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Material Type | Library | Call Number | Suggested Age | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Book | Searching... Cabell County Public Library | 616.8311 BLO | Adult | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
Amy Bloom began to notice changes in her husband, Brian: He retired early from a new job he loved; he withdrew from close friendships; he talked mostly about the past. Suddenly, it seemed there was a glass wall between them, and their long walks and talks stopped. Their world was altered forever when an MRI confirmed what they could no longer ignore: Brian had Alzheimer's disease.
Author Notes
A practicing psychoanalyst, Amy Bloom lives in Connecticut.
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Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Novelist Bloom (White Houses) looks back on the beauty and turmoil of accompanying her husband through the final days of his life in this deeply moving memoir. When her husband, Brian, was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's in 2019, he chose to end his life via assisted suicide at Dignitas in Switzerland. As Bloom writes, she worried "that a better wife, certainly a different wife, would have said no, would have insisted on keeping her husband in this world until his body gave out." But her love for Brian and his desire for a meaningful end of life drove their mutual agreement to take the steps for him to die on his own terms. With passion and sharp wit, she jumps back and forth between the beginning of their relationship, the Herculean effort it took to secure an agreement with Dignitas, and the painful anticipation of the final trip to Switzerland. Most poignant are the intimate moments they share as they make the most of their last days together. As she writes, "I imagine that Brian feels as alone as I do but I can tell he isn't as afraid." The result is a stunning portrayal of how love can reveal itself in life's most difficult moments. Agent: Claudia Ballard, WME. (Mar.)
Guardian Review
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". Because of their "eye-of-the-needle" requirements, apparently libertarian laws in the US mean that assisted suicide is all but impossible there. The "right to die in America is about as meaningful as the right to eat or the right to decent housing; you've got the right, but it doesn't mean you're going to get the goods," Bloom comments with typical tartness. An old friend offers: "'If you think you don't need to go right now, and you want to wait awhile, I can just shoot you myself, in a year or two, in a field.' Brian hugs him." His brother, making a similar suggestion, jokes: "I'd be fine in jail. I don't go out much anyway," at which Bloom comments: "I have never liked the man more." Finally they discover Dignitas, the Swiss organisation that assists those whose medical conditions lead them to choose to end their lives rather than endure the miseries of a "natural" death. Here begins the process of fulfilling the exacting demands required to take this mortal step, of which the patient's own "discernment" is considered paramount. The book is written in short chapters, giving a sense of pace to echo the urgency that now ensues - the couple must achieve their goal before Brian's mind is too disrupted for the decision to be judged truly his, a requirement that is the sine qua non of the Dignitas process. The account begins on 26 January 2020, in the final stages of this ordeal, with what is to be Brian's last journey. But it is interspersed with snatches of their history, during which we learn to love the handsome, greedy-for-life Brian, who declares to Bloom: "You should be with a guy who doesn't mind that you're smarter than he is, who doesn't mind that most of the time you'll be the main event ¿ I don't know if I can be that guy ¿ but I'd like a shot." To which Bloom appends, "We married." It is the swift but telling glimpses of that life together - she an ironic, intellectual, bisexual Jew, he a sporty hedonist from a devout Catholic family - that give the book its peculiar poignancy. But if Brian is the subject, it is Bloom who is the hero of this story. The disease renders her husband incapable of making the necessary tough decisions, of first wheedling and then railroading doctors who persist in the false diagnosis of depression that would prevent Dignitas accepting him as a candidate. It is she who must decide what to tell her children, and whether or not to prepare the grandchildren for the loss of their adored "Babu". The end of the story is told as frankly and unmawkishly as the rest. An anti-emetic is supplied to ensure the patient doesn't vomit up the prescribed lethal dose. But Ameche takes his time before downing it. "I know I'm going," he says. "I'm ready. I'm just not going to hurry." This is the most painful moment in an account that is not exactly free of painful moments, not just because of what is about to happen, but because some of the last minutes he will spend with Bloom are taken up with old football anecdotes. "I cannot manage to look interested in these stories," she writes, "because I'm not. He says nothing about our life, our love, our children and grandchildren." The effectiveness of the anti-emetic wears off, and he must be asked yet again if he wishes to go through with the procedure. He swallows a second dose, this time alongside the drug that kills him, falling silent so that Bloom suddenly longs for the football stories. She sits there until he is "gone from the world", and she must take the forlorn trip home without him. But he isn't gone. Because, as Brian enjoined her, she has written about him with all the brave-spirited, undaunted love to which the book bears stupendous witness.
Kirkus Review
A beloved fiction writer shares the story of her husband's assisted suicide after being diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. Readers will be locked into this gorgeously written memoir out of profound sympathy for the decision Bloom's 65-year-old husband made upon learning of his condition. A man who absolutely loved life, Brian immediately asked for help planning an early exit. By that time, the couple had for several years endured the depredations of his failing cognition without knowing why. Bloom describes this period with regret, longing, and her trademark mordant humor: "He has gotten me some really ugly jewelry in the last three years, things that are so far from my taste that, if he were a different man, I'd think he was keeping a seventies-boho, broke-ass mistress in Westville and gave me the enam-eled copper earrings and bangle he bought for her, by mistake." After researching what the future might hold, they sought the services of Dignitas, a Swiss organization supporting "accompanied suicide." The application process was complex. As one of Bloom's friends joked, "It's like you do everything you possibly can to get your kid into Harvard and when you do, they kill him." Along with this black humor comes plenty of despair. Sadness and tears suffuse the narrative, and many readers will shed tears of their own. In one heart-wrenching section, the author describes the plight of a family friend who shared Brian's condition: "She winds up in the care of one of her daughters, and she does not get to Dig-nitas, because that window probably closed two years earlier, and she will spend the rest of her life in a memory-care unit, and the best outcome I can hope for is that she dies soon. She does not die very soon and when we talk next, she is in the memory-care unit and she says, Something very strange is going on here, please come get me." As Alzheimer's becomes more prevalent, this shimmering love story and road map is must-read testimony. You will never forget this book, and if you do, let's hope someone close to you remembers. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Known for her introspective fiction (including National Book Award finalist Come to Me), Bloom shares a piece of herself in this first memoir. Bloom gives the reader full access to her experience of coming to terms with the onset of her husband's Alzheimer's disease and his decision to seek physician-assisted death. Bloom interweaves this experience with recollections of their past together as a mid-life couple in which each found their true life partner. Bloom's vivid imagery puts the readers in each scene; although written with a loving heart, this is an honest account that's not seen through rose-colored glasses. Of unique interest is the couple's experience of physician-assisted death, which they had to carry out in Switzerland instead of the United States, where access to assisted death is limited and cumbersome. Far from exploiting her husband's story, Bloom's memoir is a final homage to the man she loved; she says that her husband asked her to write this book because she was the only person who could do it with her particular perspective. VERDICT A memoir that will appeal to many readers as a study on grief, acceptance, relationships, and love. With her background in psychotherapy, Bloom provides clear and vivid insight on going on with life while accepting the loss of a loved one.--Kelly Karst
