In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss(21)

No matter how I fight this, at every sentence, I also see that Brian’s world is about to get very small. One of his great pleasures is overdoing it with the groceries, involving several stops at little markets, cheese shops, the East Haven lady who makes her own Thai BBQ sauce and fries up a bag of plantains for him while he waits. At our old house, we had a refrigerator just for condiments. Even now, my older daughter always says, How can you be only two people and never have an empty fridge? That’s Brian, I say, buyer of burrata, soppressata, Meyer lemons, white peaches, Benton’s ham.

On the way home from the neurologist, who has reminded us to call NeuroAging and to come see her again sometime but no hurry, I offer to drive to Liuzzi’s (a great Italian deli) and he says no. I am as disappointed and stunned as if I’d offered him a blow job on a Sunday night and he’d said he’d rather watch some Scottish mystery.

We get home and we cry for an hour, in each other’s arms. We agree not to do much talking for twenty-four hours. We go out for sushi at our favorite restaurant and are waited on by our favorite waiter, a Japanese man with a strong Japanese accent, whose conversational patter is like that of a Midwestern waitress: “How you folks doin’? Hot enough for you? C’mon, let’s get you seated right here. Comfy? Has the summer been good?”

We love Hari, and we have a great, surreal couple of hours.



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The weekend seems vast. I don’t plan to work. We cancel a visit with friends. It’s just us and I’ve let my grown children know that “we’re processing,” which they understand correctly to mean: Give us a few days. (Later, they will each reveal to me the changes that they had noticed in Brian—the slips in memory, the repetitions—and their loving, generous dismissal of those changes.) We go out to buy stationery—Goodbye, I love you stationery, so that he can write little notes to my kids and our grandchildren for after he’s gone, because he has already made up his mind to end his life. (I’d rather die on my feet than live on my knees, he says and will say again. He has already told me to figure out how.) He’ll also write cards to his mother and four siblings, but by the time he does that, I have to prod him.

I point out the elegant box of notecards with dragonflies. He points out a box with a porch overlooking a lake and four dogs sitting cutely on the Adirondack chairs. I point out that we don’t have dogs. (We don’t want dogs. I am already hearing people talk about dogs. Even my beloved Wayne suggests that maybe we’d want a dog now. I think I yelled that I did not want a fucking dog, that I have a husband with Alzheimer’s, three children, and four granddaughters, and I didn’t need another goddamn mammal to look after. I think that’s what I said. Wayne nodded. “No dog, then.”)

In the Hallmark card section, Brian and I fall into each other’s arms and cry very hard for a couple of minutes. No one gives us a second glance. I point out a box of cards with the pen-and-ink drawing of a lighthouse. Brian nods and shows me the box next to it, with Snoopy on top of his red doghouse, typing furiously on a glittering typewriter. These, he says; these’ll make ’em smile. Then we cry again, as if we are in our own bedroom, and again there is not even a concerned or disapproving glance. I tell him that he is amazing and my hero. On line, I see a bunch of profane potholders. I show him the one that says, Fuck this shit, and he laughs out loud.

We get mango smoothies next door, from a sulky girl who has clearly never ever made one, and we both feel, in this moment, that this shabby little plaza, with the Hallmark store right next to the empty Edible Arrangements store, is our new favorite place.



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Our whole weekend is crying and talking and binge-watching TV at night. We’re not people with conventional moral compasses, but we don’t let ourselves binge-watch during the day. We do things: We weed, we buy cute dresses at the outlets for all four granddaughters, we go to a movie in the late afternoon, and usually, right after weeping in each other’s arms, we fall into deep naps, as if clubbed. We wake up and discuss the garden, or the news, or the summer’s end—we talk about Stony Creek Market’s Pizza Nights coming to an end at Labor Day and not about Brian’s decline. We talk about the grandchildren, who use him and abuse him as loved granddaughters do, braiding his hair, flinging themselves on his soft stomach, pretending to be tiny football players, trying to get past him with the swim move (a pass-rushing technique used by defensive linemen, is what I understand), with which the three oldest are quite familiar. Before we fall asleep, Brian muses aloud about his wish to control his death and how I will arrange that for him. He’d made up his mind after forty-eight hours and never wavered. We cried and I agreed and he said to me, You go research it. You’re so good at that stuff—which meant that while I was looking up Exit International and the Hemlock Society and websites that would sell you both the plastic turkey bag and the helium machine for your own painless (they kept saying) DIY suffocation, I was also researching how to get sodium pentobarbital—fifteen or twenty grams, which is a ton—on the dark web. I was discovering the limits of my friends with medical degrees and the possibilities of carbon monoxide poisoning, which you can do in your car in your garage, but it’s become more iffy since 1975, when the car industry adjusted the CO emissions and then applied catalytic converters. Also, we don’t have a garage.