In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss(36)

I don’t have the energy to run around in a leotard and anklets, but I see how old people get used to dust and stickiness, mild filth and mildewed towels. It’s not because they are too blind or weak to do anything about these problems necessarily but because they have just seen too much. When you’ve buried all your closest friends, how worked up can you get about a trace of lipstick on a coffee cup or a ribbon of dust on the frame of the photo of someone you’ll never see again? You’ve buried two wives and two brothers who loved you and left you—how seriously can you take the worn spot (now sort of a hole) at the back of the chair? Perspective is useful, of course: It’s why very few people want to be eighteen again. But the other side is having so much perspective, it’s hard to give a damn about anything happening here in the real.

Children are always the exception for me, and I am watching them all, my three and their four, and I’m grateful because if not for them, we’d be living in filth already, remote in hand.



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Thanksgiving is done, Christmas is coming, and so is my mother-in-law.

Brian and I already knew the broad outlines, and the details, of Alzheimer’s from the story of my mother-in-law’s best friend of fifty years. Yvonne’s best friend was an aunt to Brian, a regular dinner guest, formidably well dressed in the Nancy Reagan mold (the custom pantsuit with the matching navy-and-white silk flower on the lapel and the sapphire earrings to match; I admired her), a great golfer, a devoted philanthropist (to causes I reviled), and my mother-in-law’s boon companion for movies, dinner, and drinks at the club. She had descended into Alzheimer’s these last few years, as if on an express. First she complained about the cleaning lady, then she complained about her occasional guests, then she complained about her son. Then she complained that valuables were being moved to odd places and probably stolen. Then she could no longer navigate, not even during the day, not even on roads she’d driven for fifty years, and my mother-in-law had to drive them to the club and to the late-afternoon movies. Then she became violent and tearful, afraid of the terrible real and imaginary forces beyond her control. Then her son placed her in an assisted-living facility, which she resented and complained about loudly, and then she didn’t have the capacity to behave well in the communal dining room or dress appropriately for the yoga class or even to keep herself clean and get along with her healthcare aide. Then her son moved her into a memory-care unit. And then she lost a tooth, and then another, and sat on her bed, waiting to leave. She was clean enough but badly dressed and she still knew my mother-in-law and, weeping at every visit, begged her friend to take her home. My mother-in-law had not spared us the details.

In early December, Yvonne arrives for a visit. We have some kind of dinner, all wonderful Italian food brought by Yvonne, and Yvonne has a splash of vodka and we go to bed early. Yvonne and I are up very early. (I think I saw the sunrise every day that year.) Brian and I decide it’s time to share our loose plan with her—that right before we took off for Zurich, Brian would send his family an email letting them know of his decision to go to Dignitas, and afterward I would send everyone, friends and family, a second letter, shaped by him, about his death:

Dear Friends,

Some of you know, and some of you do not: Brian was diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer’s this past summer. It has been a difficult, demanding, and heartbreaking time and through it all, two things have been unwavering: our loving and supportive families and Brian’s considered and clear decision that he would not and did not choose “the long goodbye” of Alzheimer’s, over the next ten years.

Brian, who loved his lucky wife, his life, and all of the fishing, football, fiction, and family it contained, made arrangements to end his life, peacefully and painlessly, at Dignitas in Zurich, with me by his side.

He was, throughout this time, remarkably courageous while grief-stricken and warm, loving, and engaged with all of us, even as he faced the end of his life. He continued with art, with walks on the Trolley Trail of Stony Creek, and with his service to Planned Parenthood, to which he was deeply committed.

The memorial service for Brian Ameche will be at 3:00 on Saturday, February 8, 2020, at the Willoughby Wallace Library, Branford, Connecticut. We would be very glad to see you there. (If you have any questions about the service, please contact: XXX at [email protected].)

If you wish to commemorate his life, please make a donation to Planned Parenthood.

Love to you all,

Amy

Brian plans to send his email just before we get on the plane. That way, there’ll be no chance of any of them interfering, he said; I’ll have said goodbye to each of them, even if they don’t know it.

It wasn’t a great plan and eventually we improved it. It didn’t give his siblings much room and it didn’t give us much time for the truly final farewells, but as far as Brian was concerned, they’d be informed with no room to interfere, and that was what mattered to him.

I hadn’t said anything to Yvonne over the phone but couldn’t keep my mouth shut with her in person and in our house, my unlikely champion and a woman who had four children under the age of five by the time she was twenty-five and was now going to lose her beautiful boy, having already suffered the death of Brian’s youngest brother, Paul (the sweetest one of us, Brian said). I loved my mother-in-law, and even though Brian had made a decision to leave the family circle of Philadelphia, he loved her, too, respected the hell out of her resilience and determination and often quoted a favorite saying of hers: We’re not here for a long time, we’re here for a good time.