What You Say When You Don't Know What to Say

I received, the other day, the single most disturbing thing I think I have ever received in my life, via the mail at any rate. It was a package from a long-ago neighbor with whom I have remained in intermittent touch for the last twenty years, and of whom I have been very fond.

In 1988 and '89 I lived in an old house divided into a quadruplex, in one half of the downstairs. In the other half lived this man, a Dutchman, older than I by roughly my life again at that point. He was divorced, and his young son spent weekends with him. I was footloose, and he was lonely, and in the course of the year we were neighbors we became friendly and have remained so, albeit on a sporadic basis, with years intervening between communications.

So on Saturday I went out to read Tolstoy on the front porch, and I found this package, a big manila mailer containing a spiral-bound booklet. At first glance it seemed merely to be a lovely memoir and celebration of the life of this old friend's mother, who was a remarkable photographer, and who, as this memoir made clear, died last year in Holland at the age of 96. I was flipping through it, marvelling at the beauty of the photos (my friend also has quite an eye for things) and at this amazing woman's long and eventful life . . . until I began to realize that where the memoir was tending was towards her death by euthanasia, which of course has been fully legal in The Netherlands since 2001. My friend would go back to Amsterdam to see his mother; he would confer with the doctor; euthanasia would be discussed as a treatment option, in the same way that abortion is, in the event that the amniocentesis results aren't what you want. I kept reading, thinking, no, surely not. No. By the time the narrative describes my friend's last trip back, I'm praying that he returns to find his mother dead already. Anything. No. They did the assisted suicide. He and his brother sat there and watched the doctor do the lethal injection. Her last words to him: "You were a dear." She was lucid; she had been telling people, "I'll be dead by Sunday." Dear God.

So really, I'm not feeling quite so witty right now. I am never at a loss for words, at least written ones, though occasionally I find I'm at a loss for the right ones. I am writing a longer piece on this theme, an exercise that may be more an act of personal catharsis than witness, though clearly you have to say what you hold to be true, and not merely wink at the evil at work in the world or shove the evidence of it under the pillow and hope it stays there and doesn't haunt your nightmares (as if they weren't already nightmares). More intimidatingly, there's the matter of making some response to my friend. I wish with all my heart that I didn't know the whole story and could merely say, in ignorance, that I'm sorry for his loss. In fact, I'm sorrier even than I would have been, because the loss seems a loss of far more than a loved person, and not at all a gateway to the kind of freedom which he supposes himself to have found.