The doctor does knock on the door and I almost scream.
Brian strolls over to the door and is his most amiable and pleasant, Brian self. （We used to say that Brian could talk to anyone. He could make small talk with a stump and, in the end, that stump would be hugging Brian goodbye, thanking him for a great evening, and inviting us all to the next stump get-together.）
Dr. G. is a small man with large, lovely, mournful eyes. We all shake hands and Brian and Dr. G. sit across from each other. I ask Dr. G. if I can stay for the conversation and he looks surprised. He says, gently, that of course I should stay, as this all concerns me, as well. I begin crying and both men look at me kindly. I pour myself a glass of water. Dr. G. （“Moishe,” he says. That’s my father’s name, and I feel lightly blessed somehow and I know that I have lost my mind） asks about our flight. He mentions, complaining lightly, just en passant, in what I can only describe as the Jewish fashion of complaining while assuring us, at the beginning and end of each sentence, that he is certainly not complaining, that he had to come so late at night because he was at a concert in the city and it was most convenient, coming after the concert, because he lives by the lake and doesn’t come into town every day but since we chose to stay in the Old Town, he had to make a special trip just to see us—not that he’s complaining. I beg him to take a glass of water and he does, probably so I’ll stop crying. He opens a folder and says to Brian, After I read your application, I knew I would see you, but I didn’t think it would be this soon. Brian says, It’s not a big window. I mean, no one knows how long they have, how much time they have, to make this choice. Dr. G. looks like he might argue but instead he says, You’re absolutely right.
He says that he began helping Dignitas （he is an ophthalmologist） after his father’s death from Alzheimer’s, which was long and painful, in every way. He says that Dignitas uses eight doctors and they are all pretty busy. I worry that he will mention again how much extra time it takes to schlep from the lake into the city, but he doesn’t. He says to Brian, I will ask you several times, many times, if you are sure that this is what you wish to do and I want you to understand that at any time, at any time between now and the final act, you are free to change your mind and not do this. I hope you will not do this, he says softly, and Brian nods. So, Dr. G. says, Are you sure that you wish to end your life on Thursday? Brian says that he is sure. I start crying again and, thank God, both men ignore me again. Dr. G. smiles and nods.
It seems to me, he says pleasantly, holding up the folder, you don’t believe in anything, Mr. Ameche. Brian laughs and says, I believe in a lot of things, but religion and the afterlife are not among them. Well, Dr. G. says, chuckling, you’ll find out before I will. Let me know. Brian smiles.
Dr. G.’s tone changes. Let me tell you what will happen: You will arrive at our apartment building in the suburbs of Zurich, in the morning, by 10 A.M. Do not be late. You will be greeted by two people from Dignitas. They will invite you in. You can take your time, he says. There will be no rushing. He looks at me, as if he can tell that I am the rushing sort, and I want to assure him that every minute of our time in Zurich is me trying to push back the clock.
There is some paperwork. There are chocolates. They will give you an anti-emetic, he says, so you will not vomit. You have up to an hour after that to make your choice about drinking the drink. If you need more time, they will administer the anti-emetic again. And again, you will have about an hour after that to drink the drink. After you drink it—it is a little bitter, he says, and I wonder how he knows. After you drink it, you will fall into a light sleep, then a deep sleep. Then it will be over. Mrs. Ameche, you can sit with him for a long time. （I’m glad he calls me Mrs. Ameche. I know Brian always gets a kick out of that.）
Brian nods attentively. Dr. G. says, At any time in this process, you may change your mind. Right now, or Thursday morning. No one will be surprised or distressed. We will all be glad for you. （I don’t know why this would be. Perhaps I would be glad, too, but only if it meant the spell was broken and my whole husband was returned to me and to himself and these last years turned out to have been just a terrible test, one poisoned apple after another, to prove that my darling deserves the life he had before.） Brian shakes his head.
“I know what I’m doing,” he says. “This is the right thing for me.”
Dr. G. nods. “I see that,” he says. “But I will keep asking.”
Brian and I sit back down, after he’s gone. I say that Dr. G. seemed nice and Brian agrees. Brian says, It’s going okay, and I agree. We sleep side by side, fingertips touching.
Babu, King of Castles With every one of our little girls, our granddaughters （Brian never thought, for one minute, that he should have had children. “I’m the baby,” he said cheerfully）， Brian became a better and better grandfather, the best Babu. “I feel like I robbed a bank,” he often said. “Never had kids and went straight to grandchildren. How lucky am I?” With every little girl, there was a phase, between two and four, when he was the Lego god, the Lord of the Towers and King of Castles, and we have pictures of each of them standing on Brian’s desk or coffee table, taller than he is, pointing proudly to the stack of blocks towering above them. Brian praised anything that seemed to show architectural or engineering skills: She copied the picture perfectly! Look how stable that is—she built a decent foundation! See how she put all the blue ones on one corner of the building envelope? I did a building like that.
When each girl got a little older and expressed interest in the more elaborate Legos, Brian would be at the kitchen table, attaching hard pink bouquets to tiny green stems, building and decorating a pastel brick wall with elaborate mosaics, hitching cellphone-size lilac RVs to tiny cars, while the little girl waited happily, occasionally handing him a piece of plastic or sharing some chocolate. （A visiting cousin found the bowl of candy on Brian’s nightstand and said, Oh, Uncle Brian is the luckiest man in the world. The granddaughters shrugged, happy to be in the know, happy to be the special people who could stick their hands right into Babu’s Candy Jar in the pantry and get nothing but a knowing wink from Babu, who could be counted on to turn his broad back, to hide them from their parents.）
Tuesday, January 28, 2020, Zurich
We walk around, exploring the fancy shops on Bahnhofstrasse, and we walk down to Lake Zurich again. We walk back. We can’t bring ourselves to go into the shops or browse the way we normally would. （We once spent a joyful half hour in an insanely expensive men’s clothing store in Chicago, just so Brian could try on dark-blue fedoras and Missoni mufflers and cashmere pullovers.） There’s a toy store near the hotel and we concentrate on that. I want to bring all the granddaughters something from Zurich. We get the twins, Eden and Ivy, a snow globe of two bunnies, even though I don’t like getting them gifts to share; there is only one snow globe, and it suddenly seems that there will not be a single decent gift in all of Zurich for me to bring back.
Our cover story is: Nana and Babu went on a vacation to Europe. While there, Babu died of a disease in his brain.
I’ve talked this over, a dozen times, with my therapist, Wayne. When the pace of my worrying and complaining about Brian became nonstop, a friend gave me a referral to Wayne, a psychiatrist—a man I’d met forty years earlier when I was a graduate student and he was striding Yale’s halls like a psychoanalytic god. I called him, introduced myself, said we’d met before; he clearly didn’t remember me and then I burst into tears. I said, I hope you can help me. I want to kill my husband, and I kept on crying. He said, You want to kill him because you love him, and I said, You are so right. Wayne, as far as I am concerned, saved me before and after this trip to Zurich, and in the end, he saved Brian, too.