In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss(27)

I encourage her, again, to talk to her daughters about her concerns and I know that everything I am saying is pointless. Finally, I ask for her daughters’ phone numbers, and Rachel cannot or will not give the numbers to me. She winds up in the care of one of her daughters, and she does not get to Dignitas, because that window probably closed two years earlier, and she will spend the rest of her life in a memory-care unit, and the best outcome I can hope for is that she dies soon. She does not die very soon and when we talk next, she is in the memory-care unit and she says, Something very strange is going on here, please come get me.





Birdseed





One day, after breakfast, Brian says, “I should get birdseed. We don’t have any. I put birdseed out all year round, and then a few weeks ago there were bugs in the seed and so I stopped for a couple of weeks.”

“You stopped for a year,” I say, and I think, What in Jesus’s name is wrong with you, Amy? Who cares?

Obviously I do, because I wish to make the point that the birds have suffered and that even though the bugs-in-the-seed problem was bad (and it was gross: Winged bugs flew out like a horror movie), he didn’t deal with it for almost two years, in fact. I am, apparently, committed to telling him it was more than two weeks. Brian’s in charge of all things avian, and I’ve affronted him by telling him that he hasn’t taken care of the birds. I try hard not to say things like this, but every once in a while my need to prove a point, such a base and unattractive need, rises up and I meet it by telling him things that he doesn’t need to hear. I’m ashamed of myself, but then Brian turns on me and says that he can’t understand why he is being “grilled” about birdseed. He gets a little loud and very irritable and he leaves abruptly to go fishing and I’m glad, not only because he’s gone but since he yelled at me, quite unfairly (you could say that I was pressing the point about the unfed birds, but I wasn’t grilling him), I don’t feel ashamed anymore.



* * *



—

Days later, we are in Donna’s office, still talking about birdseed, after a fashion. Brian sees the birds outside Donna’s window and says, I should get some birdseed. I nod.

We are there for something like couples therapy. It looks like couples therapy, since we are sitting next to each other, facing her, in a small room with beige carpeting and we look at each other at intervals, fondly and nervously. A couple of times my eyes well up with tears. It’s not like couples therapy, because neither of us has the hope that the other will change. Whoever Brian is now is who he’s going to be for as long as our life together lasts. Then I think, well, that’s true of most couples therapy, really, although it’s not usually how I open the first session when I’m the therapist.



* * *



—

In November 2019, in Donna’s office, months after the diagnosis but before the acceptance from Dignitas, Brian says, I think I’d like to go on one last vacation before I die.

Donna (she’d been leading him toward a discussion of ways he can show me support): Ah. A vacation.

Me (inside voice): Are you fucking kidding me? Arrange a trip? Now? And where? Someplace we’ve been and loved, which will now be some half-baked, propped-up version of the real thing? Some new place that I will help you negotiate while you chafe at my attention and wander off to the We Never Close Bar in some foreign city, with nothing but a pocketful of euros and your friendly grin?

Me (outside voice): Oh. A vacation. Sure. Yes.

By the time we get home, I’m hoping that he will have forgotten the big vacation. I ask him if maybe he wants a little holiday. I don’t mention a big holiday. A week ago, Great Wayne mentioned Brian might like one last big fishing trip and that I could, after all, stay at a motel in New Jersey while Brian fished for false albacore. I see that Wayne knows something about fishing and, like most men who like to fish, he has a real, if casual, affection for other men who fish. He’s sympathetic to the need to fish. Because it’s Wayne, I make calls to five different fishing guides in Jersey. It’s early November and it’s turned cold. No one will go. I tell Wayne I called five different fishing guides, because I don’t want him to think that I don’t care about my husband’s happiness. I understand that all happiness is fleeting, but I see now that there is fleeting and then there is the true and wall-like impossibility of ever experiencing this kind of happiness again, even once, even next week, let alone a year from now. Doors are closing around us, all the time. I reluctantly and hopefully call three more guides, working in the Carolinas. (And I tell Wayne about them, too.)

I have failed Brian.



* * *



—

And his doctors have failed him, including his internist, Good Time Charlie, the doctor who hates bad news. When Brian came to him a few years before, in 2016, complaining about his memory, GTC was all reassurance and Brian came home and told me so.

When we went to him for our B-12 discussion, Good Time Charlie was, as always, pleased to see Brian and didn’t say anything about seeing me. He looked at the referral from the neurologist and said, So, vitamin B-12. He said that B-12 used to be given by injection, that injection had been the gold standard, but—good news—not anymore. He said Brian should take B-12 in a massive dose, sublingually (dissolving under the tongue), and he should take it for the rest of his life. Charlie explains that he’s ordering a second, superior B-12 test, which will reveal, he hopes, another possible cause of the B-12 deficiency, atrophic gastritis, in which the stomach lining has thinned and absorption is a problem. He looks at us pleasantly and half-rises out of his seat. I see that we are dismissed, and I see that Brian has no wish for further discussion.