Amy Bloom blubbers buckets in her latest book, IN LOVE: A Memoir of Love and Loss. Unless you are made of stone, by the end you will join her.
IN LOVE is a two hundred page love letter to her husband, Brian, diagnosed with Alzheimer’s Disease and determined to die with dignity before the dementia debilitates him to memory damnation.
Without an ounce of schmaltz, Bloom describes the journey from diagnosis to decision to die with dignity, to death, ending not at a funeral or a wake but a wedding day, Brian and hers, where he succinctly says: I love you so much. That’s all I can say. I love you so, so much and I will love you every day of my life.
No talk of in sickness and in health or till death do us part. No need. The declaration was pure, crystalline, perfect, complete. Every day of my life.
Not every day is chronicled in IN LOVE, but there’s enough to get a good grasp of those days. She writes that middle aged women are supposed to look for the safe harbour, for the port in the storm of life. We are supposed to look for the calm and the comfortable. Brian was the port in the storm. And he was the storm.
Bloom knows how to pluck the heartstrings and how to tickle the funny bone and she does it equal measure, moving the prose along with exquisite wit, energy and empathy.
Intensely personal, IN LOVE does not shy away from the ethical complexities, political problems and bureaucratic barriers to assisted dying. It is all part of the process that feeds the anxiety of those committed to carry out the patient’s wishes.
Arriving in Switzerland to attend Dignitas, a facility for assisted dying, Brian is examined by a doctor and asked a few questions to make sure he knows where he is and why and what will happen. Brian answers just right and it is one of those moments when the fact that he answers correctly makes Amy think, Are we doing this too soon?
Such anxiety, as anyone who has dealt with a loved one suffering dementia, is commonplace and agonising. Lucidity and confusion play tag, doubt undermines decision.
Anxiety was assuaged by a letter from Brian’s American physician in a letter written to Dignitas, which, in part, reads: He is a strong, determined man of mettle and courage. He abhors the compromised existence lit only by a flickering, fading cognitive flame as he submerges into the darkness of an expiring existence.
IN LOVE is a humane and sometimes hilarious memoir of how love crosses borders of pain and pleasure with passports stamped with compassion, empathy and care, explores the extreme frontiers of emotion with devotion and determination.
An acclaimed novelist and short story writer, Amy Bloom has created a small masterpiece of memoir with IN LOVE. It humbles any writer attempting to review it. If one could only emulate the seemingly effortless storytelling, the elegant style, that finding a better way to put almost anything, in the hope to enthuse others to experience the sublime pleasures and pain of these pages.
Word upon word, sentence upon sentence, paragraph upon paragraph, chapter upon chapter, IN LOVE is a stupendous construction, a towering steeple on the temple of superior storytelling.
IN LOVE by Amy Bloom is published by Granta.