I fashioned a peace with California during that trip with Richard, one that was long past due. Los Angeles had always nettled me: I loved it, I disavowed it, I tried to put it behind me. I came of age in Los Angeles and, in that sense, it would always be my city: I first knew desire there, and madness; first made love and fell in love. Los Angeles was my original city of passion and disappointment: it was where my mind cracked and where, twenty years after the fact, I still felt a cringing shame for things I had said or done when manic. But it was also where I had first heard Schumann’s piano works and Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis; had, on a summer day, watched the first moon landing; first read Yeats and Lowell and Darwin. Nothing about Los Angeles was straightforward to me.
Great chunks of my life—great frightening, marvelous chunks of my life—were tangled in the passing of Southern California’s strange nonseasons. Washington would be my first home and my last, but California was the fitful, bewildering center. Only Big Sur remained uncomplicated to me. I loved it without reservation, and sought it out time and again because it was wild and beautiful, and because it could settle me in ways that no other place or person could. Even when I went mad in Big Sur, it was an ecstatic madness, an astonishingly beautiful voyage of my mind to Saturn and its rings and moons, and to distant stars. I walked off my unrest along the seacoast of the Big Sur: away, alone, and unbeholden. It was where I went for desolate beauty and for the belief that here, always, I would be at home. Southern California I kept at bay.
Now, with Richard gravely ill, my fractiousness with California seemed a waste of time and energy, not to say indulgent. Richard was dying, it was our last trip together to California, and nothing else was important. I had wasted enough of my life thinking about despair and insanity. It was not California that was wanting, it was me. Robert Frost wrote that when those who withhold themselves from the land yield to it, they find salvation in the surrender. This was true for me. I took a different view of the West Coast, more generous and circumspect; old discontents slipped away.
Richard did not need to surrender. He did not take on unnecessary battles in life, and this gave to him a strength in character I did not have. We loved our long days in California; we took them in and kept them close, wrapped our life in the June sun and the odd scents and surreal colors of the land around us. Richard had a way of giving back to me important things I had lost along the way.
One afternoon he and I sat on a bench overlooking the Pacific, lizardlike in the sun, talking about not much of anything important, only small and binding things. After a while he said, in an even voice, “We should talk about the funeral.” I tried to keep my voice steady, which was impossible.
“Yes, of course,” I said.
Richard’s suggestion was not entirely out of the blue, although in the sun and the quiet it felt that way. Earlier in the day, we had been to see Clarke Oler, an Episcopal priest who had been the rector of my church when I lived in Los Angeles. I had known and been close to Clarke for twenty-five years, and Richard was particularly fond of him. He had officiated at the religious service for our marriage at St. Alban’s Episcopal Church in Westwood, held some time after our civil ceremony in the Shenandoah Valley. We had turned to him to talk about the things we would have to do in the months to come. We talked specifically, at Richard’s request, about possible music and readings for his funeral. Later, as Richard and I sat on the bench overlooking the ocean, on an impossibly beautiful day, we continued our discussion of hymns and pallbearers and the ancient rites of final passage. No amount of God’s sun could take the chill from what we were doing.
We went as far as we could and then, thankfully, Richard said, “Enough of this. Let’s go shop for your birthday.” He suggested a store on San Vincente Boulevard we had been to before and, once there, asked to speak with the jewelry designer. “She likes moonstones and aquamarines,” he told her. “She’s a bit like them: moody and lovely. More moonstone than aquamarine.” He smiled his wonderful smile and caught the designer in his net of charm. And me, as always, all over again. He then traced out the design of the bracelet he wanted for me, one he must have been planning for a while. It was to be alternating cabochon aquamarines and moonstones, strung together by delicate links of gold. He wanted the aquamarines to be oval and the moonstones round; it was to be one of a kind.
The bracelet arrived in Washington several weeks later, a strikingly beautiful strand of mutable gray and pale blue stones. It was indeed moody, and it was stunning. Richard tried to fasten the bracelet on my wrist but could not; the clasp was too fine and his hand shook too much. So we christened it instead, continuing Richard’s tradition of dipping newly gotten jewelry in Italian fountains, gin fizzes, or the North Sea. This time he dipped it in a shot of Dalwhinnie, a single-malt whiskey we were partial to. “For us,” he said, christening the bracelet. “For you. For love.” I could not put the bracelet on then, or ever, without the help of someone else. It was an elegant string of stones, brought into existence by love, but it was not easy to wear. It was our life.
Our last summer was a good one. We returned from Los Angeles to find our garden lit up with a wild proliferation of fireflies at night and the Washington skies lit up with summer thunderstorms reminiscent of the Dies Irae from Verdi’s Requiem. Richard was able to eat steak and corn and peach cobbler, which gave us the illusion of greater health than he had, and we had long evenings of laughter and friendship. Those summer nights with our friends were the moon and the stars to both of us; they will be with me until I cease to remember anything. Our conversations leapt everywhere: from the misbegotten love affairs of our colleagues to scandals in science, from stem cell research to Thomas Aquinas. We talked about the elegance of the universe and how we thought the world would end. We talked on and on through the summer nights, taking in more wine than others would have said was good for us, and spoke of Rome and politics, of our families, and of sundry microbes, any of which would cause a thinking person to pray for a competence the government did not possess. These evenings of friendship were unrivaled times, tinged by the overhanging apprehension of Richard’s mortality. It was fierce and gentle friendship, and it made our way to his death more navigable, less lonely.
There was a fine-tuning of Richard’s and my temperaments during the years we lived with his heart disease, lymphoma, and lung cancer. Before, our differences had triggered sporadic tension; now our basic natures served us better. Our sensibilities and quirks evolved into something more shared and complex, more mingled. The intensity of my moods and periodic flares ebbed with time and with the seriousness of circumstance. Richard’s reserved ways changed into something more intense, outward, and nuanced. He became more responsive to the feelings of others, and held his emotions less close to his chest. He had always been physically affectionate with me, but now he sought me even more. When I came into a room, after even a short absence, he held on to me in a way I had not known him to do before. Just to feel. To sense. To draw upon.
Later, when he no longer had the strength to take a bath, he reached out to take in the world beyond him in newer ways. He would ask, after I had bathed, to breathe in the scents on my arms and my neck, to take in the smell of the honeysuckle or moss rose, lime blossom salts or eucalyptus. He had never done this before, and indeed had laughed at my many bottles and jars. Kay’s Excess of Scents, he would say to our friends: Why have one bottle when you can have seven?
Richard kept his essential privacy; he had been and would remain a private man. But he reached out more to other people. Acquaintances and colleagues saw the warmer side of him that I and a few others had always known. And now, when he reached out for me, vulnerable, I was glad that I could bring to him a calmer self. I was someone he could put his faith in, and it gave me pleasure. For so long, for so many years, I had needed him, leaned upon his love and judgment. Through him, I had rediscovered some semblance of my true North, and now he drew upon his gift to me. There was fairness in all of this.
The su
mmer drew to a close in quiet ways. Richard felt well enough to work hard on his science and to see patients. I wrote and worked at Hopkins and looked after him. The tumor in his right lung grew.
In early September, the Pentagon and the World Trade Center were attacked. I was on an early-morning flight to Atlanta for meetings at the Carter Center; it took off forty minutes before the first hijacked airplane flew into the World Trade Center and landed twenty minutes after American Airlines Flight 77 had crashed into the west side of the Pentagon. By the time I arrived at the Carter Center, it was ringed by Secret Service cars dispatched to protect President and Mrs. Carter.
The telephone lines to Washington were choked, and it was late in the day before I could reach Richard. When at last we were able to talk, he described the eerie sight of hundreds of Washingtonians walking as fast as they could up Connecticut Avenue, briefcases in hand, talking into their cell phones and looking unmoored. I felt panicked at being so far away from him and from Washington, but I could not get back. No planes were flying, buses and trains along the eastern seaboard were moribund, and all rental cars and trucks had been taken within hours of Atlanta’s airport having been shut down. My only option was to rent a limousine, but even that would not be possible for two days. So I settled into obsessively watching CNN and trying to keep in touch with Richard.
The evening after the attacks, a few of us had a quiet dinner with President and Mrs. Carter. They were calm, philosophical, and tough. They spoke from their unique perspective on America about its strengths: the vastness of its lands, the inventiveness and resilience of its people. The weeks to come were to be shot through with the kind of straightforward patriotism they embodied that evening, a good and necessary thing. It was not yet the time for overdone and alienating nationalism.
The trip from Atlanta to Washington was unnerving. Flags were at half-mast everywhere, from Georgia to the Carolinas. The radio reported incessantly on the efforts to recover bodies in New York and Washington and described the fighter jets streaking over both cities; it rendered the grapplings of a nation in shock. I found it difficult to shake the images of an airplane slamming into the walls of the Pentagon. My father, a career military officer, had been posted there for many years. The walls could not have been ripped open. The building was unassailable. There were so many dead.
In Washington, Secret Service cars tore up and down Connecticut Avenue and, more ominously, patrolled Rock Creek Park and the National Zoo. Antiaircraft batteries were installed near the Washington Monument, and machine guns were everywhere one looked at National Airport. There was the near-constant sound of F-16’s flying overhead on their combat patrols. It was an intense time, but a good one as well. Our neighborhood restaurants were packed at night with Washingtonians seeking closer contact with one another. Richard and I went out with friends almost every night. People, even strangers, were gentler for a while. The city was vulnerable. We all were.
In the days and weeks following September 11, Richard became medically practical. He put together a medical kit for the house that contained antibiotics, antivirals, and epinephrine. He divided up reading for the two of us to do: he took anthrax and plague for himself; I was assigned smallpox and botulism. (When I made murmurings that I wanted plague, he laughed and said, “Fair’s fair. You got to choose the movie last weekend.”) We both read up on the psychiatric complications of antibiotics and antiviral medications, which were not inconsiderable.
The city of government pulled together its people and its agencies. Richard, who had conducted a large study with the Department of Defense to evaluate early treatment intervention in major psychiatric illnesses, was asked by colleagues at the Pentagon to help draw up guidelines for dealing with the psychological and psychiatric consequences of mass violence. At the end of October, on a beautiful fall morning, we drove to Airlie House in Virginia for a meeting put together by the departments of Defense, Health and Human Services, and Justice to frame the response of the federal government to the psychiatric casualties of large-scale terrorist attacks.
We approached the meetings with the same double-channeling that now characterized everything in our lives: one channel of consciousness was on Alert, for the progression of Richard’s cancer, and, at a far more distant level of concern, for the threat of another attack on Washington. The other channel was on Normal, for the unthreatened part of our lives. They were separate channels, gliding by each other. On occasion they met, as they did during our days at Airlie House. The countryside was lovely—there were rolled stacks of hay in the fields, and black walnut pods underfoot. We sat on a bench in the gardens, utterly peaceful, as if cancer did not grow in Richard’s lungs; as if the meetings we had come to attend were not about the obliteration of minds in the wake of the obliteration of cities.
I listened to Richard’s comments during the meetings, struck, as always, by his reasonableness. He argued that we are a resilient species: we made it out of the trees, out of the last Ice Age, through an apocalyptical flood, and out of our mothers’ wombs. We would make it now. He made the case, as others did, that the government should not get swept up in programs that sounded good but were not backed by data. The scientific evidence was strong, for example, that interventions such as psychological debriefing did as much harm as good. Yet a cottage industry had evolved to send “debriefers” into areas that had been hit by natural catastrophes such as hurricanes, earthquakes, and floods. Debriefers had gone en masse to New York after the attacks on September 11. Physicians, as Hippocrates had declared, should first do no harm. Richard talked about ways to prevent psychosis and suicide in the psychiatrically vulnerable.
I sat in the back of the room and listened to him. He was dying, but still he was determined to do what he could do to help. I loved listening to him; I loved the way he thought. I loved him. But that night in bed, when I heard him coughing through much of the night, I could not sleep. The world would go on without him, although not as well, but I had no idea what I would do.
Richard’s cough came and went, and with it came and went our anxieties. Shortly after we returned from Airlie House, Richard had his two-month checkup at Hopkins, which was preceded by our usual dread. This time, however, unlike at our earlier visits, there had been no significant tumor growth in his lungs. Ettinger was clearly surprised and delighted by this; we were equally delighted, and stunned. Richard had been following an experimental protocol developed by Judah Folkman at Harvard, taking a combination of medications to starve the blood supply to his tumors and injecting himself twice daily with interferon to strengthen his immune system. He was now well past the survival time predicted for his type of cancer, and we hoped he might be among the newly emerging group of cancer patients whose disease neither worsened nor improved. They lived with their disease. They lived. This possibility, and the possibility of new experimental drugs and vaccine therapy, gave us enough hope to override the intruding presence of his cough, the cold numbers we read in the oncology journals, and the uniformly discouraging second opinions we received from other doctors.
In late autumn, Richard enthusiastically turned his interest and energy to the upcoming Leonid meteor showers. He had been in love with the stars and the skies since he was a young child, when his stepfather had first taken him to Chicago’s Adler Planetarium. His stepfather had encouraged him to read about the stars, and this, in turn, had been a powerful motivator for Richard to overcome his dyslexia. His childhood passion for astronomy was evident still. Astronomers predicted that the meteor storm of November 2001 would be the most spectacular sky event of the twenty-first century. Observers during a typical meteor shower might see ten meteors an hour; this meteor storm promised a thousand an hour, perhaps ten thousand or more. There was no way we were going to miss this night of shooting and falling stars.
We woke up at 4:30 a.m. and drove into Rock Creek Park, which was already thick with cars. Washington may be jaded to human nature, but it keeps itself open to beauty. The meteor showers were magnifi
cent in every way: spectacular bursts of green, white, and blue lights flaming across the sky, mixed with the flashing lights of the AWACS patrolling overhead. Shooting stars exploded in every direction high in the air. How perfect this is, I thought. How perfect it is that we have this, that we are watching this astonishing beauty together. How perfect that Richard is alive to see it. It is a gift for Richard’s grace. We caught bits of these falling stars, put them away for the days to come.
Richard talked quietly but passionately about the shooting stars as they rained down over Rock Creek Park. How beautiful they were, he said, how transient. Then he talked about young American soldiers, watching under an Afghan sky. Some would see the Leonids, some would be spotting targets for bombs, and some would be seeing the bombs burst. But, Richard wondered, what would Bin Laden see as he was being hunted down? Did he share the same awe for glowing dust and raining stars?
We sat in the park for a long time, watching the shooting stars and making wishes upon them, kissing with a kind of sweet abandon. Looking at star fields can induce a piercing terror at one’s finite place in the universe. This night it did not. It was just Nature at her most ravishingly beautiful, and we saw it together. It was a moment, one bead among many on our wire of time, and I would not exchange it, or our kisses, for anything in the world.
The Christmas season was a whirl of lights and carols and friends. Richard was feeling well, but I think we knew it would be our last Christmas together. Despite or because of this, it was less fraught than the year before. Perhaps we knew to take it as it came; perhaps we had sifted through some of the awful thinking one must do in light of death. But it was a festive time: trimming the tree was a gayer thing, each ornament less weighted with dark sentiment. Most of our evenings were spent by the fire (“Kay,” Richard would ask me, “would you like to make one of your special fires?”), and he and I and my mother would talk or listen to carols, have a glass of wine, and stare into the fire, dreamy and happy. The future was not unimportant; it was just put to the side for a while. Richard was dying, my mother was getting older, our dog was white in her muzzle and stiff in her walk, but we took what we had. Our lives were differently precarious, but we knew that this season was one to hold close, and we did.
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