We get home and we cry for an hour, in each other’s arms. We agree not to do much talking for twenty-four hours. We go out for sushi at our favorite restaurant and are waited on by our favorite waiter, a Japanese man with a strong Japanese accent, whose conversational patter is like that of a Midwestern waitress: “How you folks doin’？ Hot enough for you? C’mon, let’s get you seated right here. Comfy? Has the summer been good?”
We love Hari, and we have a great, surreal couple of hours.
* * *
—
The weekend seems vast. I don’t plan to work. We cancel a visit with friends. It’s just us and I’ve let my grown children know that “we’re processing,” which they understand correctly to mean: Give us a few days. （Later, they will each reveal to me the changes that they had noticed in Brian—the slips in memory, the repetitions—and their loving, generous dismissal of those changes.） We go out to buy stationery—Goodbye, I love you stationery, so that he can write little notes to my kids and our grandchildren for after he’s gone, because he has already made up his mind to end his life. （I’d rather die on my feet than live on my knees, he says and will say again. He has already told me to figure out how.） He’ll also write cards to his mother and four siblings, but by the time he does that, I have to prod him.
I point out the elegant box of notecards with dragonflies. He points out a box with a porch overlooking a lake and four dogs sitting cutely on the Adirondack chairs. I point out that we don’t have dogs. （We don’t want dogs. I am already hearing people talk about dogs. Even my beloved Wayne suggests that maybe we’d want a dog now. I think I yelled that I did not want a fucking dog, that I have a husband with Alzheimer’s, three children, and four granddaughters, and I didn’t need another goddamn mammal to look after. I think that’s what I said. Wayne nodded. “No dog, then.”）
In the Hallmark card section, Brian and I fall into each other’s arms and cry very hard for a couple of minutes. No one gives us a second glance. I point out a box of cards with the pen-and-ink drawing of a lighthouse. Brian nods and shows me the box next to it, with Snoopy on top of his red doghouse, typing furiously on a glittering typewriter. These, he says; these’ll make ’em smile. Then we cry again, as if we are in our own bedroom, and again there is not even a concerned or disapproving glance. I tell him that he is amazing and my hero. On line, I see a bunch of profane potholders. I show him the one that says, Fuck this shit, and he laughs out loud.
We get mango smoothies next door, from a sulky girl who has clearly never ever made one, and we both feel, in this moment, that this shabby little plaza, with the Hallmark store right next to the empty Edible Arrangements store, is our new favorite place.
* * *
—
Our whole weekend is crying and talking and binge-watching TV at night. We’re not people with conventional moral compasses, but we don’t let ourselves binge-watch during the day. We do things: We weed, we buy cute dresses at the outlets for all four granddaughters, we go to a movie in the late afternoon, and usually, right after weeping in each other’s arms, we fall into deep naps, as if clubbed. We wake up and discuss the garden, or the news, or the summer’s end—we talk about Stony Creek Market’s Pizza Nights coming to an end at Labor Day and not about Brian’s decline. We talk about the grandchildren, who use him and abuse him as loved granddaughters do, braiding his hair, flinging themselves on his soft stomach, pretending to be tiny football players, trying to get past him with the swim move （a pass-rushing technique used by defensive linemen, is what I understand）， with which the three oldest are quite familiar. Before we fall asleep, Brian muses aloud about his wish to control his death and how I will arrange that for him. He’d made up his mind after forty-eight hours and never wavered. We cried and I agreed and he said to me, You go research it. You’re so good at that stuff—which meant that while I was looking up Exit International and the Hemlock Society and websites that would sell you both the plastic turkey bag and the helium machine for your own painless （they kept saying） DIY suffocation, I was also researching how to get sodium pentobarbital—fifteen or twenty grams, which is a ton—on the dark web. I was discovering the limits of my friends with medical degrees and the possibilities of carbon monoxide poisoning, which you can do in your car in your garage, but it’s become more iffy since 1975, when the car industry adjusted the CO emissions and then applied catalytic converters. Also, we don’t have a garage.
As we are spreading out all these possibilities between us, we occasionally bump into an offer or a roadblock from a close friend. A dear friend offers her garage and I hug her and we cry, but she calls me a day later and says her spouse says no, too risky to help us. Brian’s dearest oldest friend, his fishing buddy since 1979, says to Brian, “If you think you don’t need to go right now, and you want to wait awhile, I can just shoot you myself, in a year or two, in a field.” Brian hugs him. One of his brothers makes the same offer, and when Brian declines and points out that his brother could go to jail, his brother shrugs. “I’d be fine in jail. I don’t go out much anyway.” I have never liked the man more.
I look up how it feels to drown （that’s all you have to type in; lots of people have first-person accounts about near-drowning, and they seem divided between peaceful brain fog as the white light shines brighter and clawing one’s terrified way through terrible suffocation） and how to drown. Someone had told me about a friend of his in her late seventies with inoperable cancer, who filled her pockets with rocks and walked into the Connecticut River, which was, my friend said, practically in their backyard. I thought about it. Maybe we would need a small boat, since no river ran through our yard. Maybe we would need a small boat? I started looking for one on Craigslist one evening. For the next few nights, I woke up to visions of Brian and me, bundled in winter jackets, late at night, dragging the rowboat to our neighbor’s dock and launching it. Would I be in it with him or just wave to him from shore? If I wasn’t with him, how would he remember to take a few Percocet from his pocket so he wouldn’t feel pain but would still be alert enough to tip himself out of the boat? It kept me awake nights and ruined my mornings, but I thought, Maybe he’ll see it differently? I thought, This is what crazy looks like, and I thought, Nevertheless. I mention that drowning is a way some people end their lives. Brian looks at me, hard. “Are you kidding me? It’s cold. No.”
I say that I think that whatever method he chooses, I would like to be with him. “If that’s okay,” I say, as if this is only a second date and I don’t want to be one of those clingy women who are always pushing to find out the status of the relationship. （This—dating—is not something I actually know about. I have barely been on a date, as such, since I was nineteen. Later, Great Wayne points out that widowhood might finally be my opportunity to be single. “Your first opportunity as an adult,” he says, to underline that it’s been forty-seven years with only minute interruptions.）
“Here’s my first choice,” Brian says. “We go through this process and whenever it is that we reach the point that it seems like I’m really going downhill, you tell me and then we lie down together, maybe in my office, not in our bedroom—well, maybe in our bedroom, we’ll see—and you give me whatever will kill me. I trust your judgment.”