In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss(40)

Susie Chang says that it will go well, no real hitches. I ask her if they’ll change their minds, once we are in Zurich. (In my mind, these are serious psychiatric examinations by serious physicians. Even though S. has now shared her actual name with us, she has continued to stress the “provisional” in “provisional green light,” in every conversation.) Susie Chang pulls the card for Brian and it is a man crossing a bridge. He will be fine, she says; he is determined to go forward and the bridge holds. I keep crying. She stops talking. I tell her that they will probably offer us a choice of dates.

“You must take the first date they give you,” she says.

“Well,” I say. “That might mean we have to get ready in a—”

“You need to take the first date they give you. I’m not saying you can’t overcome the difficulties that will arise if you take a later date, but I do see difficulties.” (As it turns out, by the time I fly home, the first reports of COVID are beginning.)





My Husband





When I met Brian (well, not exactly when I met him; when I met him I thought he was arrogant, tedious about fishing, and needing a haircut), he reminded me just a little of someone. It wasn’t my mother and it wasn’t my father, a man who had excellent DNA and the romance and joie de vivre of a doorstop. I already knew that the Virtuous—people who cannot face their own flaws or acknowledge the ugliness in their nature, people who will patiently explain, for days, that you should not be hurt by their behavior because they didn’t mean to hurt you—those people are not for me. Brian, as it turned out, was at peace with all his faults (even the serious ones), and most of the time, I loved him for that, too.

Before the diagnosis, Brian made jokes about taking up drinking again. I was never a good audience. When we were dating, Brian drank a large double vodka most nights. He was stunned when I told him that the standard measurement for a vodka on the rocks was just a two-ounce pour (thank you for the training, Red’s Bar and Grille and also Valentino’s Café). My children, who had lived through plenty of genteel alcohol abuse already, in my previous relationships, were horrified to come home for a visit and find a handle of vodka in my freezer. (I drink—but like a Jew, and not like one of my schnapps-slamming ancestors, either.)

I come from a family where there was a bottle of Tío Pepe in the sideboard, gathering dust for years. Once, at my parents’ house, when I made myself a second gin and tonic, my mother worried aloud about what was happening to me up there in Connecticut. I didn’t ask Brian to stop, but I did ask him not to drink at my professional occasions. At one big literary festival, I’d been bored and annoyed and made the mistake of telling Brian so. Ten minutes later, fueled by alcohol, his general undauntedness released, he’d paid one of the shuttle drivers, scheduled to start driving the speakers back to the hotel in a few hours, to bring the two of us back to our hotel right then. I had to explain myself to the nice driver, let him keep the fifty dollars, and tell Brian that I could not and should not leave so early. Brian napped in the minibus until I felt it was respectable to leave. He didn’t drink at my professional events after that or at our wedding, and six weeks later, he stopped drinking altogether, forever.

In the last few years, Brian would say, Can I start drinking again when I’m eighty? And I’d say, Please, don’t ever start drinking again, but you can start smoking weed when you’re eighty (he was aggressive when drunk and a cuddly chatterbox when high), and then he’d say, reasonably, that he wouldn’t get high or have a drink until he was eighty-five and I would agree that eighty-five was fine but if he got drunk and fell down, even at ninety, I wasn’t going to help him up and he would say, Fair.



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I married him—despite all the very good reasons that no one should ever partner up for a third time—because early on, he reminded me of the best father figure of my life, my ninth-grade English teacher. When that man died, his friends (eighty-year-old poker buddies, pals from his teaching days, devoted former students of all ages and types) wept. He was old, fat, diabetic, and often brusque. Women desired him and my children loved him and most men liked his company a great deal. He was loyal, imperious, needy, charming, bighearted, and just about the most selfish, lovable, and foolishly fearless person I had ever known. And then I met Brian and found another.

On our third anniversary, Brian hurt his back. I’d come home to find him in our bedroom, not dressed, more than naked. He’d left work early. He was wearing his T-shirt, a very wide, white, and necessary mesh-and-Velcro lumbar-support wrap, and the navy-blue socks that were usually hidden by his suit trousers. His boxers were off because he was going to bed; his undershirt and socks were on because his terrible back pain made both the reaching up and the bending over difficult. He looked at himself in the mirror and laughed out loud. He put his black fedora on his head and modeled the whole look for me, like Naomi Campbell. That’s what it was like.





Thursday, January 30, 2020, Zurich





The night passes and the next morning we have a car take us to Pfaffikon, where Dignitas has its apartment, or house—I couldn’t really tell. It’s a residential structure in an industrial park. Two nice women, in nice clothes, sweaters and slacks (I mean that I feel an effort was made. They didn’t just throw on their sweats and come over), greet us. They have dressed for the occasion of shepherding us across the river and they take it seriously. I have never been treated with such seamless, attentive tact. They walk us in, up a few steps to the door, and I see a snow-covered garden, the kind of gesture toward a garden that you’d find in an industrial park (it’s January, so it might be that it’s a floral paradise in June), and into a large, odd, immaculate room. There’s seating in every corner—two small armchairs, a large pleather recliner, a pleather sofa, and a hospital bed, as well. It dawns on me later that it’s important that everything that can be sat on or laid down upon be washable. In the center of the room there’s a table with several chairs. The Ladies bring our paperwork to the table and point out the many bowls of chocolates. They review all of the steps, which Brian and I can now both recite. They look at him closely and say, At any time in this process, including after you drink the anti-emetic, you can choose not to do this. We will be very supportive of you changing your mind, rest assured. We are assured. The only sign of reluctance on Brian’s part is what he warned me about—his making conversation before taking the sodium pentobarbital. He’d said to me that he thought he might be inclined to “just bullshit around for a while” when the time came to take it. “I know I have to go,” he said. “I know I’m going. I’m ready. I’m just not going to hurry.”