In one session, Donna, who has steadily supported Brian as he makes his peace with choosing to end his life and has encouraged me to cry when needed and not give up, suggests we call an old friend of hers, Dr. Bornstrom. I can’t quite figure out what he does: actual end-of-life activities, turkey-brining bag and Party City helium tank, which I’ve just read all about on a New Zealand website while sitting in the parking lot of Donna’s office. Five minutes ago, I didn’t know anything about this technique and now I have a fairly complete grasp on it. All of the advice is sensible and terrifying and I am pretty sure that I can’t do it and Brian won’t have it. I am still searching for whoever it is, the person who will help us, who will help us do whatever needs to be done.
* * *
—
While Brian is in the restroom, Donna asks me if he might like to go to Vermont and have a psychedelic pre-death trip. She says that psilocybin has been shown to reduce people’s fears about their impending death, helping them better embrace their limited time on earth and be at peace with their death. It sounds like a good thing and I say no. I don’t think I can do it, which is not the right place to stand on this, and all the way driving home I worry that in my selfishness and fear and aversion to psychedelic drugs （when I was in high school, the three boys in our little group got so high once or twice a week that they were immobile, tripping the day away. I made apple fritters in the kitchen of whoever’s mother wasn’t home and I pulled the blankets up around the boys before I left） I am depriving Brian of something that could help, could even be an exceptional experience. （He tripped a few times in college and after and seems to have suffered no effects at all, aside from still getting very lost in any place that isn’t the wilderness.） In the driveway, I tell Brian that this psychedelic experience is available to him and that we can go to Vermont anytime. Brian takes my hand. I’m sad, he says, and I’m still kinda angry, he says, but I’m not afraid. We don’t have to schlep to Vermont.
Fall 2019, Stony Creek
We are waiting on Dignitas. Brian dictated his bio for them:
Biographical statement for Brian Ameche
I was born in Kenosha, Wisconsin, the son of first-generation, working-class Italian-American high school sweethearts. My father became a well-known college football player and then a professional athlete and he and my mother had five children （me, my three brothers, and two sisters） by the time they were 25. Eventually, there were six children, of whom I am the eldest. My youngest brother, Paul, died at 20 and we all miss him still.
We moved four or five times in my childhood and I spent most of my adolescence in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and went to private school there. I was on the wrestling, lacrosse, and football teams and was captain of all three teams through high school. I was recruited by Yale University, to play varsity football there for four years. As with many football players, my doctors have suggested that my years of hard contact on the football field may have led to my dementing disease.
I took some time off before graduate school and worked as a guide （hiking, climbing, fishing） in Colorado for a year. I’m still an avid fly fisherman and had hoped to do some guiding and instructing in my retirement.
Always drawn to design, construction, and visual art, I went to the University of Minnesota and got my Master’s in Architecture. I （like my father） married my high school sweetheart and we returned to New Haven, Connecticut, where I began my architectural career. In the course of the past almost-forty years, I have designed public housing projects （some of my best work）， the women’s athletic fields at Yale, a country club, a leading assisted-living facility, apartment buildings, corporate offices, and a wonderful Girl Scout camp. I loved designing and would be doing it still, if not for Alzheimer’s.
In my early fifties, my marriage ended. I met and fell in love with Amy, and we married, twelve years ago, with our friends and my family and her three wonderful children around us. We have built a great and happy life together and I am more sorry than I can say that Alzheimer’s is putting an end to that.
I tweak it a little and read it back to him. He makes a few more changes and gives it back to me. I make all the changes he wants, and he drops a line about his father winning the Heisman Trophy when I say, Jesus Christ, darling, they’re Swiss. They don’t care. Done. We have scones and coffee （and bacon and eggs for him） to sort of celebrate. Dignitas is pretty much my job now. We have dinners, we have the kids, I have some version of work, he has stained glass and therapy and the gym, to which I will be driving him by October. Brian is content, as far as that goes, to check in with me every few days regarding our Dignitas application process and offer encouragement. Occasionally, when we hit a speed bump of which he’s aware, he says: This is crazy. It’s my life, I should get to decide how to end it. Most days, he seems to feel that I’ve got the situation well in hand, that the end is coming too soon, certainly, but not right around the corner, not before we can do sushi and a movie many more times and that nothing bad will happen in the process, which will unfold as we expect. This is not true, that nothing bad will happen, and therefore not comforting to me. It leaves me quite alone with reality, but the way he feels is exactly what I want for him.
Often, in the morning, he puts his hand on me and says, Today, I feel pretty good. Sometimes he says, I feel like my memory is about 90 percent. I say that’s great. Some mornings, he says, I think I’ll start driving to the gym again, and we agree, as we do every time, that a reasonable compromise is that I’ll drive him or our son-in-law, Corey, will drive him to the gym （twenty-five minutes away） but that he can drive to the stained-glass studio, six minutes away （straight up the road and turn right at the Chowder Pot）。
To stained glass, today at 11:00.
Drive up the road past Stop and Shop, TURN RIGHT at the giant lobster.
Jayne’s studio is on the left, at Apple Orchard Gallery.
And I draw a heart.
This one time, Brian leaves to work on his last stained-glass project （a sunset or a sunrise） and comes back in three minutes. I forgot how to go, he says, and it is his bravery in saying so, getting the directions from me and going out again, that levels me. This man? This is the one that has to shuffle off this mortal coil? Every morning, as soon as Brian leaves our bedroom, I cry, furiously. I mentally review all the people—not even bad people, just people I happen to know—who should have to die instead of him.
A Little Help
At the same time that we are trying to check all the boxes for Dignitas, I take seriously their slow and careful approach and their underlining that no is a definite possibility. I’m trying to create Plan B, according to Brian’s directives, in which I get him a completely painless and lethal dose of something he can drink—no injections—while the kids gather round and I hold his hand. （I’ve read up, and on top of all that, I will have to make it look like I’m out at the movies or taking a long walk while he’s dying from his lethal dose, and that strikes me, a lover of English mysteries, as very suspicious behavior. How many wives leave a husband with Alzheimer’s on his own for the evening while they pop off to a movie or take a long stroll through the marsh?）