A heartbreaking long goodbye
In Love: A Memoir of Love and Loss
Granta, £16.99
Ihave a dark kind of optimism,” Amy Bloom once said. “To me, a happy ending might be that everyone is still alive, or that no one is rotting away with Alzheimer’s.” It’s hard reading this sentence now because her new book is a moving account of her husband’s death following his diagnosis with dementia.
It took the neurologist under an hour to give them the diagnosis following an MRI scan and various mental tests. The couple made a quick decision. “It took Brian less than a week to decide that the ‘long goodbye’ of Alzheimer’s was not for him, and less than a week for me to find Dignitas,” (the Swiss non-profit organisation offering accompanied suicide in Zurich).
This was classic Bloom. She doesn’t pull her punches. There is no false rhetoric, no empty sentimentality. She tells it as it was: “We won’t make it to our thirteenth wedding anniversary,” she writes but gives few details of their 17 years together. They fell in love in 2005, both unhappy with their current partners, both liberal Democrats in a small town in Connecticut. He was an architect, she was already established as a writer.
Despite the title, In Love is not a romantic book. It is about the different stages of her husband’s Alzheimer’s. “His memory loss felt sudden: names disappearing, repetition, information turned upside down, appointments and medications scrambled. Suddenly, it seemed, we argued about everything.” Bloom is puzzled. Brian is no longer the man he was. She starts looking at websites and then the doctors take over. “I see the white spaces where the brain no longer is, and so does he.”
The blows come thick and fast. First, there’s the diagnosis. Worse still, there’s no cure. He can’t drive any more. “Brian jumps in: ‘I might be in an accident.’ ‘You might kill someone’, the neurologist says.” His world quickly shrinks. In less than six months they are on a flight to Zurich so he can commit suicide. She wraps her arms around him “as if he is my baby, at last gone to sleep, as if he is my brave boy going on a long journey, miles and miles of Nought.”
Bloom is still angry, with the doctors and psychiatrists, and with the cruelty of what happened. He was in his mid-60s. They both had so many years ahead of them, all those lovely grandchildren.
Oddly, though, the book is too much about her. You get little sense of him, the confusion and terror he must have felt. Their family and friends seem curiously marginal. The book is about two good people let down, not given the right advice. Perhaps someone should have told her to wait longer before writing
Bloom is angry with the doctors and the psychiatrists, and with the cruelty of what happened