In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss(8)
It seems to me, he says pleasantly, holding up the folder, you don’t believe in anything, Mr. Ameche. Brian laughs and says, I believe in a lot of things, but religion and the afterlife are not among them. Well, Dr. G. says, chuckling, you’ll find out before I will. Let me know. Brian smiles.
Dr. G.’s tone changes. Let me tell you what will happen: You will arrive at our apartment building in the suburbs of Zurich, in the morning, by 10 A.M. Do not be late. You will be greeted by two people from Dignitas. They will invite you in. You can take your time, he says. There will be no rushing. He looks at me, as if he can tell that I am the rushing sort, and I want to assure him that every minute of our time in Zurich is me trying to push back the clock.
There is some paperwork. There are chocolates. They will give you an anti-emetic, he says, so you will not vomit. You have up to an hour after that to make your choice about drinking the drink. If you need more time, they will administer the anti-emetic again. And again, you will have about an hour after that to drink the drink. After you drink it—it is a little bitter, he says, and I wonder how he knows. After you drink it, you will fall into a light sleep, then a deep sleep. Then it will be over. Mrs. Ameche, you can sit with him for a long time. (I’m glad he calls me Mrs. Ameche. I know Brian always gets a kick out of that.)
Brian nods attentively. Dr. G. says, At any time in this process, you may change your mind. Right now, or Thursday morning. No one will be surprised or distressed. We will all be glad for you. (I don’t know why this would be. Perhaps I would be glad, too, but only if it meant the spell was broken and my whole husband was returned to me and to himself and these last years turned out to have been just a terrible test, one poisoned apple after another, to prove that my darling deserves the life he had before.) Brian shakes his head.
“I know what I’m doing,” he says. “This is the right thing for me.”
Dr. G. nods. “I see that,” he says. “But I will keep asking.”
Brian and I sit back down, after he’s gone. I say that Dr. G. seemed nice and Brian agrees. Brian says, It’s going okay, and I agree. We sleep side by side, fingertips touching.
Babu, King of Castles With every one of our little girls, our granddaughters (Brian never thought, for one minute, that he should have had children. “I’m the baby,” he said cheerfully), Brian became a better and better grandfather, the best Babu. “I feel like I robbed a bank,” he often said. “Never had kids and went straight to grandchildren. How lucky am I?” With every little girl, there was a phase, between two and four, when he was the Lego god, the Lord of the Towers and King of Castles, and we have pictures of each of them standing on Brian’s desk or coffee table, taller than he is, pointing proudly to the stack of blocks towering above them. Brian praised anything that seemed to show architectural or engineering skills: She copied the picture perfectly! Look how stable that is—she built a decent foundation! See how she put all the blue ones on one corner of the building envelope? I did a building like that.
When each girl got a little older and expressed interest in the more elaborate Legos, Brian would be at the kitchen table, attaching hard pink bouquets to tiny green stems, building and decorating a pastel brick wall with elaborate mosaics, hitching cellphone-size lilac RVs to tiny cars, while the little girl waited happily, occasionally handing him a piece of plastic or sharing some chocolate. (A visiting cousin found the bowl of candy on Brian’s nightstand and said, Oh, Uncle Brian is the luckiest man in the world. The granddaughters shrugged, happy to be in the know, happy to be the special people who could stick their hands right into Babu’s Candy Jar in the pantry and get nothing but a knowing wink from Babu, who could be counted on to turn his broad back, to hide them from their parents.)
Tuesday, January 28, 2020, Zurich
We walk around, exploring the fancy shops on Bahnhofstrasse, and we walk down to Lake Zurich again. We walk back. We can’t bring ourselves to go into the shops or browse the way we normally would. (We once spent a joyful half hour in an insanely expensive men’s clothing store in Chicago, just so Brian could try on dark-blue fedoras and Missoni mufflers and cashmere pullovers.) There’s a toy store near the hotel and we concentrate on that. I want to bring all the granddaughters something from Zurich. We get the twins, Eden and Ivy, a snow globe of two bunnies, even though I don’t like getting them gifts to share; there is only one snow globe, and it suddenly seems that there will not be a single decent gift in all of Zurich for me to bring back.
Our cover story is: Nana and Babu went on a vacation to Europe. While there, Babu died of a disease in his brain.
I’ve talked this over, a dozen times, with my therapist, Wayne. When the pace of my worrying and complaining about Brian became nonstop, a friend gave me a referral to Wayne, a psychiatrist—a man I’d met forty years earlier when I was a graduate student and he was striding Yale’s halls like a psychoanalytic god. I called him, introduced myself, said we’d met before; he clearly didn’t remember me and then I burst into tears. I said, I hope you can help me. I want to kill my husband, and I kept on crying. He said, You want to kill him because you love him, and I said, You are so right. Wayne, as far as I am concerned, saved me before and after this trip to Zurich, and in the end, he saved Brian, too.
Wayne used to treat children as well as adults. I’ve talked over what to say about Babu and his death, with Wayne and with my children, the parents of our four gorgeous little girls, Brian’s adoring pack. Wayne says, again and again, simplest is best, and none of this is untrue. I’ve told my children that if they wish to go another way with his story, if there is another approach they wish to take, I will respect that. None of us conclude that getting into the right to die and how we came to that and that I sat with their beloved Babu while he passed from life to death and let him and why I let him—with an eleven-year-old, two six-year-olds, and a two-year-old—will be helpful. They will all miss him terribly and I’m pretty sure that none of them have perceived any malfunction in him. Yet I know that if we were not going to Dignitas now, soon they would be sad and relieved for his life to come to its end, and this way they are just heartbroken. It matters to Brian and to me that they will remember him as their loving, fun, goofy, candy-sharing, soft-touch Babu. I figure that when each of them gets to be old enough, if they want to, they will read this book and his lovely little notes written to each of them, all of which begin: I wish I could stay longer. And when they are teenagers, they may be angry that we lied to them, and that will be okay. This is the best we can do.