“For couples therapy?” I say.
Brian thinks over why he wants me to come.
“Sure. And because lots of the stuff we discuss, I don’t remember after. You could help me remember.”
I say yes immediately. I don’t want to do this. We have been in couples therapy, he and I, lots. We had a wonderful old lady who seemed to love us both. Be quiet, she’d tell me, putting up her hand like a crossing guard. It’s not your turn. And you, she’d say to Brian, pay attention, this part is important. She told him to stop being a selfish baby and she told me to stop being so hard on him. She said to him, You chose her, this woman who doesn’t wait on you hand and foot. And just as I was about to say, I actually do, pretty much, wait on him hand and foot, she’d cock a dyed eyebrow in my direction. You chose him, you chose the opera and the red sauce, not the white wine and the gloom, at which point she’d cackle and Brian and I would laugh, pleased with all of us. We were mad for her and put her on retainer, in effect, after our first session, a year before we married. We kept up with her, on and off, until a few years ago, when it seemed once more that we had things in hand.
Once, many years ago, Brian was having a couple of bad, sulky weeks and I wasn’t sure why, and I was so mad at him I said that I thought he must be having an affair. He stared at me openmouthed, and then he said, “I’m not having an affair, I’m just being a prick.” Then he handed me his phone and said, Call Rachel. We can go see her and then after we can go to Tre Scalini. In the car, he said, Who am I having an affair with? I couldn’t think of who it might be, and then the storm was over but we went anyway and also to Tre Scalini, because Brian loved their early-Seventies Italian restaurant vibe and their good Bolognese sauce and their mediocre antipasto plates—and he felt about a meal in a restaurant the way people feel about money and good health: always better to have it.
Call me anytime, Rachel had said cheerfully at our last session, five years ago. In 2019, Rachel called me. She’d heard from a patient who was a friend of mine that Brian had Alzheimer’s and was going to Dignitas. Just come to my apartment, please, she said.
When I get there, I ring the doorbell many times and finally she appears: thin and distracted. “Oh,” she says, “I wasn’t sure it was the doorbell.” Her house is a shrine to psychoanalytic theory, Marimekko, and mid-century tchotchkes from all over the world, and she guides me to a worn sofa.
She tells me that although she’s told her patients she has a medical condition and will be retiring soon, she actually has Alzheimer’s and hopes she can refer some patients to me. She can’t find the patients’ names, and we sit down and she says: I heard about you and Brian. I’m hoping, I can, y’know, get on board with the two of you. She describes the way the three of us could travel to Sweden. Switzerland, I say, and I tell her that that’s not the way it works, that it’s quite a long process of application. She looks disappointed.
“Do you know I have Alzheimer’s?” she says.
“Yes, I do.”
“How do you know that? Who told you?”
I don’t mention the visit （or the next or the next） to Brian. I tell Rachel that I will have to be out of touch for a while （because Brian and I are working on getting to Zurich and I know I cannot shepherd him and then her）。 She tells me that her lawyer is on her side and that she thinks maybe he can help her get to Sweden. Switzerland. I say encouraging things about her lawyer, who sounds like a nice man, and I say, repeatedly, that I hope she talks to her daughters about how she’s feeling. “You mean about my hip,” she says. I say no, I mean her forgetfulness. “Well, they don’t need to know,” she says. “You know, Amy. You can take care of it.”
I encourage her, again, to talk to her daughters about her concerns and I know that everything I am saying is pointless. Finally, I ask for her daughters’ phone numbers, and Rachel cannot or will not give the numbers to me. She winds up in the care of one of her daughters, and she does not get to Dignitas, because that window probably closed two years earlier, and she will spend the rest of her life in a memory-care unit, and the best outcome I can hope for is that she dies soon. She does not die very soon and when we talk next, she is in the memory-care unit and she says, Something very strange is going on here, please come get me.
Birdseed
One day, after breakfast, Brian says, “I should get birdseed. We don’t have any. I put birdseed out all year round, and then a few weeks ago there were bugs in the seed and so I stopped for a couple of weeks.”
“You stopped for a year,” I say, and I think, What in Jesus’s name is wrong with you, Amy? Who cares?
Obviously I do, because I wish to make the point that the birds have suffered and that even though the bugs-in-the-seed problem was bad （and it was gross: Winged bugs flew out like a horror movie）， he didn’t deal with it for almost two years, in fact. I am, apparently, committed to telling him it was more than two weeks. Brian’s in charge of all things avian, and I’ve affronted him by telling him that he hasn’t taken care of the birds. I try hard not to say things like this, but every once in a while my need to prove a point, such a base and unattractive need, rises up and I meet it by telling him things that he doesn’t need to hear. I’m ashamed of myself, but then Brian turns on me and says that he can’t understand why he is being “grilled” about birdseed. He gets a little loud and very irritable and he leaves abruptly to go fishing and I’m glad, not only because he’s gone but since he yelled at me, quite unfairly （you could say that I was pressing the point about the unfed birds, but I wasn’t grilling him）， I don’t feel ashamed anymore.
* * *
—
Days later, we are in Donna’s office, still talking about birdseed, after a fashion. Brian sees the birds outside Donna’s window and says, I should get some birdseed. I nod.
We are there for something like couples therapy. It looks like couples therapy, since we are sitting next to each other, facing her, in a small room with beige carpeting and we look at each other at intervals, fondly and nervously. A couple of times my eyes well up with tears. It’s not like couples therapy, because neither of us has the hope that the other will change. Whoever Brian is now is who he’s going to be for as long as our life together lasts. Then I think, well, that’s true of most couples therapy, really, although it’s not usually how I open the first session when I’m the therapist.
* * *
—
In November 2019, in Donna’s office, months after the diagnosis but before the acceptance from Dignitas, Brian says, I think I’d like to go on one last vacation before I die.
Donna （she’d been leading him toward a discussion of ways he can show me support）： Ah. A vacation.
Me （inside voice）： Are you fucking kidding me? Arrange a trip? Now? And where? Someplace we’ve been and loved, which will now be some half-baked, propped-up version of the real thing? Some new place that I will help you negotiate while you chafe at my attention and wander off to the We Never Close Bar in some foreign city, with nothing but a pocketful of euros and your friendly grin?