In her new book, "In Love," Amy Bloom writes about her husband, Brian Ameche, a gregarious, life-embracing former-college-football-player-turned-architect, and how they fell in love later in life in a small town in Connecticut. And she writes about his Alzheimer's diagnosis, the early days of his decline, and eventually his death at age 66.
But what distinguishes this book from other such memoirs is that Ameche made a decision within 48 hours of his diagnosis: He did not want to live on indefinitely as the horrendous brain-wasting disease took control and destroyed him. He preferred to die sooner. He wanted to end his life, he said, "while I am still myself, rather than become less and less of a person."
What he didn't understand then was just how difficult that is — and that, in the United States, our lives are not entirely our own to do with as we please.
