In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss(35)

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These are the final paragraphs of Wayne’s letter about Brian, and this letter is what gets us the green light from Dignitas.

I found no evidence in Mr. Ameche’s history or presentation of clinical depression. No profound mood disturbances with weight loss, difficulty sleeping, or lost time from work. In reviewing his past experience, I think that he was over-diagnosed by himself and those who had treated him years ago. It seems more appropriate to say that what he complained of was a situational dysphoria brought on by expectable life stressors, challenges, and disappointments. It seems likely that his adult distress had its roots in the dysfunctional family setting of his childhood. He is the oldest of six children of a legendary American football hero and his loving but limited wife. He himself was an outstanding football player at Yale University, where he also began his architectural studies. He married his teenage childhood sweetheart. This was a union that did not stand the test of maturity that comes with adult life. They divorced without children. The divorce caused upheaval in Mr. Ameche’s devout Italian-American Catholic family of origin. For the past 12 years he has been in a stable, satisfying, and replenishing marriage that has brought with it his wife Amy’s children and grandchildren. As he reported movingly, he has found great love, joy, and meaning, surrounded by them.

Mr. Ameche estimates that he has 60–80 percent of his recent memory capacity left. I would estimate that it is at more like 40–50 percent. When asked for his social security number at a relaxed moment, he provided it haltingly. He could not repeat it backwards. His memory functioning comes and goes, both within the session and day to day. He is probably made more aware of the perplexity and frustration that are set off by those lapses from the reactions of those around him. He delivers his narrative in plain, straightforward, yet poignant terms. Some aspects of his presentation seem quite commonplace. He and his wife derive pleasure from the rhythm of ordinary everyday activities such as running errands and shopping for home goods. He has led a fulfilling physical life, close to nature; fishing and building (retirement complexes, athletic facilities, etc.). He abhors a compromised existence lit only by a flickering, fading cognitive flame as he submerges into the darkness of an expiring existence and death, after the fact. At the moment he is mentally competent with sound judgment that is unhampered by mental illness or severe character disorder. In the midst of his current affliction he falls within the range of normal when it comes to charting his life’s course and making decisions.

He is a strong, determined man of mettle and courage.



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Great Wayne sent the letter to me within a week. I emailed him back, thanking him and asking him to throw around any titles he had or ever had had. He laid the titles on, until the list looked like a parody of a psychoanalytic Who’s Who, and if he had been that kind of guy, he would have added Rufus T. Firefly, Prime Minister of Freedonia. I send the letter to Dignitas and I wait to hear from Heidi. I don’t think I should show the letter to Brian and he doesn’t ask to see it.

“I enjoyed talking with Wayne,” he says. “The man knows all about Fordham’s Seven Blocks of Granite offensive line. Good man.”





End of November 2019, Stony Creek





It’s the day before Thanksgiving and Brian has had one more Dignitas phone interview (he remembers the word Alzheimer’s; he remembers that it’s Switzerland, not Sweden), and Heidi tells us we now have the provisional green light. She reveals that her name is really S. We thank her quietly. S. sighs, like a pilot who has safely landed the plane. She says, Mr. Ameche, please have a nice weekend. Mrs. Bloom, you, too. She tells us that there will be more emails coming with more details and more documents needed. This is the call we have been working toward since August.

We’ve heard what we needed to hear, and in the first moment, Brian hugs me hard, because we have accomplished the thing we wanted to accomplish, and done it together, and he loves teamwork. And then the light changes and dims; I am in the world without him in it; he sees, clearly, the world going on without him, me alone in the kitchen and him not next to me. After we make sure we’ve hung up properly, we cry in each other’s arms and, without speaking, we go right up to bed for a nap, at 11 A.M., and only come down when the kids come through the door, ready to start Thanksgiving prep.

I tell the kids, while Brian makes a sandwich, in his usual fussy, happily attentive way. We are all crammed in the kitchen, relieved, in an awful way, relieved that Brian will be able to do what he wishes to do, and, except for Brian, we are weepy and distressed. Brian takes my daughter Caitlin aside and tells her that she must take care of me, and she promises that she will, and I cry in the doorway. He finishes his sandwich and goes upstairs, to watch the news.

I start dropping things. I drop the ceramic pie weights onto the kitchen floor. I drop an entire open bottle of corn syrup into a bowl of butter and eggs. I burn the toast. I actually set one pie on fire in the oven and quadruple the amount of bourbon in the other so that no one who is not a Kentucky drunk could eat it. It’s not just that I can’t hold on to anything (metaphor received) but how little I care and how little effort I’m prepared to make to fix any of it. I gather up most of the pie weights and just tell everyone to be careful where they walk. The mothers of the grandchildren hunt down every pie weight I missed, and I let them. I throw out the bottle of corn syrup and then I throw out the butter and eggs, too. I leave the burnt toast in the toaster oven and figure that someone, at some point, will need to use the toaster oven and they will remove the blackened toast. I think, And this is how you get to Grey Gardens.