A couple share a drink in an airport bar: they’ve had a good marriage, but know they won’t be toasting their next wedding anniversary. Their journey will mark a new, uncertain beginning for one and an ending for the other.
This memoir by psychotherapist and writer Amy Bloom—following several works of fiction and short stories—charts her husband Brian Ameche’s decision to end his life at the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland. Its short, non-linear chapters are vignette-like and evoke the dreamy, almost unreal, nature of the process—from Ameche’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis in 2019, back to the life they built together and then forward to late January 2020, when they travel to Zurich.
“‘Please write about this,’ said my husband,” runs the book’s epigraph. And in doing just that, Bloom incrementally builds the foundations of Ameche’s choice, describing the preparations attendant on assisted dying and the bureaucracy involved. This is revealed to the reader through copies of emails with the clinic, cognitive-assessment sheets and comments on American legislation on the issue: “choosing to die and being able to act independently while terminally ill is a deliberately narrow opening,” she writes.
The book’s raw honesty recounts fears both private and public as the “rising weeds” of dementia take hold, and Bloom is confronted with the slow, gradual loss of her husband even before his death. Ameche is asked many times whether he is sure about his decision, and his response is telling: “I don’t want to end my life,” he says, “but I’d rather end it while I am still myself.”
He is tenderly remembered in all his enthusiasm, his joy, in his work as an architect and his letters to his small granddaughters that begin: “I wish I could stay longer.”
