’t tolerate the invasive surgery, and not know what would come next. “The reality is, we never know how much time we have,” Corinne admits. “And to have somebody put a deadline on it, even if it’s hypothetical, it’s a tough reality. So you just deal with it and try to make the best of every day, which she certainly did.”

Moving forward, Eva tried to live her life as normally as possible, and her health declined only slightly. However, things took a turn for the worse in April 2021 when she had a bad fall that landed her in the hospital. Eva had gotten up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom. On her way there, she stumbled in the dark, fell over the coffee table, and hit her head on the sharp corner of a bookcase. Corinne says her dad called her in “complete panic” and she rushed to meet her parents at the emergency room.

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The fall took a major toll on Eva and left her hospitalized for three days and in rehab for 10 days. And to make matters worse, Druse, 95, started experiencing stroke-like symptoms just a week after his wife’s accident.

“I get a phone call from my dad and he is slurring his words and half incoherent. It seemed like he may have had a stroke,” recalls Corinne, who notes Druse’s history of atrial fibrillation (aFib) and transient ischemic attacks (TIAs), or mini-strokes. “So we went back to the hospital, they did all sorts of tests and determined yep, that’s probably what happened. And they decided to keep him there.”

“So now I have two parents in medical care,” she adds.

Eva and Druse ended up at the same rehab facility to recover. But Corinne admits that while there, they were “losing their will to live” so she took them back home. With the damage from Eva’s fall and her aortic stenosis, Eva’s physician told Corinne that she should consider at-home hospice for her mother.

“My first reaction was, you gotta be kidding me,” she says. “This is a woman who has what appears to be so much life in her and so much sparkle. So having them say you might want to consider hospice, which generally means six months or less left to live, was a complete shock to me.”

“But it started to make sense… the doctors at this point are understanding quality of life. I mean, it was okay, but it wasn’t really living.”

As she started to consider the doctor’s recommendations, one thing that impressed Corinne was that her mother was never afraid of death. So, as Eva entered hospice in early June 2021, she decided that she wanted to pursue medical aid in dying (MAID).

She had the option available to her through Washington’s Death with Dignity Act, which went into effect in 2008. The law allows state residents with terminal illnesses to end their lives with lethal medication — without supervision of their medical team. It’s different from euthanasia because the patients themselves administer prescribed drugs to end their lives, rather than a doctor.

Meanwhile, Eva’s decision to die left Druse distraught. “I had a very interesting, serious heart-to-heart conversation with him one evening after my mom had gone to bed,” Corinne shares. “And he was just panicked like, ‘What happens to me if she goes first?’ That’s always been a concern of his. He couldn’t see a scenario where he would want to continue if mom was gone.”

Druse ultimately let his daughter know that although he recovered from the stroke, he wanted to choose MAID, if eligible, and end his life alongside Eva.

“He’s always been afraid of dying. But I think he was more afraid of being left alone,” she explains. “He was like, ‘Well, if she’s gonna go and I have the option to go at the same time, then I’m getting on that horse.’ So I was like, look, we’ll figure something out.”

From that point, Corinne was constantly on the phone, speaking to hospice coordinators and doctors trying to get her dad qualified for hospice and MAID. She admits it was “surreal” to be essentially advocating for her own father’s death. By mid-June, Druse was successfully qualified based on his history of mini-strokes.

Corinne says it was “a race” to get her dad qualified, and the justification from doctors came down to the strong possibility of her father suffering a stroke that wouldn’t kill him, but would leave him incapacitated.

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With both parents now set to move forward with MAID, Corinne began to realize she would be losing both of her parents. “This is, in some ways, the ultimate painful paradox because the last thing you want to do is see your mom go, but yet here you are, helping your mom go,” she says. “It’s tough.”

Corinne decided to spend the last few weeks of her parents’ lives enjoying as much quality time as she could. She would host special family dinners for them, making them their favorite meals, drinking champagne and sharing childhood stories as a way to “repay my parents for everything they’d done for me.”

The experience was bittersweet. Corinne even recalls the moment she received the lethal medication — which she calls the “cocktail” — from the pharmacy.

“On July 27th, the day before my mother’s cbirthday, there was a knock on the door. This gentleman from the pharmacy comes and has two white packages. The top is stapled shut. One has my mom’s name on it, one has my dad’s name on it. So I was now the custodian of the deadly powder,” she says. “It was the weirdest thing. And I said, ‘This might sound really weird, but can I give you a hug and take your picture?’ And he said, ‘Sure, no problem.’ ”

“It was such a poignant moment, like, wait a minute, I now have in my possession ‘the thing.’ I ended up putting both packages up on a shelf in my closet,” she says, joking that “I’ve got this time bomb in my closet.”

Corinne then had a few conversations with her parents about picking the perfect “death date”, joking about not ruining any upcoming holidays or birthdays. “That’s just our family…you’ll know we’re really dead if we’re not laughing,” Corinne quips.

“So I said, ‘Oh, I’ve got this really ridiculous idea. This is so wicked. Friday the 13th is coming up, let’s do it then … I’m just kidding!’ And my mom looks at me and says, ‘Okay, I could do that,’ ” she recalls. “So we’re having this kind of joking conversation and, you know, the realization is that whatever date you’re gonna pick, it’s gonna ruin that date for the rest of your life. So what difference does it make?”

So, Eva and Druse decided on Friday, August 13, 2021.

The night before, Corinne hosted an intimate dinner for her parents. “We called it the Last Happy Hour instead of the Last Supper,” she says. “I made my dad’s favorite appetizers, and we sat around and had our glasses of wine and my dad went to bed. My mom and I sat around on the deck and then she crawled into her bed. And I asked if I could lay down and sleep with her for a little bit…It was perfect.”

On the morning of their deaths, Corinne and her husband were at Eva and Druse’s home by their sides. They were also joined by two counselors from nonprofit End of Life Washington, who guided the family throughout the process and provided them with support.

“The counselors prepared the cocktail, we sat around and shared some private moments together. They got to sit in their own bed and hold hands with each other and talk before they were able to take the meds,” she recalls. “We put music on and they took the cocktail. Then we poured a glass of wine and we had a final toast. About 10 minutes after they drank it, they went to sleep.”

“From there, the process can take hours. But in my parents’ case, they were gone within the hour,” she continues. “Our music played and we sat there and kept my parents company. And every once in a while the counselors would come back and check them. At about 11:30 a.m., they figured to the best of their ability that they were gone. And it’s basically up to the hospice nurse to come by and give the final pronouncement, which she did about noon.”