For more or less the same fee as Dignitas, with more or less the same application process, although with the addition of a second doctor interviewing you once in Switzerland, Pegasos provides the same accompanied suicide that Dignitas does, but the barbiturate can be injected intravenously （self-administered by turning a knob or pressing a button） or drunk, and the death is recorded on video. Dr. Erika Preisig and her brother, Ruedi Habegger, co-founded Lifecircle, but you can’t find it anymore because in 2019, Dr. Preisig was fined twenty thousand dollars and sentenced to fifteen months in prison （suspended sentence） after a wrongful-death suit was successfully filed against her—for mishandling the barbiturate involved in the assisted suicide of a depressed sixty-year-old woman. The court found that this woman had the discernment to choose to end her life but that Dr. Preisig had mishandled （which I think meant handled） the sodium pentobarbital in assisting her. So, Dr. Preisig disappears and her brother opens Pegasos. Pegasos defines itself mostly as better than Dignitas: Less red tape! Urgent situations can be addressed in weeks, not months! English is the first language for the volunteers! You can bring your dog! No membership fees!
In English big-city newspapers （MY WIFE ENDED HER LIFE AT DIGNITAS, The Guardian; I’M ANGRY THAT DAD HAD TO DIE AT DIGNITAS SO FAR FROM HOME, Daily Mail）， there are multiple articles every year about a husband or wife or children taking someone they love to Dignitas. It’s usually a first-person account of the anxious plane ride （and in England, they usually keep it even more quiet than Brian and I will, because the police have been known to come to the house as soon as the grieving family returns and announce that charges are pending） and then the drive to the little blue apartment building, which some people call the Blue Oasis, in the industrial outskirts of the suburbs of Zurich. The articles sometimes end before the person drinks the anti-emetic, and sometimes an article goes on to describe the very end and the return home.
Wednesday Continued, January 29, 2020, Zurich
Dr. G. knocks on the door in the morning and begins by saying that it will be a short meeting. He asks Brian twice if he has changed his mind and Brian says no. He and Brian talk about their shared love of the Dalai Lama and they each get to tell their story about being a young man and meeting His Holiness. They are pleased with each other. I wipe my tears on my sleeve. Dr. G. asks Brian a few questions to make sure that Brian knows where he is （Zurich）， why he’s here （to have an accompanied suicide at Dignitas）， and what will happen （have a chocolate, sign some papers, drink something so he won’t vomit, and drink the drink, is what he says）。 Brian answers just right and it is one of those moments when the fact that he answers correctly makes me think, Are we doing this too soon? Should we come back in six months? After Dr. G. leaves, and I cry some more and Brian is dry-eyed, I can see how far away he already is. His little boat is far offshore now.
We go out to dinner and eat not-bad Italian food and Brian orders with none of his brio. He doesn’t look at the waiter. Brian knocks over my glass of wine and the waiter puts six cloth napkins on our little table and Brian sits calmly while the mopping up occurs and another waiter kneels beside me to clean up the broken glass. I’m sure we speak but only about the food and the weather. We walk down a few side streets, through the mist, and circle around to our hotel. As he has every night, Brian asks if we can go for a stroll and I say yes, because how can I say no. It is cold and dark and slippery and I imagine that Brian feels as alone as I do but I can tell he isn’t as afraid.
Spring 2019, Stony Creek
Tell Me Why
Our normal life had begun to require a level of effort that I’d last had to make when I had an unhappy marriage, a full-time job, a teenager, a toddler, and a baby, with none of the joy. Having barely looked at another man or woman for fourteen years, I was now imagining myself having drinks on a rooftop lounge with pleasant but unlikely, even unpromising, companions. Brian and I were always stickily close; we liked to grocery shop together. We liked to go to the fish market and the bakery and the dry cleaner’s together. He was as familiar with my shoes and shopping preferences as my sister was. I had even driven with him across New England to visit fancy fly-fishing stores. Now I exhaled when he went for a long walk and ruminated late at night that maybe I could get him a small apartment in New Haven （a studio seemed punitively small, so I thought a decent one-bedroom, in a walkable neighborhood）， with some kind of helper, if needed.
How I could have contemplated “helper” and managed not to wonder why I was thinking that my sixty-five-year-old husband, who read Faulkner and worked out three times a week, would need a…helper, I couldn’t—absolutely could not—say.
We would still do parental and grandparental things together, and I imagined that somehow the family would never have to know that I found it impossible to live with this man who I clearly adored. I didn’t tell anyone in the world that I had these thoughts. I did tell close friends that he was driving me crazy with his male mid-sixties/early retirement/loose ends. And it will pass, I said to myself, and look—he’s making stained glass （I found the teacher, made the appointment for the lesson, and located the studio） and going to his book club （I scanned the planning emails when he felt overwhelmed and I ran to the library for the book） and he’s pursuing the occasional zoning fights of our little town and studying the town’s bylaws with great enthusiasm, so, really, what’s wrong? I couldn’t say, but I knew that this man was not the man I’d married, and the change had happened not over fifty years, which would have been very sad but not puzzling, but over three years. And since I still couldn’t say anything about it to anyone, I certainly couldn’t do anything about it.
I did the reading and I watched the videos and I pushed myself to see what I wasn’t willing or able to see a year ago—Brian had had the signs of mild-to-moderate Alzheimer’s since late 2016.
For the oldest son of a large Italian family, having a woman wait on him, or serve him, or assist him when assistance was desired （when it was not desired, there was no helping him at all） was pleasant and comforting; and, at least half the time, it was pleasant and comforting to me. I’d become a stepmother to a ten-year-old when I was twenty-one, and I liked that job more than I think most girls would have. I graduated from college, got and then quit the job of a lifetime at a theater in New York. （“My boyfriend thinks it’s too hard to have a family and be in the theater,” I said. Everyone was at least ten years older than I, and I think they felt the annoyed pity one does for lucky young people who don’t know what they’re throwing away. No one laughed or scolded me or took my car keys away. I moved back to Connecticut, moved in with my former professor and his son, and we became a family.） I took a job at a daycare center. I was home by three, so I could make cookies and play gin with my almost-stepson. I took him to doctors’ appointments （where the nurse stared at us both in our nearly identical graphic T-shirts, shaggy hair, and drooping bell-bottoms and then shrugged）， and I took a strong stand against his parents clothing him in earth-tone plaids, which made him look like a cholera victim. I shopped with him, played Othello and backgammon, tucked him in （when he wanted to be tucked in）， cooked what he wanted to eat, insisted he write thank-you notes, and defended him against all comers. I was as good a parent as I knew how to be, because there was something about the job that mattered to me （well, not “something”： my own mother, who was a loving presence and a terrible cook but never protected me from anything or anyone, handicapped as she was by besetting anxiety）。 I have liked caring and doing and protecting since my first round as a mother and got better at it with two more children, and by the time I got to Brian’s early Alzheimer’s—even though neither of us knew what it was—the steady ratcheting up of tactful assistance, comforting, protecting, and general back-leading was imperceptible to me.