In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss(39)

In the end, one sister-in-law and one brother-in-law, not married to each other (whom I have never known to be close), decide to come up together, which surprises all of us, even Brian, and then there is some friction about scheduling, or driving, or avoiding rush hour, and he will not make the trip with her but he is not pleased that she’ll make the trip without him. He will come a week later, with Yvonne. Meanwhile, our sister-in-law does make the trip by herself. She arrives with food and kisses, and I can see Brian is truly happy to see her, with her pretty face and warm hugs and her admiration for him. She could stay for a week, as far as I’m concerned. She is a lively, mile-a-minute presence and we’re glad of it and glad she came, despite the family-wide disapproval of her coming up solo. (I’m not sure why that was. If they were my own family, I could tell you why, even if I chose not to. Brian’s family is still, to me, another country, where I speak the language but not the dialect.) The family phone calls with Brian seem to go well. There are a few lovely letters from friends of Yvonne’s, who’ve known him since he was born. He becomes more detached with every week.

We get several emails from an old friend, imploring and scolding and using, again and again, the least compelling arguments I can imagine (I read on Google…There’s no urgency…), and each time Brian responds with kindness and restraint.



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Nothing will happen until January. There’s Christmas and Hanukkah to get through before January 6, when Dignitas reopens. No one is happy about this, except, maybe, in the oddest way: me. I know that this will be our last Christmas, but I know that we will still have some time after that.

I tell my sister that Brian and I won’t be joining her and her husband for the posh Vermont resort New Year’s Eve that we’ve done with them for the last few years. Ellen wants me to come. She says, Maybe it would be a nice distraction. She says, I just want us to go on having what we had. This is loving and heartfelt, but I can feel my own heart harden. That will never happen again in my life, I think, and I say, as harshly as I can, that neither he nor I will be sitting around—not even over tins of caviar and French champagne—chitchatting with people whose favorite conversation is: We are planning a fabulous trip in the spring, and what great trips are you planning? That’ll be awkward. I say it unkindly and my sister, who loves me, says, Got it.

I can hardly stand to talk to my sister on Christmas Day; it’s the first time we’ve been apart for Jewish Christmas (Chinese food on Christmas Eve, glass dreidels and fortune cookies on the tree) in more than thirty years. When it’s over, Brian goes upstairs to nurse his cold and I start untrimming the tree.

I am practicing being a widow, preparing myself to do things alone: taking down the strings of lights by myself, listening to Brittany Howard, and having a snack. It is about as much like actual widowhood as our granddaughter Ivy making a fist and waving it overhead, saying ferociously: “When I do like this, I am magic, and you cannot catch me.” When we are being perfect grandparents, we pretend we can’t catch her. Sometimes, in the spirit of my own grandfather, I am a darkly cheerful beacon of realism and I just go ahead and catch her.

I’m waiting in the living room, pretending and knowing that I will be caught and that I am not a widow, I’m just a weeping and annoyed wife. Brian will be gone from my life soon, although I don’t yet know how soon, and he’s also still a man with a cold. It’s a cold, not pleurisy, is what I think, even as I am tearing the fringe off a pillow at the thought of his not being upstairs any longer, not having a cold, not being a sick man than whom there is no one sicker, as I have said to him. One time, I said that I had friends with metastatic breast cancer who complained less about that than he did about his cold. And then he won’t be there for me to say it to him.



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I had two big relationships before Brian, and both ended because I wanted out. I didn’t feel truly lonely in either one until toward the end, because I had my kids and my friends and my work and a great deal of pleasure in solitude. Even when I felt ignored or put upon or mildly mistreated, I knew that the other person loved me and needed me, and even if they were not who I had hoped they’d be, I knew that I was big in their lives. Sometimes now with Brian, I am worse than alone. I’m gone from his interior landscape. Not that I have been uprooted but that I am not there, and never was. These moments are scorching. Instead of yelling at Brian, Hey, I’m a person, too, I make him a cup of tea with a big spoonful of honey and bring it upstairs. He opens his eyes and smiles and he says, Thank you, and I get to see that it’s just as scorching to be present.

I call Susie Chang for a Tarot reading, since she and Great Wayne are now the only professionals I turn to, and I tell her that Dignitas has us on hold until January 6. I ask her what she sees for this trip. It’s my only question. She tells me she’s getting out the traditional Rider-Waite deck, which is to me the “let’s get down to business” deck. No distracting beauty, no metaphorical crows, no modern re-gendering. (I have opinions about these things. The summer I was seventeen, my Friday-night job was to shill for Madame Rosa, next to Sandolino’s, in the Village. My job was to walk up and down in front of her storefront, handing out flyers and saying things like: Madame Rosa, five bucks, knows all. Before Madame Rosa closed for the night, before I got on the train back to Long Island, I’d make her a cup of tea and we’d chat briefly. “Look at the shoes,” she said. “As a rule, rich people don’t wear cheap shoes.” “Look at the hands, soft or hard.” “No one comes here because they’re happy, kiddo.” She was as good a clinical supervisor as I ever had. Madame Rosa used a Rider-Waite deck, and she told me that she had one of the originals, made in 1910.)