In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss(9)
Wednesday, January 29, 2020, Zurich
We shop, we go to dinner, we meet my oldest friend, who has flown in just to fly home with me, when I have to travel without Brian. Other people, including all of my children, volunteered to come. My son said, If you don’t want me there while the two of you are there, I’ll just meet you in Zurich Airport on Thursday and fly home with you. Some people offered quickly and then withdrew their offers a little later, when they contemplated the actual trip. My oldest friend called and said, Tell me what you need, and I did tell her, on speakerphone, so Brian could also have his say. We don’t need much while we’re there, I tell her. Brian nods and he shouts, Thanks, darling! before we hang up. I text her later that I expect that I will not be functioning very well at Zurich Airport on the way home and her only job is to get me on the plane and home to Newark Airport, without any major fuckups. She says, I can do that, and she does.
We have one more day to fill. We take walks—I photograph the intersections so we won’t get lost, and every time I hold up my phone, Brian walks on and says, We’ll be fine. We chat listlessly. I find an index card in my bag when I get home: January 29, agony and tedium. We sleep after every meal. When Brian wakes up, we read some poetry off my phone: Brian’s man, John Ciardi, his girl Szymborska; and I read my Janes, Hirshfield and Kenyon. I read them to myself because I cannot read them aloud and I can’t even look at the line Let the envious gods take back what they can from my favorite Hirshfield poem because, boy, they’ve shown me, those envious gods, haven’t they just? Brian says he wants to take a walk and puts on his jacket. I grab my sweater and my notebook, where I wrote down Dr. G.’s suggestion for the best routes. I’m like a people-pleasing agoraphobic here in Zurich; the idea of going beyond the tea shop on the corner terrifies me and I actively wish to conceal this fact from Brian. I’ve only become an anxious person in the last few months, and my coping and deflecting mechanisms are not polished.
We can’t even play gin. We can’t read. I would like to have some heartfelt, leaf-shaking conversations, the way I imagine some people get to, at the end of life. (I imagine this despite having sat at multiple deathbeds, at which there definitely were no last-minute confessions, assertions, or expressions of deep feeling. The people dying were often in pain and exhausted or heavily medicated. My father patted my hand and thought I was my mother. My mother grabbed my arm and said, Jesus, honey, do something about the pain. As my old man used to say, frequently, regarding my expectations: the triumph of hope over experience.)
PART II
End of Life
It’s amazing to me that people said to me, “Well, why go to Switzerland? I mean, why not Oregon or Colorado or Hawaii or Vermont? There are right-to-die laws in those states.” (That some people said this to me right before—and right after—my husband died was more than amazing.) The right-to-die (physician-assisted dying) laws in California, Colorado, Oregon, Vermont, Montana (as a result of a 2009 State Supreme Court decision), District of Columbia, New Jersey, Maine, Hawaii, and Washington require that you be or become a resident of that state (sometimes quick and easy, not always) in order to pursue your physician-assisted suicide and also—consistently—that you are mentally competent, medically assessed as having only six months to live, and can express your wish to die, usually three times, twice orally and once in writing, to two local physicians.
These laws are pretty much the same and they are intentionally eye-of-the-needle. Practically speaking, you have to be damn close to death’s door to get a doctor to swear that you’ll be dead in six months. You have two physician interviews, some days apart, in which you assert that you are not psychotic or suicidal or depressed and hope the doctors agree with you. You have to be able to swallow what the doctor prescribes, without any assistance. Will the doctor be thoughtful enough to give you a powder that dissolves into a bitter but easy-to-drink four ounces? In some states, you have to be able to get yourself into a pharmacy to purchase your lethal prescription, because assisting you in any way is illegal. I’m not sure how much enforcement of this clause there is.
Choosing to die and being able to act independently while terminally ill is a deliberately narrow opening. Many people can’t get through it. They can’t swallow well enough. They can’t talk well enough. They can’t hold the glass or mix the drink on their own. (Helping someone hold the glass is a crime in most of America.)
People who do wish to end their lives and shorten their period of great suffering and loss—those people are out of luck in the United States of America.
March 2019, Stony Creek, Connecticut
Something Sudden and Slow
I was lucky—I guess—that Brian got worried about his memory loss after he had hip surgery and was willing to get tested, mostly because he thought and hoped his poor memory might be just a bad reaction to the anesthesia used for the hip implant in March. I’d gotten worried about his memory and balance a couple of years earlier, and since he was now worried, I could say I was worried, too.
Still, his memory loss felt sudden: names disappearing, repetition, information turned upside down, appointments and medications scrambled. Suddenly, it seemed, we argued endlessly about everything.