In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss(30)

To stained glass, today at 11:00.

Drive up the road past Stop and Shop, TURN RIGHT at the giant lobster.

Jayne’s studio is on the left, at Apple Orchard Gallery.

And I draw a heart.

This one time, Brian leaves to work on his last stained-glass project (a sunset or a sunrise) and comes back in three minutes. I forgot how to go, he says, and it is his bravery in saying so, getting the directions from me and going out again, that levels me. This man? This is the one that has to shuffle off this mortal coil? Every morning, as soon as Brian leaves our bedroom, I cry, furiously. I mentally review all the people—not even bad people, just people I happen to know—who should have to die instead of him.





A Little Help





At the same time that we are trying to check all the boxes for Dignitas, I take seriously their slow and careful approach and their underlining that no is a definite possibility. I’m trying to create Plan B, according to Brian’s directives, in which I get him a completely painless and lethal dose of something he can drink—no injections—while the kids gather round and I hold his hand. (I’ve read up, and on top of all that, I will have to make it look like I’m out at the movies or taking a long walk while he’s dying from his lethal dose, and that strikes me, a lover of English mysteries, as very suspicious behavior. How many wives leave a husband with Alzheimer’s on his own for the evening while they pop off to a movie or take a long stroll through the marsh?)



* * *



—

While Brian is out walking the Trolley Trail, a pretty path through the marshes, I’m making sausage and peppers wrapped in eggs for Jack, my dear friend and former student, who prides himself on being handy, helpful, canny, and crafty, with the long-lashed, round, and guileless eyes and pink cheeks that canny and crafty call for. Jack is, maybe, my best bet for advice on Plan B. Jack has fixed things around the house, fixed stairs and cabinets for our friends, and researched for me. I often make him breakfast, suggest things to read, and edit his writing. It sounds much more transactional than it is. I would cook for him anyway. He would fix my wobbly table anyway. It’s a little embarrassing (for me, maybe for him) but we just love each other; we are a happy match of dovetailing foibles and compatible personalities, quirks, and amusements, forty years apart. Brian is very fond of Jack. Since Alzheimer’s, for Brian, trust matters even more than fond, and he also trusts Jack. (Brian’s decided that our electrician, the nicest and most competent of men, is “shirking,” is “not doing things properly.” The man has saved our house over and over for a decade and he’s come to our house multiple times in the last three months because Brian chose to redo, reconnect, or disconnect some crucial bit of wiring.)

I make coffee for Jack and me, one eye on the clock. (Brian is a certain kind of CEO for this project: He doesn’t want to participate in discussions below his pay grade, he doesn’t want to overhear troubling or puzzling discussions, he doesn’t want any bad news, he doesn’t want any unsolved problems presented, and regular progress reports are appreciated. No meeting should last more than ten minutes.) I’d told Jack about Brian’s diagnosis a couple of weeks ago and tried to finish my sentences between gulping tears. I couldn’t understand why I cried nonstop during these phone calls. I was sure that Brian had Alzheimer’s before the MRI; I’d thought, It’s not a surprise. But it was a surprise the way every bad thing, even as you see the flames in the distance, even as the terrible thing is upon you, breathing in your ear, hammering on your narrow bones, is still a surprise.

I begin with a rant about the American healthcare system, our refusal to let people die a dignified and comfortable death, the money made off suffering, the doctors unable to face their limits and meet the needs of their patients. Jack listens and eats. I swear constantly and unimaginatively.

“Nobody can talk about it,” I say. “Nobody seems to know what they’re doing. There is literally no treatment. The most advanced Alzheimer’s research in the world says: Eat fucking blueberries. Get enough fucking sleep.”

Jack nods.

Brian comes home and they both have more breakfast and I think that sexism will exist as long as women give birth, because the two of them, the young man and the not-young man, and me, as well, are all happy as can be with them sitting like paying customers and me turning bacon, toasting bread, and filling mugs.



* * *



—

A few days later, Jack’s in my office, while Brian is at the stained-glass studio. I want to think out loud. I lie on my couch, with my hand over my eyes, the way I do when I’m trying to plot a scene for a novel, and Jack paces and then sits in my armchair. I’ve looked up how much pentobarbital we’d need. The amount is buried in some document for Exit International or Dignitas, but I unearth it (and forget it, twice, and unearth it again—I think Brian’s Alzheimer’s is destroying my memory) and finally write the amount, 20 GRAMS, on an index card. He’s got to take an anti-emetic, I say, so he won’t throw it all up. Then the stuff goes in a blender, to make a smoothie, and I have to wear gloves if I help at all, so it’s only Brian’s fingerprints on it. I say, It’s a crime, Jack.

I know that I want my children with us and I know that if we do this, they would want to plant themselves by my side, but I cannot bear to have any of them, parents all, face any legal consequences. I think that maybe they would come over after, and I can’t imagine where they would all be waiting, or what happens after. I cannot imagine this, and I close my eyes and focus on the smallest, most useless details—what room, what time of day—repeatedly. Jack leaves, quietly.