When Brian Ameche, the husband of Amy Bloom, knowing her taste for simplicity, bought her “a very expensive … sweatshirt with tulle trim”, she might have guessed something was amiss. Looking back, she was “surprised that I didn’t look at that sweatshirt and think, ‘I see that you have Alzheimer’s’”. By this time Brian had begun to forget things, to lose his way and, most distressingly, to become distant with his wife, with whom he had lived in rare concord since their late-life marriage in their 50s. And yet, as I observed in my father when my mother was in the grip of this disease, denial is its almost inevitable attendant. Those closest to the sufferers often find they cannot bear to acknowledge what is happening.
Bloom’s sharply observed, often witty, eminently moving memoir charts the gradual progression of the illness from her slow recognition that her husband was not himself, to an eventual diagnosis, followed by a fraught search for a means for them to end his life. For “once Brian had finally been diagnosed it took him less than a week to decide that the ‘long goodbye’ of Alzheimer’s was not for him”.
