Nothing Was the Same Nothing Was the Same Read online

  I remember an afternoon at the Natural History Museum in Washington, standing in front of a glass case filled with mummified owls. It seemed a violation of wild things to see such creatures stuffed and fakely perched. Yet had they not been dead and fixed, I could not have seen their wings and claws so clearly; I could not have appreciated the intricate beauty of their feathers and beaks. Had it not been for their deaths, I could not have seen what made them live. I would have preferred to have seen them fly or hunt or take a mouse to beak. But with them dead, I took in—with awe—their parts and proportions, saw in their stillness what made a snowy owl a snowy owl and not an Eastern screech. Death had something to give.

  Grief, lashed as it is to death, instructs. It teaches that one must invent a way back to life. Grief forces intimacy with death; it preserves the salient past and puts into relief our mortal state. All die, says Ecclesiastes. All must die, it is written in the first statute of the Magna Carta. All die, teaches Grief.

  “Sometimes I think that the search for suffering and the remembrance of suffering are the only means we have to put ourselves in touch with the whole human condition,” wrote Graham Greene. Grief is at the heart of the human condition. Much is lost with death, but not everything. Life is not let loose of lightly, nor is love. There is a grace in death. There is life.

  FUGITIVE DYES

  In the Shenandoah Valley, they say that spring climbs the mountains a hundred feet a day. Like grief, the spring will catch you unawares. You have become used to winter; it has in its own way served you well. The new season is not what you know. It is fresh and it comes from death.

  Even as Richard was newly dead, I knew there was inside of me a reservoir of life. There was so much laughter the night he died—my friends and family and I laughed hard and well that evening—and where there is laughter, however dark, there is life. I knew there was life because I saw it in the faces of my friends and I felt it in the warmth of my family. Life seemed possible to me then, in the kindness of people I loved; later I knew it in the kindness of strangers who reached out with a word or a touch.

  A few days after Richard died, I went to a small dinner party at the residence of the British ambassador. Jim Watson was being knighted for his codiscovery of the structure of DNA, an occasion Richard and I had hoped to share. Now I drove there alone; had it not been for my long friendship with Jim, and my inexpressible gratitude to him for his help during Richard’s illness, I would have stayed at home. As I turned from Massachusetts Avenue onto the embassy’s grounds, I suddenly remembered what Richard had said to me after Jim called to invite us to the investiture.

  “I hope I live long enough to make it.” Richard laughed. “I would give anything to see Watson on his knees.”

  I laughed out loud, remembering this. Richard was in the car with me for a moment and, where Richard was, where I laughed because of the memory of him, there was life.

  It was a soft June evening and the gardens were spilling over with roses. Richard would have loved everything about the occasion: the gentleness of the Washington summer night, the company of friends, the ambassador’s evocation of the high magic days of two young scientists doing shatteringly important work in postwar Cambridge, and the elegant celebration of one of the great discoveries in science. The evening was all these things, but what opened up a sliver of my heart to life again was that every person on the British Embassy staff, from the attendant who parked my car, to the person who checked off my name at the table in the entry hall, to the ambassador and his wife, said, “I am so sorry, Madam, for the loss of your husband.” It was a small thing, but it was intensely important to me. It was an extension of civility in the face of death; it was an acknowledgment of my grief. The rituals of queen and government went on, the conversations of science went on, human kindness went on. I went on.

  My heart thawed slowly back into life. In time, things that had overwhelmed me in the early months after Richard died came back and now gave pleasure again. I thought one evening to see if I could listen to music without the pain it earlier had caused me. I put on Orfeo and it broke my heart, but it was a heartbreak that promised life. The music did not rip open my heart any wider than it could at the same time heal.

  Each day, each week, I pushed further, thinking to see how much life I could let back in before having to dart to the safety of sleep or a restless walk. When at last I reached out to Schumann and Beethoven, I listened to them with deep pleasure; there was no pain. I knew their beauty differently for having had to put them aside: I loved them more because of the vulnerability they had opened up in me.

  Coming again to life was a hard but good thing. Life was in front of me now; the glove had been thrown down. I could not back away from the world: my temperament and my curiosity about what lay ahead made certain of this. Life had to be taken up again; the ribbons, woven flat against the maypole, had to be unwound. The future, inevitably, had become more inviting than the past. I was uneasy with grief, impatient with my life. I had spent too long in the company of illness and death. I did not want to do this any longer.

  Sentiment and reminiscence, necessary at the beginning of grief, were now in active competition with life. Blood had to get to tissue: I wanted to yank back the tedious beige curtains I had hung. Mourning had forced me to reckon with death, but imagining forward was life. If I was to take seriously Richard’s life and death, and my own, I would have to turn dead-on toward life. I had no interest in sewing my own shroud. Time was indeed a healing thing.

  Richard had often talked about his experiences with Hodgkin’s disease with other patients who suffered from it, hoping to give them encouragement and practical advice. One woman, with whom he had spoken many times, eventually died of her disease. Richard wrote to her brother about time and grief: “I have wondered about time’s ability to heal,” he wrote. “To me, it is a moving away or growing around the wound, nothing ever filling the void; new things diverting attention. The pain does not diminish, but the dilution by life’s momentum makes the amount of time thinking about it and the suffering decrease.” He was right. Life’s momentum is a powerful thing.

  In the immediate weeks and months after Richard died, I had turned to poetry and other literature for solace. Now I turned to them to see how to make my way back to life. I took down Tennyson again, and Douglas Dunn’s Elegies. I reread Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair and Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song. I went back to my old and much margin-noted copy of William Bradford’s Of Plymouth Plantation, to put in mind the role of will in overcoming adversity, and to hold up before me the absurdly easy physical dimensions of my life. I copied out great chunks of Edward Thomas and Louis MacNeice and Thomas Hardy, and taped to my mirror the final lines of Robert Frost’s “Reluctance.”

  “The heart is still aching to seek,” he had written. “But the feet question ‘Whither?’”:

  Ah, when to the heart of man

  Was it ever less than a treason

  To go with the drift of things,

  To yield with a grace to reason,

  And bow and accept the end

  Of a love or a season?

  I had no choice but to bow to a kind of end to love, but it was a treason to go with the drift of things. No one could fight this drift but me. Just do it, I said to myself. Just do it. There was comfort in looking backward, but it was beginning to take the air from the room. “The shadow kills the growth,” wrote Ben Jonson. The shadow of Richard’s death was long.

  Memories of Richard continued to drift in and out of my mind as it reknit. Sometimes they jarred, at other times they added a sweet moment of pleasure to my days. My dreams of him changed. Lost was the pervasive feeling that he would come to me only to leave. My dreams were kinder now. In one, I remember, I was in a meadow and saw a man gasping for breath, poisoned by chlorine gas.

  I said to him, “Wait, my husband is a doctor. He will be here soon.”

  My heart dropped as I remembered: He will not be here soon; he is d
ead. The old terror hit then, but Richard appeared and smiled and I felt his warmth come into me. Life was right again. I woke up easy in my mind for it was the first time in my dreaming of him that he had not left.

  Another day, working on my book about exuberance, I reached for my research folder containing my interviews and notes about Joyce Poole, a biologist who studies elephants in Kenya. Tucked into the file, I found an e-mail Richard had sent to her. “Kay is away today,” he had written, “but has been not very patiently awaiting your response. Not being patient is a fairly common trait, I think, among exuberant people. Which she is. I will read her your response later today. I think it is just what she is looking for.” He then went on to offer his own entirely unsolicited observations about exuberance and creativity. How totally Richard. It was as if he had gently parachuted down into a thicket of someone else’s ideas and made himself at home.

  Mark Twain told a friend that after his wife died memories of her would come as an occasional grace note, “memories of little intimate happenings of long ago that drop like stars into the silence.” Richard kept dropping stars my way. (Stars. I read not long ago that astronomers discovered streams of ancient stars streaking past the Milky Way at a million miles an hour. It is an image I long to share with Richard. Will I always think of him when I think of stars? Will I ever think of another man?)

  I kept close to me memories of Richard that I particularly loved. Some refused to leave; others I wanted with me because they were him and us and I loved calling them up when in a blue mood or when simply missing him: our Los Angeles day of dire wolf skulls and aspens and rainbow trout; the vision of roses and lilacs floating in our bath in Rome; a gold ring dipped in the Trevi Fountain. Other things of Richard I kept but changed. I found it rending to look at the moonstone and aquamarine bracelet he had designed for me in California, so I took it to a jeweler and had it reconfigured into a necklace: the same elements together in a different way.

  A New York Times reporter wrote about a small octopus that carried a brown bottle wherever it went: “When a human leaves it a much grander bottle, large and clear with a multimasted sailing ship inside, the octopus investigates the gift, considers for a moment, then picks up its beloved brown bottle and goes on its way.” I understood this small octopus perfectly. I did not want a new, multimasted sailing ship; I wanted what I had had and loved.

  There continued to be times of terrible missing. I opened the Archives of General Psychiatry one day and saw Richard listed as an author on a paper about schizophrenia. My heart raced. I have to show this to him, I thought. If his name is on the article he must still be alive. Then I saw the superscript next to his name and traced it to the footnote at the bottom of the page. “Deceased,” it read. Yes, of course. Deceased. Later that night I woke up, aware that I had forgotten to take my lithium. Richard would have asked if I had taken it, I thought. Richard is dead, I snapped to myself. Enough. Get over it.

  Over time, solace more than pain came from my memories of Richard. Thoughts of him were sweeter, less often jagged, stabbing things. There is a time limit to grief, I began to understand. Grief will end. I am alive. I love Richard, but I love life as well. Grief was beginning to wear out its welcome.

  “But though this had been a day and night of much trouble,” wrote William Bradford, “yet God gave them a morning of comfort and refreshing.” Life was on the other side of grief, morning on the far side of a hard night.

  Grief had changed the landscape of what had been our common life and settled happiness. Everything we had been together had been thrown into disarray. Revelation’s dragon had swept its tail round the heavens, flinging stars to Earth and rearranging the sky: all that mattered was differently ordered from what I had known. Richard had created a quiet place for me; our life was lived at a gentler pace than I had known in my earlier, hurtling world. He had been a constant in an inconstant universe. Death had in some ways preserved him. It was I who must change, our relationship that must change. I did not wish to lose Richard but I would, unless our relationship was open to the possibilities of life.

  I made a list of things to do. I would take up squash again; try to get through Pride and Prejudice again; learn more substantively about bits of nature I loved, but knew only in a dilettante way: plum blossoms, spotted quolls, spectacled bears. The list of natural phenomena I wished to better understand was long, but I would start with these. I would study neurology in a more systematic manner; visit Saint Petersburg and the Orkney Islands; see if I could arrange a trip to observe the elephants in Kenya’s Amboseli National Park. I would begin again my weekly lunches at the National Gallery of Art and take up again my walks to the National Zoo. It seemed like a manageable list. I taped it to my mirror next to the excerpt from the Frost poem.

  I set out to understand Richard better. The neurosurgeon Harvey Cushing stressed that what one accomplishes in one’s work does not die. I believe this, so I decided to read Richard’s scientific papers, first to last, in order to have a deeper understanding of his scientific work. This was to send myself on a fool’s journey; he had written more than eight hundred papers, many of them highly technical. I read as best I could as many of them as possible. I thought I knew the range of his intellectual interests but I did not, and I felt closer to him for having followed where his brain had taken him during his scientific life.

  I learned about him in other ways. Richard loved to listen to audiobooks and liked to have me read aloud to him. Reading had come easily to me; I had not known books in his way. I thought I would try to hear books as he had heard them. On Christmas day, three years after his death, I took Isak Dinesen’s Out of Africa to his grave; he had loved listening to her book and had encouraged me to do the same. I had pleaded lack of time and never did it. Now I sat on the bench near his grave and began to read aloud: “I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills,” I began. And then I read on and on, caught up in the beauty and cadence of her words, until I had to stop.

  Dinesen wrote of Africa, but as I looked around me, I thought, This is true of where I am now: “You woke up in the morning and thought: Here I am, where I ought to be.” Reading at Richard’s grave on Christmas morning, I thought: I am where I ought to be. This city is my home. Washington is the city of my childhood and the better part of my adolescence, it is where Richard and I met and where we fell in love, it is where we lived and worked together. Washington is where he lies, and it is where we will lie together until the world ends, or until a parish ordinance mandates the resettling of bones.

  But not yet.

  I was caught that Christmas morning between death and life, but I was inclined, unstoppably, into life. I had a covenant with Richard, but I had one with the future as well. “Tonight I saw the stars trapped underneath the water,” wrote Douglas Dunn. “I signed the simple covenant we keep with love. / One hand held out an apple while the other held / Earth from a kirkyard where the dead remember me.”

  I acted on my covenant with love in private and public ways. I planted a weeping cherry tree at Richard’s grave and watched it grow graceful and gentle, complexly branched. I completed at last a needlepoint tapestry I had been working on for ten years, a wreath of moss roses against a background of navy blue. I had started it in London and given it to Richard on our wedding night. We lay together that night and listened to Paul Robeson sing the seventeenth-century words of Ben Jonson. The rosy wreath in my needlepoint was my marriage gift:

  I sent thee, late, a rosy wreath,

  Not so much honouring thee,

  As giving it a hope, that there

  It could not withered be.

  But thou thereon did’st only breathe,

  And sent’st it back to me:

  Since when it grows, and smells, I swear,

  Not of itself, but thee.

  It was the final verse of a poem about the transcendent nature of love and about renewal; it said all I felt for Richard. The tapestry had been nearly finished by our wedding night, but n
ot quite: as was my wont, my enthusiasm had exceeded my accomplishment. Ten years later, too late for Richard to see, I took up my needlepoint again. It galled me that I had been so blasé with time, that I had left the wreath unfinished. I do not think Richard would have cared, but I did. I regretted so many things left undone.

  More recently, I donated in Richard’s memory a collection of photographs to the Johns Hopkins Hospital. They are images of artist Anna Schuleit’s floral tribute to patients institutionalized at Harvard’s Massachusetts Mental Health Center, where Richard did his residency. Schuleit had observed what those who work in psychiatric hospitals know all too well: patients on psychiatric wards, unlike those on medical and surgical ones, seldom receive flowers from their visitors. Moved by this, she created a remarkable installation, Bloom. She filled the hospital with twenty-eight thousand potted flowers and arranged them by color on each of the four floors. Live sod—forty-nine hundred square feet of it—was laid out wall-to-wall in the basement. She planted two thousand pots of African violets, blue pansies, ferns, and heathers in the hallways, offices, and patient rooms. Fifteen thousand orange tulips were trucked to Boston to add color and to pay respect to the hospital and to those who had lived and been treated there. Hundreds of these tulips were later replanted on the unmarked graves of patients at a state asylum.

  Richard, who trained at the Mass Mental in the early days of psychopharmacology, had gotten into frequent and heated arguments with his psychoanalytically trained clinical supervisors there. He found it inexplicable to have to justify using medications in patients with psychotic illnesses such as schizophrenia and mania. The experience made a deep impression upon him and taught him to question received wisdom in psychiatry. It also made him even more determined to find new ways to treat the severe mental illnesses.