In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss(37)

You can imagine how often he said that.

(As I was arriving to meet Yvonne for the first time, Brian, not even divorced from his first wife, decided to give his mother all the bad news at once, an hour before I showed up: three kids, divorced, career, Jewish, and bisexual. She didn’t bat an eye. After our first dinner together, she patted my hand and went to the kitchen to call his siblings and basically said, Get on board with this.)



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Even so, Yvonne, very Catholic, always neatly coiffed, given to wearing a nice Burberry wrap over her St. John suit and not much given to exploring worlds that were truly foreign to her, is not my ideal confidante. I stand outside Yvonne’s bedroom door on our second floor until I hear footsteps and wait until I hear bustling sounds. I knock and she lets me in; she’s already nicely put together. I sit on the bed, beside her, and tell her our plan with Dignitas. She pulls away from me and wipes her eyes and I wait, with my hands clasped. I don’t want a scene, but if there is one, I want it to happen while Brian is still asleep.

Then she says, “I am so relieved. I realized that last night. I was praying about this and praying all night and I realized that what I prayed for was that he would not have to suffer as Joanne does. I’m shocked that I’m so relieved, but I am.”

Yvonne talks about the tragic life and the terrible death to come of her dear, glamorous, devoted friend. We hold hands and cry and she says that I was a gift to her son and I throw myself in her arms, as if she is my own mother. We go downstairs to have breakfast with Brian. Yvonne holds Brian’s hand and talks about Buddy, a quadriplegic young man whom she knew well. Over coffee, she tells us how Buddy’s brother drove him to a motel (in Michigan? This must be what it’s like for Brian on bad days: Whose brother? When was this? Do I have to listen?). There they’d arranged to meet with Jack Kevorkian (the Dr. Death of the Eighties), who gave Buddy a lethal injection.

Brian says, Well, this whole thing, it’s in your sweet spot, Mom. He means death and dying. Yvonne nods agreeably. I go upstairs and come down to model which of two scarves I should wear for my lunch with my new agent. I wear the one Yvonne chooses: Sophisticated, not somber, she says. I have no idea how I look these days, and Brian, who used to have things to say (usually nice things), doesn’t notice. For years I asked his opinion about what I wore, and for the last three years I fussed at him about his clothes—fishing hat plus Brooks Brothers polo = homeless—and now I don’t do either.



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We ask Yvonne not to tell Brian’s siblings about our plans. She doesn’t hesitate.

“It’s not mine to tell,” she says. “It’s your business. You tell them when you’re ready.”

“I know it’s a hard secret to keep,” I say.

In the most ladylike way, she snorts. “I’m eighty-four,” she says. “I can keep a secret.”

Brian smiles and says to his mother—again—that she’s an expert in death. Yvonne cared for and buried her barely middle-aged parents when she was young; a beloved younger sister, for whom Yvonne’s home became a hospice; an equally beloved older sister; her sweet son, Paul, still at college; and two much-loved husbands. I am leaving out—as Yvonne would point out—all of her late friends.

She says that she’s been to eight funerals in the last six months, and she lists each of her friends and their circumstances of death and family. (Stroke, husband has ALS. Heart, kids are in Los Angeles. Like that.) She’s sadly matter-of-fact. She cheers herself up by recalling the film her family made (A Family in Grief: The Ameche Story) after Paul’s death, as part of a projected series of documentaries on resiliency; their particular film was on the rest of the family in the aftermath of Paul’s car accident on Christmas Eve in 1981. Yvonne says she remembers Brian saying, in his voice-over narration, that death is something we don’t talk about but that there is no life without death. I can see that she and Brian are both quite pleased that he was so wise at such a young age.

I’m a crabby, exhausted person, ready for a nap at any and every hour of the day. I pour myself a third cup of coffee and think, Duh—and the man was close to thirty when he made that remark. There is going to be some Ameche mythmaking coming about Brian’s prescient sensitivity and Dalai Lama–ness. Everything makes me mad. Yvonne loves her children and casts each of them in the most flattering baby-pink spotlight whenever she can, and I tend to resist, for no good reason. I’m the grumpy usher at the show muttering about spaghetti stains on the satin and flubbed lines. Then, as now, I don’t quite understand how this film project developed, but the film about the Ameches did air and I do know that my mother-in-law had and enjoyed a brief career speaking about grief at various conferences, following the making of the film. What Yvonne manages to do, in the days after Brian’s diagnosis and in the days after Brian’s death, is to locate herself exactly where all the guide-to-grief people say she should be. At home, by herself, with her daughters or with friends, she lets herself be a mother awash in grief. We have one brief phone call in which she weeps to me that she just wanted more of him, and I feel so much the same way that instead of comforting her, as I intended, I just weep with her and then we mumble our goodbyes into our wet phones.

With us, and then later with me, she doesn’t center her grief. She’s careful not to cry first or loudest and she rarely refers to her own loss. She is, as Brian says, a fucking class act.