Our first night, we do manage to go down to the Widder’s Michelin-starred restaurant, but it’s confusing to both of us. There’s no water and no bread. The waiter seems more like a guy trying to finish his dissertation, waiting for us to leave his carrel.
“You know tapas?” the waiter says, and I say that we do indeed know tapas.
“So, this is our version of tapas,” he says, and hands us the menu, which lists three prawns for fifty dollars, a small venison sausage for forty. On the next table, we see one meatball and one sliced mushroom in a spoonful of beef broth. Brian and I stare at the meatball and the menu and the waiter stands perfectly still and we order chicken sandwiches from the bar. I’m too mad to order a twenty-two-dollar Aperol spritz. The fries are excellent.
The Provisional Green Light
We have a day to fill before our first interview with Dr. G., the Swiss doctor from Dignitas who will conduct two interviews with Brian, one Monday and one Wednesday, before our appointment at the Dignitas apartment on Thursday. We’d been informed, in our last phone call with our Dignitas contact person, Heidi, who has now revealed her actual name to us （S.）， that we’re “on our way to the provisional green light,” and then we got the more-official email, stating that we had now received the provisional green light and a Swiss doctor would write the prescription for the sodium pentobarbital that Brian would drink for his “accompanied suicide” in the Dignitas apartment. So, if Brian does as well as expected in the interviews, with Dr. G. checking on Brian’s discernment and determination, we’ll get the full green light on Wednesday and go to the Dignitas apartment on Thursday. （As my sister said, It’s like you do everything you possibly can to get your kid into Harvard and when you do, they kill him. Ellen was horrified it came out of her mouth and I was horrified to hear it, but she wasn’t wrong.）
I never pushed back with Dignitas in any way. I hadn’t complained when our phone interviews at home in the fall were regularly delayed and we were notified a half hour later, by email （“They’re Swiss,” I said. “How can they be late? How can they be late, again?”）， even though Brian and I were sitting in the kitchen, unbearably tense, bagels put aside so as not to make any untoward noises, waiting for the phone to ring, waiting to put Brian on speakerphone so that if they asked something important to which he could not find the answer, I could write it down in the notebook in front of us and he could then answer. This only happened once, when S. asked him why he wanted to end his life and he paused, not because he didn’t know the answer but because he’d forgotten the word for Alzheimer’s. Sometimes he said Anheuser, as in Anheuser-Busch, maker of adequate beer, and sometimes he said Arthritis. By the time we leave home for Zurich, he’s forgetting the names of our grandchildren and mixing up the dates of all kinds of things, he can’t find his way through the grocery store, but he always remembers the name of his disease.
On the phone call with S., I wrote ALZHEIMERS, as neatly as I could with a shaking hand, in giant letters. Brian nodded to me and cleared his throat, as if it’s just that he was moved by the gravity of the question, and then he answers thoughtfully: I don’t want to end my life, he said, but I’d rather end it while I am still myself, rather than become less and less of a person.
This is the call we have been working toward since August, five months, when it became clear that Dignitas was Brian’s best choice and probably, really, his only one.
We might have gotten there sooner had it not been for the neurologist who wrote in the lab report for Brian’s MRI that she was ordering it because of a “major depressive episode.” This was easy to write and not true, and if she had been a little more diligent or accurate, we might have been accepted by Dignitas in September and, in fact, we would not have been ready. By December, when S. told us that we could go forward with the process, that we could come to Zurich in January, the real thing was upon us, the world without Brian in it, the world going on without him, me alone and him in the earth or in the stars but not next to me. After we thanked S. one more time, we hung up, weeping in each other’s arms, and, without speaking, went right up to bed for a nap at 11 A.M.
Monday, January 27, 2020, Zurich
According to Dignitas data, 70 percent of the people who get the provisional green light never contact Dignitas again; the reassurance, the insurance, is all they need. That was not us. In early December, we were still hoping for the green light. We’d received an email that the Dignitas office would be closed from December 21 to January 6. It also said that we’d sent them the wrong form for Brian’s birth certificate and our appointments in Zurich could not, would not, be scheduled until those papers were received. S. attached a list of recommended hotels, all of them sounding pleasant enough, several of them very chalet-like, with lots of gingerbread and overlooking Lake Zurich.
But Brian didn’t want to take healthy hikes around the lake. He wanted to be in the center of the city, in either the oldest or the most modern part, as he always does. He told me to get some other hotel suggestions. He said, Just google some places and show me, and we began our virtual tour of Zurich, a cold German Swiss city famous for chocolate, some good fishing in the spring, holding on to the bank deposits that persecuted Jews made during World War II and not giving back a franc or a painting until 2000, and one good restaurant overlooking the famous Chagall windows.
（Short version: When we do get to Zurich, the windows are nice. The Fraumünster Church offered the commission to Chagall in the Seventies, when he was eighty years old. He finished the five windows in three years: Jacob wrestling with the Angel. The End of Days—angel with trumpet. Giant Crucifixion scene. I love Chagall and these bored me to fucking tears. Brian looked and looked, checking out the paint colors, the lines, and the soldering, and then we both turned away in the shadowy sacristy. We didn’t care and we weren’t moved. We had a better time in the tea shop afterward, eating exceptional, perfect cakes of red velvet topped with wobbling red gelatin and, on top of that, thin chocolate domes like bonnets. That, we could get behind. Fifteen minutes for the windows, one hour for the pastries.）
July 2019
The Blue Notebooks I’m hoping the neurologist we’ve made the appointment with will have an explanation for the past few years of things that Brian’s done that have puzzled me or hurt me and constantly worried me: After complaining about his phone and the calendar on the phone, Brian has started carrying a six-page paper calendar all over the house, from room to room, as my grandmother used to carry her ancient plastic handbag. When I say, We don’t need the calendar, he bristles. When I remind him that we have a large whiteboard calendar in the kitchen for coordinating doctor’s appointments, social engagements, and that, at his request, I’ve filled in a lot of squares with his appointments and mine, he says, I never look at that thing.
When I say, hoping for a fun evening like we used to have （for two working adults, we took in a lot of movies and a lot of popcorn）， Let’s go to the movies tonight or tomorrow, he gets up, searches for his paper calendar, and comes back to me, studying it hard, although there’s always a seven o’clock movie at the 12-plex five minutes away and we have neither children at home nor a dog. He brandishes the calendar every time we talk about any coming event, including getting takeout. I see him writing things down, in his new jagged handwriting.