I, it's Diane. On my mind, books. This month I'll be sharing a few conversations from my monthly book club series.

Today, I meet Bloom. Part of what Brian wanted me to write about was to let people know about planning and expectations for the end of their life in the United States.

I selected Bloom's memoir in love as my March 2022 read. It deals with an issue extremely important to me, medical aid in dying.

I've supported the movement to expand access to this life-ending option since 2014 when Maya has been separate of painful and prolonged death from Parkinson's disease.

In this book, Amy Bloom tells the story of how she helped her own husband die after a tragic diagnosis. Amy Bloom joined me on Zoom last year. I hope you enjoy the conversation as much as I did.

Welcome to the March meeting at the Diane Reim book club. Today, the book is in love. I met more of love and loss. And the book's author, Amy Bloom, is going to be with me when her husband, Brian, was diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer's. He made the decision to end his life.

The question of how he would do that was left to Bloom. The book is both the portrait of a marriage and the story about how Bloom helped fulfill Brian's wish.

Amy Bloom is a best-selling novelist and short story writer and a professor of creative writing at Wesleyan University. I'm so thrilled to be here with me today. Welcome to you, Amy.

It's so good to be here. It's so good to see you again.

Thank you. Amy, tell me a little about Brian, who he was and why you felt so hard for him.

Oh, I'm glad you asked why I felt so hard for him and not why he was who he was because that would be a much longer story.

You know, he was a big dog. He was a big physical presence. He was had a big laugh. He had a big heart.

He was very much the oldest son of a large Italian family with everything that that implies, in case you happen to know large Italian families.

And he was always two things, a great embraceer of life. The kind of guy that if you said to him, honey, there is the drag queen mermaid parade in Coney Island starting in just two hours.

He would say, let me get my hat. I love that quality. And he was always game.

So whatever it was, something new, something different, trying something.

He was really quite committed to being in therapy, as he said he had lots of things to unpack and undo.

And again, just game for it. One of my favorite things about him was that when he was in therapy at one point sort of sorting out things about life as one does.

His therapist was a very serious old school psychoanalyst and Brian would come back and said, we had the best time.

We were talking about Yale's defensive line this year and where the problems are and I'm thinking, is there any actual therapy. And that's what he was like.

So you were married for almost 13 years when Brian died. How far into the marriage did you first begin to see signs that Brian was changing?

Well, I first noticed it, you know, as anybody who knows people with Alzheimer's, it's really a diagnosis that occurs in hindsight in lots of ways.

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