In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss(23)

Dr. Schwartz says, “When any kind of right-to-die legislation is proposed—the opposition shows up with ten million dollars as soon as it’s about your right to choose.”

End of Life Choices New York supports VSED—voluntary suspension of eating and drinking—as the only effective, legal, and certain end to life that even a very physically limited person can choose. It sounds to me like it takes enormous discipline and fortitude for everyone. I had a friend, years ago, who sat by the bedside of a dear friend, holding her hand every day for weeks. She said it was peaceful at first and then excruciating and then over. It seemed to me that my friend was a better, and also just different, person afterward.

“It’s not easy,” Dr. Schwartz says.

I say, “It takes a couple of weeks, I know.”

There’s a pause.

“How big’s your husband?” she asks, and I can tell her exactly because, thanks to an eating-disordered adolescence of football and wrestling, Brian announces every change in his weight like a supermodel. “He’s six foot one, two fifteen.” (When he got the diagnosis, he dropped ten pounds in a minute. When he finished the application to Dignitas, he gained it all back and ate like a man on a mission and was, as always, happy to share, happy to order more, happy to meet the chef.)

And Judith Schwartz says, “Oh. Could be three weeks, even a week more.” She says kindly, “It is not an easy process, often.”

From which I take that often means ever, just as rarely, in all of my conversations now, means fucking never. She lets me know, because I ask twice, that her organization does nothing at all in the hands-on department.

“Oh, no,” she says immediately but still warmly. I love Judith Schwartz as I now love everyone I speak to who is not cruel, horrified, or utterly useless in this process.

I ask what she has heard about Dignitas.

“Oh, yeah, they are the real deal,” she says, and I am reassured once more that they are not scam artists (although in May 2018, BBC News reported that an ex-employee accused Mr. Minelli, the director, of receiving bequests from rich and more or less satisfied and grateful families of the dead. Who can blame them? To have your beloved relative find a way to painlessly end a life of suffering or of painful diminishment or of just plain exhaustion at one hundred four, like David Goodall, the ecologist and botanist, who said, “My abilities have been in decline over the past year or two, my eyesight over the past six years. I no longer want life to continue. I’m happy to have the chance…to end it”).

I have now read everything, pro and con, about Dignitas and seen most of the documentaries. Dignitas seems to do what it says it does: You fill out the forms, write the essays (a biography and a few paragraphs on why you wish to have “an accompanied suicide”), and send them—eventually—ten thousand dollars (more for the cremation and the mailing of the ashes in a plain urn if that’s what you want, is what I recall) and a pile of documents. You show up in Zurich and they interview you, twice (it used to be only once, but someone complained that more assessment was required, and I assume that that someone was connected to the Swiss government), and you bring all sorts of identification, so it’s not a pain in the ass for the Swiss police to identify the body (which apparently had sometimes required a couple of calls to grieving Americans, once they got back home).

“They’re Swiss,” Judith Schwartz says, laughing a little. “Here’s what they’re looking for: discernment. Discernment.” She says the word emphatically, as does the woman—friend of a friend—who brought her father to Dignitas last year and has become my coach for the final-days part of the process—as if it’s a word with special meaning, which it may be to the Swiss people, or to Dignitas. “Discern-ment,” she says. “You really have to be cognitively with it. That’s what they’re looking for and checking for. They absolutely will not accept anyone who cannot clearly make this choice, with full comprehension and understanding, from beginning to end.”

They now require the dental records of the person coming to Zurich, and I have to get them. I mention this to Dr. Schwartz, with an air of can-you-believe-it?

“Just do what they tell you,” Judith Schwartz says.

And I do.





* * *



—

Dental Office Manager (who may be the dentist’s wife): Is Brian changing dentists? Is he unhappy with Dr. L.? He’s been a patient of ours for so long that…

Me (thinking, My husband would never ever give up a dentist who likes football, saw Brian play magnificently in the Yale Bowl, and is a paisan, to boot. But we have to go to Zurich with his dental records so Brian can die in peace): Yes, he loves Dr. L. I just need his dental records.

DOM: Yes, but…

Me: I just need his dental records.

DOM (thinking, Fuck you): Well, you’ll have to pick them up in person. Before lunch.

Me: See you tomorrow morning.

DOM: Click.





September 2019, New Haven





We pin our hopes on Dignitas because the right-to-die laws in America are not going to help us. Dignitas leads me to a meeting with Brian’s psychiatrist, because Heidi of Dignitas has told me that since Brian is in therapy, they need a report on his mental health from his psychiatrist. I’m sure that Brian’s psychiatrist already knows the results of Brian’s MRI test, because I can use the World Wide Web and I have learned that Brian’s neurologist and his psychiatrist are not only the same age, practicing in the same city, but I already know they refer patients to each other and I see they went to the same medical school. I picture them having dinner together a couple of times a year. I picture the neurologist summing Brian up for the psychiatrist, over a couple of glasses of pinot grigio: Not good. His brain has shrunk. Lots of white stuff. A 23 on his mini-mental—23. Yale graduate. They both shake their heads.