I suggest we go to the city for his sixty-sixth birthday and have a lovely overnight. I feel like an overnight is about what we can handle, and I hope that lovely is still possible. We haven’t yet had our diagnostic neurology appointment, but I can feel something coming hard, a train rumbling through, startled birds flying off. Brian agrees and we go to the city. We relax in the pretty room, admire the courtyard, rest and shower, and Brian asks me if he needs to dress up. I shrug. Other women tell me that their husbands get to be this way as they get older, wanting to stay in their Tshirts and sweatpants, regardless of the occasion. I notice the mismatched straight couples: the woman’s in cocktail dress and heels, and the guy has basically found a clean polo shirt and a belt. I am married to a man who owns two tuxes, four sets of studs, and plenty of cummerbunds, but we have had a lot of conversations about his dressing up or down the last couple of years. I say, as pleasantly as I can, Honey, wear what you want. You’re a handsome man. He puts on his sports jacket with jeans and a white shirt. He puts on the glasses he recently bought （the last few years, his face had begun to look so vulnerable and unsure, I’d begged him to start wearing glasses again. He had missed them, he said, and then he started wearing them every day and we both felt that he was now properly armored）。 He looks, right then, exactly as he looked on our wedding day: handsome and expansive, at ease with himself and the world.
We have a quiet but lovely dinner at a very expensive Italian restaurant, and we have fun with every dish. Trofie nero and I forget the middle part; then, for dessert, Brian has crema al cioccolato and he makes me order the mille-feuille, which is also chocolate-intensive, and we take our time. We walk most of the way back to the hotel and then my shoes hurt and I say, Let’s get a cab, and Brian says, Just a few more blocks, and I walk one more block and stop. He looks at me and says, Want a cab. I say, Yes, I do. He puts his arm up. We are both, I think, determined to have a nice time.
In the hotel, we begin to make love and Brian says, I’m sorry. Not gonna happen. I say, It’s okay, and it is okay. That is the last time for that.
We kiss and sleep wrapped around each other.
* * *
—
Back at home the next day, we have one of our mutually maddening conversations: I tell Brian that I’m going to weed our picnic area （gravel with tons of weeds busting through）。 He says, as he has said repeatedly, that although he’d started adding the gravel six weeks ago on his own, he stopped because it aggravated his tennis elbow. I last heard about his tennis elbow five years ago. Also, he doesn’t play tennis. The picnic area is big and bumpy with occasional mounds of gravel, as if giant moles are burrowing through it. Brian says we need a lot more gravel to make the area solid underfoot. He says we should hire someone to bring and spread the gravel. I agree and say that we can’t afford to do that right now. （Also, I don’t want another project to supervise, and since we can’t afford to have it done professionally, however it’s done, it will involve me working side by side with a helper. All I want to spend money on, all I really want to do, is buy shoes and clothes.） I tell him I’m going to weed and smooth out the gravel we do have. He tells me that we need more stone. I tell him that I agree but that we can’t afford it. I tell him that I’ll take care of it. He tells me we need more stone. I’m sure the look on my face is not a pleasant one. He says, Do you want me to do it? I say no, although I mean yes. I mean, Yes, if you could do it the way you would have a couple of years ago, measuring the number of cubic yards needed and discussing the size of the gravel until I want to scream—yes, that would be great. But not now. Now it would not be great and I would either be trying very hard to discreetly micromanage the entire time or else end up doing it myself, so, no. I go to my office to eat a scone and read a mystery and hope that I will clear my head and do some actual work.
I have studied up and watched dozens of English videos about this process （including the 2011 one featuring Sir Terry Pratchett, who died of Alzheimer’s in 2015）， and some of them are weirdly uplifting and some of them are unbearably sad, but not, for me, as sad as they will be. I also watched Still Alice a couple of times, on the sly. Julianne Moore, the actor, is beautiful and talented, and Alice, the character, is flirtatious and warmhearted and wise, and I enjoy the movie, sort of, until I find myself getting irritated with her winsomeness and unyielding charm, but at the end, when her former self tries to guide her current self, via prerecorded message, to suicide, I cannot watch. I walk in and out of the room a dozen times, each time willing Alice to bring the laptop with her to the dresser, to balance it properly, to not drop the pills but to manage to take them and achieve what her more-present self had hoped for. I watch this movie, in bursts, when Brian is working out or taking a walk. Everything else I watch is reality TV, which Brian despises, in which every character is a pretty shabby human being, or English comedies, specializing in the hilarities of class conflict, which he used to love.
* * *
—
Brian wakes up the next morning with stomach pains. He thinks he’s constipated but he’s also reporting bowel movements, so we’re both stumped. His stomach is tender to the touch.
Me: Maybe you have appendicitis.
Him: I don’t.
Me （thinking, Why are you being stubborn and ridiculous?）： You could have—
Him: I had my appendix out years before I met you.
Me: Where’s the scar?
Him: Have a look.
He stretches out like a white sea lion and rests his hand on the scar.
Off he goes to urgent care, five minutes from here. He insists on driving himself. I don’t feel good about letting him go by himself （and this is the last time I will ever let him do that. All doctor’s appointments are now joint business）。 He drives off. （For fourteen years, he beeped the horn every time he drove off, because he liked me to stand on the porch and wave goodbye, whenever possible. He has turned me into a wave-from-the-porch person, and I do it for everyone who pulls out of my driveway. Now people who don’t do that for their guests seem to me to be lacking something, as I was.） I hear from him after about an hour. Someone （doctor, nurse, PA?） has told him a bunch of things at Stony Creek Urgent Care, which he mostly misreports （I think, but maybe not）， scaring the shit out of me.
“An emergency MRI? What for?”
“I don’t know.”
I never get to speak to the doctor who sends him to New Haven for what I think are an ultrasound and bladder scan and blood tests. New Haven, which has been my home city for forty years now, feels to me like Rome at rush hour: confusing, dangerous, impossible to navigate solo. I have two appointments with patients, starting in a half hour. （When Brian retired three years ahead of schedule, I started doing psychotherapy again, in my little Stony Creek office. Smart to see that we were going to need the cash. Stupid not to have scheduled a neurology consult right then.） Between sessions, I talk to my dear friend and assistant, Jennifer, who’s in New Haven, and when Jennifer asks if I’d like her to meet Brian in the ER （where he may or may not be having an emergency MRI, where he may or may not actually wind up）， I cry and thank her. She meets him at the ER and keeps him company. She calls regularly and texts for the next three hours and is reassuring, every time. He doesn’t need to see any specialists, there is no MRI, there was never an MRI, he’s not being admitted to the hospital, and nothing is terrible. She says later, We had a great time, just goofing around. You know me and Brian, we joked about everything. He handled it all really well, she says, but sometimes he forgot what the doctor’d just said.