Nothing Was the Same Nothing Was the Same Read online

  I learned to live in expectation of assault. From nowhere, a memory of Richard would compel me, like some recollected scent, into a region of my mind whose existence I had forgotten. Then I would coil to protect myself, huddle as prey against predator. He cannot be gone, I would rail against the gods, caught again in the presence of his absence. He will not be back, I would know after each new confrontation. It became clearer over time, less wavering. He will not be back. He has been away too long.

  Grief taught through indirection. It was an unyielding teacher, shrewd and brutal. It attacked, soft and insidious at times, gale force at others, insistent that I see Richard from first one slant and then another—sometimes in fragments, at others full-on—until I could put him, and the two of us as we had been together, in the more distant place where all to do with him had to be. Memory and regret bypassed my rational mind and saw themselves straight into the festering places.

  I fought hard against this, defiant. If he cannot stay, I would rail at Grief, do not bring him back. But grief teaches in its own way, and thoughts of Richard came and went in a manner not of my choosing. Grief, pre-Adamic and excellently evolved, knew how best to do what it had to do. Richard had to come and go, return and leave again, if he was to take leave in the way he must. He had to take leave in order that I might find a new place for him; in order that I might find a new way to be with him, in order for life to go on. Or so I found some peace in believing.

  Grief, said C. S. Lewis, is like “a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape.” This is so. The lessons that come from grief come from its unexpected moves, from its shifting views of what has gone before and what is yet to come. Pain brought so often into one’s consciousness cannot maintain the same capacity to wound. Grief conspires to ensure that it will in time wear itself out. Unlike depression, it acts to preserve the self. Depression is malignant, indiscriminately destructive. Grief may bear resemblance to depression, but it is a distant kinship.

  Physically, I felt far better after Richard’s death than I had during my bouts of depression. I slept restlessly but well enough, and when I did not, medication usually worked. My mind narrowed to a more insular universe. In an essential sense, I was alone. Grief, like depression, is a journey one must take largely unattended. I pulled in my dreams and kept company with the past. The future was set aside, put in abeyance. I had less energy, but enough to see me through. This is never so in depression. Weariness pervades the marrow when one is depressed; it is what renders despair intolerable. I bled out during my depressions. This was not so after Richard died. My heart broke, but it beat.

  My mind knew that things were not right after Richard died; it knew that everything about me needed tending. Solitude allowed tending, and grief compelled solitude. Time alone in grief proved restorative. Time alone when depressed was dangerous. The thoughts I had of death after Richard’s death were necessary and proportionate. They were of his death, not my own. When depressed, however, it was my own death I thought about and desired. It was my own death I sought out. In grief, death occasions the pain. In depression, death is the solution to the pain.

  I was notably restless in the months after Richard died and, disturbed by this, I spoke to my psychiatrist, concerned that I might be getting ill again. He reassured me that such restlessness was an unavoidable and probably necessary part of grieving. In time, it became less distressing; it was never the perturbing agitation of mania. So, too, the sadness of grief was never so extreme as that of depression. It did not obliterate my reason. I was profoundly unhappy and distraught in the months after Richard died, but not hopeless. My mood, fixedly bleak during depression, was not so during grief. It was mutable and commonly rose in response to the presence of my family and friends. I was generally able to meet the demands of the world. I conserved my energy but was able to call upon it when I had to. Like a butterfly in the rain, I sought hiding places and kept my wings folded tight about me until I had no choice but to move. When I had to move, I did, albeit gingerly and not far. In time, the weather cleared. Even during the worst of my grief I had some sense that this would happen, that the weather would clear. I did not have this faith during the merciless months of depression.

  My mind did not retain full clarity after Richard died. Far from it. But my confusion during grief was different from that which I had experienced when depressed. During both, I ruminated: my thoughts, repetitive and dark, churned over and over and made me doubt that I would ever create or love again. When I was depressed, however, each thought was not only dark but death-laden and punitive. No simple good came from the ruminations of melancholy.

  Grief cut me more slack. Memories came unsought and disturbed my equanimity. Still, they carried with them an occasional sweetness, a periodic tincture of life. My thoughts did not dwell on the pointlessness of life; they dwelled, instead, on the pain of missing a life. Hope can find a place in a mind missing love. It cannot find a place in a mind taken over by depression. In grief, one feels the absence of a life, not life itself. In depression, it is otherwise: one cannot access the beat of life.

  Grief, however, creates a strange sensitivity. The world is too intense to tolerate: a veil, a drink, another anesthetic is required to blot out the ache of what remains. One sees too much and feels it, as Robert Lowell put it, “with one skin-layer missing.”

  After Richard died, I reflexively shied away from anything that might hit a minor key, sound a deeper note. I struggled to find ways to keep from being overwhelmed by what I saw and heard around me. I found solace at his grave, in part because of this disturbing sensitivity. I knew I would find quiet there. There was comfort in the old trees and in the stillness of the buried. I newly appreciated the colors of the earth; vibrant ones jangled my nerves, seemed garish and intrusive. For many months after Richard’s death, I brought no primary colors into our house. I hung beige drapes and purchased dull linens and drab clothes. It was a beige time in my life, which I later took to calling my “antifrock” period. My new dresses were meant to conceal, to inhibit the responses of others. They were the opposite of summer frocks: they were anything but free and light.

  The parts of me that froze when Richard died had to thaw slowly; otherwise, I would drown. Life had to return inchmeal; my heart could open up only small territories at a time. I turned by instinct to music to help with this, but it was not the solace I thought it would be. Only hymns, which quieted my nerves, brought predictable comfort. Schumann and Beethoven ripped my heart apart. Their music, ordinarily a source of immense pleasure, pierced me in a manner I found unbearable. The beauty was too human and yet unearthly: it was too intense, too direct an emotional hit. Schumann and Beethoven awakened in me things best left alone. In the one completely irrational act of my grief, I gave away my entire classical musical collection. I did not want to have access to such pain.

  I cloaked my senses in other ways. The first Christmas Eve after Richard’s death I went to a Presbyterian church, not the Episcopal church to which I belong. In an immediate way, I did not want to run into people I knew or to remember times I had been there with Richard. More viscerally, I did not wish to risk a sudden flooding of memory at midnight. I did not want to come out of the church into a crisp night with bells ringing and the chance of snow. It would be a pure assault on the senses. Although confirmed as an Episcopalian, I had attended Presbyterian churches often over the years; for that first Christmas, I found the prospect of their services more gentling: less ancient in ritual, no kneelers and no kneeling, more congregational. Communion would be in the pews, not at the altar; wine would be in small cups, not in a silver chalice. The carols of Christmas Eve would be altogether more comforting than the Mass of Christmas morning. I would offset the intensity of the Anglo-Catholic liturgy with the sparer Scottish church tradition.

  Yet my Presbyterian Christmas gave only the slightest of reprieves. When, toward the end of the service, the church was darkened and each of us sat with lighted candle and sang to
gether “Silent Night,” I cried. I cried, missing Richard. I cried because “Silent Night” was his favorite carol. I cried because there was really nothing I could do to keep his memory at bay.

  “I miss him in the weeping of the rain,” wrote Millay. “I miss him at the shrinking of the tide.” Yes. But I miss him everywhere.

  From the beginning, poetry consoled in a way that music could not. I read deeply, if fitfully, after Richard died. Such consolation was never possible for me during the times I was depressed. When depressed, I could not concentrate well enough to read; little made sense to me and the written word left me cold. When depressed, nothing could open my heart or give me courage. I was too dulled, too incapable of receiving life; I was dead in all but pulse. Only after depression took its leave could I turn to the experiences of those who had known deep despair or been mad—Robert Lowell, Byron: so many.

  Grief, on the other hand, rendered me able to take solace from those who had written so well about loss and suffering. After Richard died, I turned instinctively to Tennyson’s In Memoriam, which I had read when seventeen, recovering from my first siege of suicidal depression. I found it then, as I found it after Richard’s death, to be an astonishing work: a passionate journey through suffering; a poem of great doubt and greater love. It is a poem that makes sense of the complexity and ferocity of grief, a poem of regret and renewal and letting go. Tennyson’s grief is raw in In Memoriam, and in the nakedness of his pain is a peculiar, defining power.

  Perturbation is elemental to Tennyson’s elegy, and it was one of the things that first drew me in. He strews his poem with images of howling, blasting, lashing: rooks are “blown about the skies;” the sky is sown with “flying boughs.” There is a “wild unrest that lives in woe.” “Can calm despair and wild unrest / Be tenants of a single breast?” he asks. It is clear throughout that they can and are. Nature is portrayed as “careless of the single life,” as “red in tooth and claw.” Grief, for Tennyson, is a sickened and violent thing: “The blood creeps, and the nerves prick / And tingle; and the heart is sick.” Time is “a maniac scattering dust, / And Life, a Fury slinging flame.”

  I found solace in Tennyson because I found his grapplings with grief so pained that I believed them. He wrote of the dreadful missing, the nights and seasons that pass unshared. He brought to his portrayal of grief lines of staggering beauty; he offered a solace that was not an easy solace. Each anniversary of death, each Christmas, each ringing in of the new year found in Tennyson a passing, a changing, an evolving apprehension.

  There is no straight path in Tennyson’s poem of grief. Understanding comes, only to dissipate; faith enters but to leave; and resignation to death is now and again incomplete. Yet death must be acceded to if it is to give way to life. This Tennyson makes clear in his great image of the wild, tolling bells:

  Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky,

  The flying cloud, the frosty light:

  The year is dying in the night;

  Ring out, wild bells, and let him die.

  Ring out the old, ring in the new,

  Ring, happy bells, across the snow:

  The year is going, let him go;

  Ring out the false, ring in the true.

  Ring out the grief that saps the mind …

  Grief transforms the nature of how death is experienced. There is wisdom in the pain attached to grief; it is not irredeemable suffering. It is not suffering without an end: despair cannot indefinitely “live with April days, / Or sadness in the summer moons.”

  I found that in my old copy of In Memoriam I had bracketed lines toward the end of the poem. After Richard’s death I wrote out these lines as an act of faith, a hope that I might grow into them. The years of grief, Tennyson had written, “Remade the blood and changed the frame, / And yet is love not less, but more”:

  Regret is dead, but love is more

  Than in the summers that are flown,

  For I myself with these have grown

  To something greater than before.

  Love is altered but remains. To read In Memoriam was to throw a summer wreath over an unclimbable fence in impassable weather. I could see life on the other side: the way over the fence would be hard, but the wreath gave me something to keep sight of, something toward which to move. Tennyson saw me through dark times. Words made a difference.

  The capacity to be consoled is a consequential distinction between grief and depression. It is not that consolation is always possible during grief; it is not. It is, rather, that consolation is possible. We have, as individuals and societies, found ways to deal with grief.

  Depression, less comprehensible than grief, does not elicit the same ritual kindness from others. Human nature keeps us at a greater distance from those who are depressed than from those who grieve. Grief does not alienate in the same way that depression does. It is different. Being a human thing, ancient and inevitable and given to all, grief draws together those who knew the dead, binds those who have cause to miss and mourn. It is in our human nature to extend tolerance and time toward those who are weary and confused while grieving: the loss is known, the emotions understood.

  From the first death, the first grief. We know what our ancestors knew. They would, through their issue, lay down the rudiments of mourning: which bells to toll, why one veil and not another, how to pin a mourning brooch. Toward the depressed, society gives no such instruction, no such sanction. Grief and depression have always been part of the human condition, yet we treat them differently. The rituals of grief defend against alienation. Depression by its nature alienates. Grief alienates only when it is perceived by others to be too prolonged, too severe. That is, grief begins to alienate when it begins to bear likeness to depression.

  I had known depression and mania since I was seventeen years old. What I experienced after Richard’s death was grief, not depression or madness. In the early days after he died, when grief overwhelmed me and I could see no way out, I had hours of abject terror: What if my madness comes back? How will I keep my sanity with him not here? But these fears did not last for long.

  Indeed, my close acquaintance with madness turned out to be a deft tutor for my passage through grief. It was strange that familiarity with despair and delusion would help me to deal with Richard’s death: I had thought only to fear the return of sickness. But my struggles with manic-depressive illness had taught me more than I knew. I had a facility with extreme emotions and knew better than I would have liked how fast a mood can shift. I assumed suffering to be an integral part of life. My disease and my temperament, so beholden to each other, had taught me from the time I was young that contradictory and shifting moods were as real and meaningful as more settled, consistent ones. I had no expectation that calm was anything but a transient state. I knew, as well as I could know anything, that confusion and darkness inhabit lands next to light-filled and quiet ones. I knew from experience that prior suffering buys no protection against future pain. (And nothing could prepare me for simply missing Richard.)

  In a practical, way my long history of mania and depression had impressed upon me the symptoms to be most vigilant of; I knew to worry if I slept too little, got agitated, felt hopeless, thought of suicide. I was careful about this, perhaps overly so. Madness had prepared me for grief in other ways. It gave me an unsentimental gauge by which to test my sanity within my grief. It gave me a respect for the true terror that is at the core of madness: how inhuman it is; how far beyond grief it lies. When I knew grief, I knew in an odd way and for the first time how very sick I had been when mad. It was the difference between a confused mind and a delirious one, between agonal sadness and a knife across the carotid. It made me respect my mind more and look after it with a bit more tenderness.

  The human nature of grief put the suffering of mania and suicidal depression in context: it was pain beyond describing and beyond solace. There was a sanity to my grief that kept the border strong between it and insanity. Mourning, as Freud made clear, is a natural part
of life, not a pathological state. “Although grief involves grave departures from the normal attitude to life,” he wrote, “it never occurs to us to regard it as a morbid condition and hand the mourner over to medical treatment. We rest assured that after a lapse of time it will be overcome.” There are exceptions; some who grieve do need medical attention for depression, but most do not. Grief is not a disease; it is necessary.

  Adversity proved good preparation for adversity. I believed, experience had taught me, that my desperate missing of Richard would pass. I believed that my restlessness would yield to ease, that night would find its way to day. I took it on faith, beneath my desperation and longing for Richard, that at some point, unannounced, a love for life would reemerge. I had been through so many cycles of darkness and light that I believed to my quick that nature would keep to her rhythms. If I survived madness, I said often to myself after Richard died, I can survive anything. I had found discipline and a harsh optimism from living on the edges of sanity. Richard had taught me not to lower my expectations of life in the presence of difficulty and not to squander love.

  Many years earlier, after I had nearly died from my attempt to kill myself, I wrote out lines from Byron that I have kept since for courage: “Yet, see, he mastereth himself, and makes / His torture tributary to his will.” Having been so ill in my mind did not allow me an easier or faster way through grief, but it did give me some way of seeing grief for what it is: a human thing.

  “Blessing may break from stone,” wrote George Mackay Brown. “Who knows how.” Grief is such a stone. It gives much to the living, slows time that one might find a way to a different relationship with the dead. It fractures time to bring into awareness what is being mourned and why.