“I cannot take all of these losses,” I said to my therapist, The Great Wayne, as I lay down, sniffling on his absurdly proto-Freudian Peruvian rug-covered couch.
I had a list of large and small losses: my parents (whom I miss every day, but orphaned at 55 does not feel like someone has done me wrong); my old house (which I miss only at the holidays when my new house is an exploding clown car of children and grandkids); my perfect, helpful and unintrusive nextdoor neighbour who moved away suddenly, replaced by someone who is none of the above; my older sister, hospitalised twice; and, more than all of these, my husband, Brian, my constant companion and best beloved, who had been gone from me and from this world for a month. Brian was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease at 65, and, having seen its ravages in his own family and witnessed his own decline, he was determined not to make what he called “the long goodbye”. I supported and helped and wept, every day, while he arranged for his own peaceful and painless assisted suicide at Dignitas, in Switzerland.
