Me （outside voice）： Oh. A vacation. Sure. Yes.
By the time we get home, I’m hoping that he will have forgotten the big vacation. I ask him if maybe he wants a little holiday. I don’t mention a big holiday. A week ago, Great Wayne mentioned Brian might like one last big fishing trip and that I could, after all, stay at a motel in New Jersey while Brian fished for false albacore. I see that Wayne knows something about fishing and, like most men who like to fish, he has a real, if casual, affection for other men who fish. He’s sympathetic to the need to fish. Because it’s Wayne, I make calls to five different fishing guides in Jersey. It’s early November and it’s turned cold. No one will go. I tell Wayne I called five different fishing guides, because I don’t want him to think that I don’t care about my husband’s happiness. I understand that all happiness is fleeting, but I see now that there is fleeting and then there is the true and wall-like impossibility of ever experiencing this kind of happiness again, even once, even next week, let alone a year from now. Doors are closing around us, all the time. I reluctantly and hopefully call three more guides, working in the Carolinas. （And I tell Wayne about them, too.）
I have failed Brian.
* * *
—
And his doctors have failed him, including his internist, Good Time Charlie, the doctor who hates bad news. When Brian came to him a few years before, in 2016, complaining about his memory, GTC was all reassurance and Brian came home and told me so.
When we went to him for our B-12 discussion, Good Time Charlie was, as always, pleased to see Brian and didn’t say anything about seeing me. He looked at the referral from the neurologist and said, So, vitamin B-12. He said that B-12 used to be given by injection, that injection had been the gold standard, but—good news—not anymore. He said Brian should take B-12 in a massive dose, sublingually （dissolving under the tongue）， and he should take it for the rest of his life. Charlie explains that he’s ordering a second, superior B-12 test, which will reveal, he hopes, another possible cause of the B-12 deficiency, atrophic gastritis, in which the stomach lining has thinned and absorption is a problem. He looks at us pleasantly and half-rises out of his seat. I see that we are dismissed, and I see that Brian has no wish for further discussion.
Brian’s blood test comes back normal, and I’m glad and I’m still angry and puzzled about the last meeting and I leave a voicemail for Charlie.
He calls me a few days later and I tell him that I can’t understand why in the course of our meeting he never asked about the referral from the neurologist or Brian’s cognitive issues. He stammers and says that he assumed the referral was for headaches.
WHAT HEADACHES? I tell Charlie that if he looks at Brian’s chart, he will see that Brian has barely ever had a headache in his life.
Charlie says, “Okay,” like a fourteen-year-old boy, mulish and nervous.
“What does that mean? Does this seem okay to you? Okay that you had no interest in why a longtime patient was being referred by a neurologist? What’s okay about that?”
“Okay,” he says.
“It is not okay,” I say.
The End of the Guilford Fair
The end of the Guilford Fair was a nightmare. The only thing that would have made it worse would have been if the twins were with us, but Brian got through the ice cream purchases and the funhouse with them and now they’ve gone home with their parents. September rolling in, MRI behind us, we had managed to slide and swerve around the rising weeds of Brian’s dementia when they sprang up near the twins.
Once a week, for the last year, since retirement, Brian would pick the girls up from school or, in the summer, from camp. This summer, he went to get them at camp and couldn’t find them. Their mother and I waited in my driveway. I called his phone, over and over. After almost an hour, I got in my car to go find them all and called him one more time from the road and reached him. （We had as many fights about his phone as about all other things combined; the more difficult it became for him to use it, the more he rejected it, carrying it in case he needed it but turning the ringer off all day.） He sounded ragged, breathing hard. He said that he couldn’t find the room they were in and, also, they had been running around somewhere. Then he said that they were crying and everyone was upset. It was like talking to a man stranded by the side of the road, watching the car he’d just tumbled out of explode. I asked him if he needed me to come get him. He said no, that he’d be coming home soon, with the twins.
I fish in their memories occasionally, but neither of the twins seems to remember this incident. Eden remembers Babu playing checkers in a new “crazy” way, but she has sorted this as a memory of his being silly on purpose. That day he came late to pick them up, couldn’t find them at Guilford Lakes School, and they shouted at him and he shouted at them seems to have disappeared, gone below the surface.
My daughter and I spent family dinner that night smoothing things over. Brian swore, in front of us all, hand to God, that he did not say to them, “I will never pick you up again.” （Although I am sure he did say that. When the emails from his book club got overwhelming, when the online exchanges about fishing plans were too much for him, he’d say angrily, This is crazy. I won’t do this again.） Brian assured the girls that of course he would be happy to pick them up, anytime. （He never did it again without me.） Tears were dried. Hugs were had. They sat in his lap and ate most of his potato chips. And by the time we all went to the Guilford Fair two months later, the people who didn’t know about Brian’s Alzheimer’s and our hopes and plans for Dignitas were the grandchildren and most of our friends, the people we wished to protect and be protected from.
At Connecticut small-town fairs, giant fields are turned into parking lots for thousands of Subarus and Hondas. Old men in neon vests and stoned teenagers direct you to spaces. Rows and rows of shimmering, sunbaked cars faced us, and most of the parking-space pointers had now gone home. I looked left, Brian looked right, and then he was gone. He had decided to explore other, farther rows. （It will not surprise you to read that we were in the wrong lot entirely. Our lot was beside a different, more dilapidated white farmhouse, one field away.） I phoned him every couple of minutes. I began to cry. I pictured us reunited many hours later, when the fair closed, Brian brought to me by Guilford Fair security （slightly beefier versions of the parking-space pointers）， humiliated and furious.
Instead, after forty minutes during which tears and sweat ran from my face to my feet, I reached Brian on the phone and he told me where he was—Just standing by the llamas, darling—and I ran to him, slowing down before he saw me, so I didn’t seem alarmed. I was so frightened and anxious, I could hardly speak. I could not stop hugging him. Brian suggested we walk down to the road, from back to front this time, and then look for a place to perch, for an aerial view. We did and I saw the other lot. We found our car. I drove us home and Brian made himself a cheese plate and watched the news while I took a shower and recovered from the second panic attack of my life.
Thursday, November 14, 2019, Stony Creek
Moonlight in Vermont
By late November, there’s frost and I live with panic. Thanksgiving is nearly here. The clock is ticking, which doesn’t describe it. The ticking clock is on the only door through which I can help my husband walk. Dignitas, the only door in the world for us, is closing and locking in front of me. Sometimes I go to my office to pace and then to cry. I ask everyone I can stand to ask if they know someone who might help us; mostly I don’t ask, because I can’t take it.