“I have failed him” is a confession that Amy Bloom utters more than once of her husband, Brian Ameche, in her courageous howl of a memoir. Spoiler alerts aren’t required to say that, ultimately, she does no such thing, even though ensuring that it’s so means making good on the ultimate pledge: helping her beloved kill himself.
Assisted suicide is the preferred wording at the Dignitas clinic in Switzerland, to where she and 66-year-old Ameche will eventually travel from their Connecticut home in January 2020, in order for him to down a fatal dose of sodium pentobarbital. They’ll fly business class, paid for by her sister, but the truer journey there takes months and involves endless paperwork and administrative delays, obstructive medical professionals (“villains”, she deems them), and a slaying range of bittersweet emotions. Because braided with the backstory of their offbeat midlife romance is Bloom’s account of watching her spouse fall victim to one of the world’s most prevalent but least understood diseases: Alzheimer’s.
