In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss(22)
As we are spreading out all these possibilities between us, we occasionally bump into an offer or a roadblock from a close friend. A dear friend offers her garage and I hug her and we cry, but she calls me a day later and says her spouse says no, too risky to help us. Brian’s dearest oldest friend, his fishing buddy since 1979, says to Brian, “If you think you don’t need to go right now, and you want to wait awhile, I can just shoot you myself, in a year or two, in a field.” Brian hugs him. One of his brothers makes the same offer, and when Brian declines and points out that his brother could go to jail, his brother shrugs. “I’d be fine in jail. I don’t go out much anyway.” I have never liked the man more.
I look up how it feels to drown (that’s all you have to type in; lots of people have first-person accounts about near-drowning, and they seem divided between peaceful brain fog as the white light shines brighter and clawing one’s terrified way through terrible suffocation) and how to drown. Someone had told me about a friend of his in her late seventies with inoperable cancer, who filled her pockets with rocks and walked into the Connecticut River, which was, my friend said, practically in their backyard. I thought about it. Maybe we would need a small boat, since no river ran through our yard. Maybe we would need a small boat? I started looking for one on Craigslist one evening. For the next few nights, I woke up to visions of Brian and me, bundled in winter jackets, late at night, dragging the rowboat to our neighbor’s dock and launching it. Would I be in it with him or just wave to him from shore? If I wasn’t with him, how would he remember to take a few Percocet from his pocket so he wouldn’t feel pain but would still be alert enough to tip himself out of the boat? It kept me awake nights and ruined my mornings, but I thought, Maybe he’ll see it differently? I thought, This is what crazy looks like, and I thought, Nevertheless. I mention that drowning is a way some people end their lives. Brian looks at me, hard. “Are you kidding me? It’s cold. No.”
I say that I think that whatever method he chooses, I would like to be with him. “If that’s okay,” I say, as if this is only a second date and I don’t want to be one of those clingy women who are always pushing to find out the status of the relationship. (This—dating—is not something I actually know about. I have barely been on a date, as such, since I was nineteen. Later, Great Wayne points out that widowhood might finally be my opportunity to be single. “Your first opportunity as an adult,” he says, to underline that it’s been forty-seven years with only minute interruptions.)
“Here’s my first choice,” Brian says. “We go through this process and whenever it is that we reach the point that it seems like I’m really going downhill, you tell me and then we lie down together, maybe in my office, not in our bedroom—well, maybe in our bedroom, we’ll see—and you give me whatever will kill me. I trust your judgment.”
“I can’t do that, darling. It’ll be murder. I can’t give you something that will kill you. We read about that all the time. These people can be prosecuted,” I say, although I don’t really think that a white woman my age will be sent to do hard time for assisting her husband in ending his life, in Connecticut, the Land of Steady Habits, as Brian often calls it.
“I could go to jail. To jail.”
Brian thinks this over and seems to drift away and then he comes back, with enthusiasm.
“You’d do great in jail. You’re so resourceful; you’re a leader. You’d be great.”
I tell him that I won’t do that and that whatever we do, it has to be his hand that guides the end. He falls asleep. In the depth of Google wormholes for end of life, for suicide, for assisted suicide, for euthanasia, for terminal illness, and for making end-of-life choices, in August I finally find Dignitas, a Swiss organization to which even a foreigner can apply for an accompanied suicide, if you meet their criteria: be of sound mind, have medical records supporting this, have ten thousand dollars to commit, and be sufficiently mobile to get to the outskirts of Zurich. I am already imagining how we can get to Zurich, and I cannot really imagine how we (mostly me, with no medical training and limited hand-eye coordination) will do this at home if Dignitas doesn’t work out. (They emphasize the words application and provisional, many times.)
Right to Die
Right to die in America is about as meaningful as the right to eat or the right to decent housing; you’ve got the right, but it doesn’t mean you’re going to get the goods. After Brian told me his decision, I’d called End of Life Choices New York, where my daughter knew a woman who knew a woman. Their mission is “to expand choice at the end of life, respecting every individual’s wishes, and striving for the best possible quality of life and a peaceful death.” On their website, it says that they also strive to educate people about end-of-life choices. They have been able to accomplish making it legal in New York to at least tell dying people about palliative and hospice care, and they managed to get a law passed in 2011 that asserts that these people have the right to know about the care available to them. They educate, they advocate, they pursue, and, perhaps most effectively, they counsel.
I called the excellent and haimish clinical director, Dr. Judith Schwartz, to talk about the organization, but first she had to counsel me, since I burst into tears as soon as she answered the phone. She advised me right away about what she—and the organization—could and couldn’t do. They do policy, they fight to expand the right-to-die laws so that you do not have to be in the final stages of a terminal illness to receive aid and medical assistance, and they attempt to ensure that, at the very least, your spouse or friend will not face prosecution if they do assist you in ending your life. (“Unsupervised two-year probation” is often what the widow who holds the gun or pours the poison winds up with, but that’s after an arrest, legal wrangling, and headlines in your local newspaper.)