In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss(26)

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I get off the phone and Brian looks at me dubiously. I have been on the phone, silently sitting and blinking and nodding, for several minutes.

“It’s okay,” I say. “We just need a better psychiatric report.”

“Sure,” he says, going back to watching the news.

Brian keeps watching the news and I make dinner. It’s disgusting. Having always been a competent and sometimes a very good cook, I am now like any other bad, beleaguered cook. I am often dismayed and surprised by what appears in the pan or the pot. Things that are broiled burn. Things that are sautéed cling and drown. Nothing tastes right. Almost everything is too salty, too oily, or tastes like metal. About once a week, I just throw the whole meal out and we have pizza and a salad or I make sandwiches. I feel that I’m concentrating, but I never am. I have scraped dinner into the garbage again when Donna, Brian’s mindfulness/meditation teacher, calls to see how he’s doing, since he missed the last class of his meditation course (right day, wrong time). His face lights up and I go into another room. A half hour later, he’s off the phone and in an excellent mood. I suggest that he call her back (“How about now,” I say, and slide his phone toward him) and see if she’ll be his new therapist. He does and she will and God bless her, may she be inscribed in the Book of Life.

A colleague says, “I hear she’s flaky.” I don’t give a damn. I don’t care if Donna wears a saffron robe and juggles rose-quartz crystals (she doesn’t). Brian leaves every session with Donna with a little spring in his step.



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After about two months of twice-a-week meetings with Donna, Brian says that he’d like me to join him.

“For couples therapy?” I say.

Brian thinks over why he wants me to come.

“Sure. And because lots of the stuff we discuss, I don’t remember after. You could help me remember.”

I say yes immediately. I don’t want to do this. We have been in couples therapy, he and I, lots. We had a wonderful old lady who seemed to love us both. Be quiet, she’d tell me, putting up her hand like a crossing guard. It’s not your turn. And you, she’d say to Brian, pay attention, this part is important. She told him to stop being a selfish baby and she told me to stop being so hard on him. She said to him, You chose her, this woman who doesn’t wait on you hand and foot. And just as I was about to say, I actually do, pretty much, wait on him hand and foot, she’d cock a dyed eyebrow in my direction. You chose him, you chose the opera and the red sauce, not the white wine and the gloom, at which point she’d cackle and Brian and I would laugh, pleased with all of us. We were mad for her and put her on retainer, in effect, after our first session, a year before we married. We kept up with her, on and off, until a few years ago, when it seemed once more that we had things in hand.

Once, many years ago, Brian was having a couple of bad, sulky weeks and I wasn’t sure why, and I was so mad at him I said that I thought he must be having an affair. He stared at me openmouthed, and then he said, “I’m not having an affair, I’m just being a prick.” Then he handed me his phone and said, Call Rachel. We can go see her and then after we can go to Tre Scalini. In the car, he said, Who am I having an affair with? I couldn’t think of who it might be, and then the storm was over but we went anyway and also to Tre Scalini, because Brian loved their early-Seventies Italian restaurant vibe and their good Bolognese sauce and their mediocre antipasto plates—and he felt about a meal in a restaurant the way people feel about money and good health: always better to have it.

Call me anytime, Rachel had said cheerfully at our last session, five years ago. In 2019, Rachel called me. She’d heard from a patient who was a friend of mine that Brian had Alzheimer’s and was going to Dignitas. Just come to my apartment, please, she said.

When I get there, I ring the doorbell many times and finally she appears: thin and distracted. “Oh,” she says, “I wasn’t sure it was the doorbell.” Her house is a shrine to psychoanalytic theory, Marimekko, and mid-century tchotchkes from all over the world, and she guides me to a worn sofa.

She tells me that although she’s told her patients she has a medical condition and will be retiring soon, she actually has Alzheimer’s and hopes she can refer some patients to me. She can’t find the patients’ names, and we sit down and she says: I heard about you and Brian. I’m hoping, I can, y’know, get on board with the two of you. She describes the way the three of us could travel to Sweden. Switzerland, I say, and I tell her that that’s not the way it works, that it’s quite a long process of application. She looks disappointed.

“Do you know I have Alzheimer’s?” she says.

“Yes, I do.”

“How do you know that? Who told you?”

I don’t mention the visit (or the next or the next) to Brian. I tell Rachel that I will have to be out of touch for a while (because Brian and I are working on getting to Zurich and I know I cannot shepherd him and then her). She tells me that her lawyer is on her side and that she thinks maybe he can help her get to Sweden. Switzerland. I say encouraging things about her lawyer, who sounds like a nice man, and I say, repeatedly, that I hope she talks to her daughters about how she’s feeling. “You mean about my hip,” she says. I say no, I mean her forgetfulness. “Well, they don’t need to know,” she says. “You know, Amy. You can take care of it.”