By late November, there’s frost and I live with panic. Thanksgiving is nearly here. The clock is ticking, which doesn’t describe it. The ticking clock is on the only door through which I can help my husband walk. Dignitas, the only door in the world for us, is closing and locking in front of me. Sometimes I go to my office to pace and then to cry. I ask everyone I can stand to ask if they know someone who might help us; mostly I don’t ask, because I can’t take it.
In one session, Donna, who has steadily supported Brian as he makes his peace with choosing to end his life and has encouraged me to cry when needed and not give up, suggests we call an old friend of hers, Dr. Bornstrom. I can’t quite figure out what he does: actual end-of-life activities, turkey-brining bag and Party City helium tank, which I’ve just read all about on a New Zealand website while sitting in the parking lot of Donna’s office. Five minutes ago, I didn’t know anything about this technique and now I have a fairly complete grasp on it. All of the advice is sensible and terrifying and I am pretty sure that I can’t do it and Brian won’t have it. I am still searching for whoever it is, the person who will help us, who will help us do whatever needs to be done.
While Brian is in the restroom, Donna asks me if he might like to go to Vermont and have a psychedelic pre-death trip. She says that psilocybin has been shown to reduce people’s fears about their impending death, helping them better embrace their limited time on earth and be at peace with their death. It sounds like a good thing and I say no. I don’t think I can do it, which is not the right place to stand on this, and all the way driving home I worry that in my selfishness and fear and aversion to psychedelic drugs (when I was in high school, the three boys in our little group got so high once or twice a week that they were immobile, tripping the day away. I made apple fritters in the kitchen of whoever’s mother wasn’t home and I pulled the blankets up around the boys before I left) I am depriving Brian of something that could help, could even be an exceptional experience. (He tripped a few times in college and after and seems to have suffered no effects at all, aside from still getting very lost in any place that isn’t the wilderness.) In the driveway, I tell Brian that this psychedelic experience is available to him and that we can go to Vermont anytime. Brian takes my hand. I’m sad, he says, and I’m still kinda angry, he says, but I’m not afraid. We don’t have to schlep to Vermont.