Your touch will plot us wise,
your quiet keep it true;
and joy be the starlight
to what we have to do.
I wanted stars for him, and quiet. I wanted joy for us.
I rode with Richard’s body to Rock Creek Cemetery, a lonely and strange ride in the pelting rain. The grave attendants had left, the weather being so foul, and the committal service was held in the small parish church. The ancient words gave comfort: “Earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” and when they were done, I put yellow tulips on his casket and kissed him through the birch wood. Richard was not near, but he was not yet gone. Then I walked out into the downpour.
The next morning was as fair as the day before had been foul. It was a morning filled with sun, a good day, if the day we committed Richard’s body to the earth could be such a thing. The grave was very deep, a sharp reminder that space was being kept for my own coffin. I looked down at Richard’s coffin and tried to think of a way to say good-bye to him, but my mind would not let me do this in peace. It would not give me the words to say good-bye, the clarity to say “I love you.” It threw up terrible questions and images instead.
What was the last thing Richard had thought before losing consciousness? I tormented myself. What had he felt as they hooked him up to the IVs and monitors, as they injected him, prodded him, forced a tube down his throat? Was it fear? Was it pain? Did he have any chance to use his mind to think of other things? To hope? Why had I not stayed with him in his room, when I knew he was so ill? Why did I choose then to conform to mindless rules, to do what a nurse insisted?
I did not know how to stop my mind, except to reach for thoughts and images that might compete. I thumbed through The Book of Common Prayer again, and found the second of the wedding prayers we had used to celebrate our marriage. It had been such a good day, such a day of happiness.
“Give them wisdom and devotion in the ordering of their common life,” the priest had said to us. “That each may be to the other a strength in need, a counselor in perplexity, a comfort in sorrow, and a companion in joy.”
I would miss my counselor in perplexity, my companion in joy. I would miss his ordering of our common life.
PART THREE
OF SOMETHING LOST
The yule-log sparkled keen with frost,
No wing of wind the region swept,
But over all things brooding slept
The quiet sense of something lost.
—ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON
WILDFLOWERS AND GRANITE
In the weeks after Richard died, time moved erratically; memory was capricious. I could make no sense of how my mind worked and soon stopped trying. Shock protected my heart, but porously. I knew it must be shock because I got done what I needed to do. I knew the protection was porous because, when I was least expecting it, a memory would bring me to my knees. I had then the cold horror: Richard is dead. I will not see him again. There may have been rules that determined which memories came unawares, or when they would choose to strike, but I never discerned them. Logic came from the world without, not the one within.
Practical matters and tradition dictated the things that needed to be done after his death. I had only to find a place to start and an inevitable progression would emerge. I started by sorting through Richard’s things. I knew this would be a minefield to negotiate, but it was what made sense to me at the time: I would go through his desk, his books and clothes, his papers and financial files, and the medications that hadn’t worked well enough.
Richard’s desk seemed the obvious place to start, although I soon found it to be too much him to continue and stopped not long after I had started. There was a glass bowl containing a tangle of keys to our house, his offices and the wards at St. Elizabeths and NIH, to his labs, his car. Most of the keys were labeled, but who would find that helpful now? His wallet lay on his desk; I found it impossible to pick it up, impossible not to. In it was a photograph of me with long hair and a laugh I would never have again. There were credit cards, a driver’s license, and—in an unusual exercise in the poetry of everyday life—a medical license stating that Richard was “duly registered to practice the healing art in the District of Columbia.” Had that phrase, “the healing art,” caught Richard’s attention? I would not know. I could not ask him.
I went restlessly from room to room in the house, finally settling again in his study. I stared at his books for a long while and pulled down a few, incapable of facing them in any systematic way. Anna Freud’s The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense loomed out at me: Had it always been there? What was it doing on Richard’s bookshelf? He was a die-hard psychopharmacologist and biological psychiatrist. I opened the cover and there it was, a bookplate marked “Ex Libris Richard J. Wyatt, M.D.” It was true, then; Richard had had a copy of Anna Freud’s book in his possession. Strange. I was oddly reassured to see that there was not a single margin note or underlined phrase. Basic Methods in Molecular Biology and The Mesocorticolimbic Dopamine System, on the other hand, were copiously notated and their margins filled with his scrawl. I felt better; the Richard I had known reemerged a bit. I quit his bookshelves when I came across the section of books he had written or coauthored; I wasn’t up for too much Richard too soon. It was beginning to be clear that with Richard dead, work and books and ideas were not going to be such fun again; I was not going to be able to walk across the hallway and ask him a question about science or medicine. Or lure him into bed. He was dead.
There was no avoiding Richard in our own house, of course. His file cabinets were everywhere and their contents gave me some pleasure; they also ripped my heart apart. Five entire file drawers were filled to brimming with letters and cards and other bits and pieces I had sent or given to him over the years. I was touched by the fact that he had kept these things and somehow relieved that he had had concrete evidence of how much I loved him. I had never questioned that he knew how much I loved him, but he was not there to allay my sudden insecurity. Had I shown him often enough, and well enough, how much he meant to me? It was too late now.
I found the notes he had kept about my illness in another file drawer: chartings of my moods and medications, lithium research papers with margin notes and queries, pages photocopied from books about mania. Detailed, reassuring. Who will do it now? Who will ever care enough, or be knowledgeable enough, to do it again? Into one folder, labeled “Suicide/MDI,” Richard had slipped a letter I had written him, with one paragraph bracketed in red ink: “Thursday is the anniversary of my almost having killed myself,” I had written. “For the life of me, I cannot understand why this day is so important to me but—always—it is tied up with my prayers, failures, survivals and—always—I have a glass of wine and a moment to myself and a toast ‘To Life.’ All this by way of saying it is a season of grim memories and I wish I could be held very tight. But knowing you makes it so much less bad, so much less lonely.”
I sat down and reread the letter.
In all our years together, Richard never failed to remember this dark anniversary. It was a day we marked each year with a glass of wine and a toast to life. Later, I would find this date marked in his appointment book with “Kay.” So many things were going to end.
In a different file drawer, I found photocopies of letters Richard had sent to me over the years. It was too painful to read beyond the first two or three, so I stopped and put them into a box that I thought I would open in a few months’ time, after my emotions had settled. I did not open the box for five years. The first letter, which I did read, was one Richard had written to me about why he loved me. “The smile and laugh light up the room,” he had written. “But the reflectiveness holds my attention. There is self-confidence without arrogance, vulnerability without weakness. There is self-preservation, but kindness. Insight is with humor, perception with appreciation, and intellect with judgment. The judgment rules but intuition is the guide.” Was this how he had seen me? It must have been; it was addressed to me and
signed by him. I had forgotten this letter and I loved having it now. Will any man love me this way again? What will I do without him? I want my husband back.
I dreamed that night that I was meeting Richard for dinner and I saw him across the room. I got up from the table and went to him, relieved and filled with joy. Something made me hesitate, though, and made me ask: “Are you dead?”
He said, very gently, “Yes,” and I woke up sobbing, bereft, alone.
I should have known that Richard, creator of under-the-bedcovers Easter egg hunts, and author of countless original acts of love, would have left me help to wend my way through grief. He did. On the second day of going through his things, I found a letter under his computer, handwritten, on the precarious downward slant his handwritten letters seemed always to take. He said in it how lucky we had been to find each other and that he had learned from me how to love. And, he wrote, perhaps I had found some relief from my restlessness and passing despairs. He said that he was grateful for the extra time we had had together and that, until the past few years, he had always assumed he loved me more than I loved him. Not because I didn’t love him, he said, but because love was new to him and not to me. “In the past years, however,” he ended his letter, “I have seen your love in everything you have done for me. I love you more than you can know.”
I sat in his study, with his note in my hands, trying to think what I had done for him that anyone else would not have done. I couldn’t think of anything, except perhaps to make transparent my utter delight in his company, and to provide an ampleness of passion and laughter. The love had always been there. It had come and remained without effort, as a star moves in the course that has been set for it.
Two additional envelopes, which I came across under the large box that held his medications, contained cash and explanatory notes. The first was to pay for a birthday present he had charged to a credit card. The gift he had ordered, a pair of aquamarine earrings to match the bracelet he had designed for me in California the year before, arrived at our house a few days after his death, days shy of my birthday.
In the other envelope, Richard had put enough cash for me to buy a basset puppy once Pumpkin, our fourteen-year-old basset hound, died. He had felt for some time that we should get another dog because Pumpkin was old, and he worried that I would be devastated by her death. I had resisted, thinking Pumpkin was used to being the only dog and would find it hard to adapt to another animal in the house.
Certainly, Pumpkin needed consoling during the weeks after Richard died. For days she moped around the house and slept next to Richard’s empty reading chair. I could scarcely look at his chair, remembering him reading or tapping away on his laptop, or thinking about our afternoons when I read to him as the sun filled the room. Finally, after several days, I thought to sit in his chair myself, which helped Pumpkin adjust to his absence. I realized that Richard would have figured out what to do in a few minutes’ time. It would not have taken him days, as it did me.
Pumpkin had been hopelessly smitten with him. After all, as Richard had often said to our friends, she was a female. And females were drawn to him. He liked to recount our naming of her as an example of this. Pumpkin had come into our life as a ten-week-old puppy and, at the beginning, had a somewhat conflicted relationship with Richard. He had not wanted a dog to begin with and was initially adamant that she not sleep in our bedroom with us. It was bad enough that she jumped up on the couch in his study, he said, but he’d be damned if he was going to pay for her to get up on another psychiatrist’s couch because she had been traumatized by some primal scene she had witnessed in our bedroom. It was always disconcerting to hear Richard express a psychoanalytic thought, usually a lingering remnant of his Harvard residency; it meant, among other things, that he was unlikely to change his mind.
In fact, he warmed to her over time. When she was a puppy, still with pink pads on her paws and ears so long that she tripped over them, he nicknamed her “Vicious,” a name he continued to use until he died. Pumpkin, who was morbidly shy and the gentlest of bassets, was incapable of anything resembling aggression. Richard persisted in calling her Vicious, and one day suggested putting our competing names for her to the test. We should be objective, he said. Scientific. He sat at one end of the living room and I sat at the other. Then he dropped Pumpkin down midway between us.
“You call her,” he said.
“Come here, Pumpkin,” I called out to her. She sat, head cocked, listening to my voice. With basset hounds, there is a random correlation between what is asked of them and what is done. She sat expectantly; only her tail moved.
Richard smiled.
“Here, Vicious,” he cajoled her. “Come to Richard.”
She padded over to him straightaway.
“Science has spoken,” he said. “I rest my case.”
On our wedding night, I had asked Richard to sit in the living room while I gathered up the first part of my wedding present for him. This came in the form of Pumpkin, and it had been designed to counter his complaint that, unlike the other dogs we came across in the park, she did not know how to do any tricks. This was true, largely because I had never seen the point in teaching her any.
I thought that teaching Pumpkin to do a trick for Richard might cut down on his comments about her inability to learn and my inability to teach. She and I practiced fastidiously in the days leading up to the wedding, and after Richard and I returned from the Shenandoah Valley, I brought her into the living room, white satin bow around her neck, and waved a dog biscuit in front of her nose.
“Speak,” I said. She barked immediately. We both looked over to Richard for his approval. There was silence instead, then a smile appeared on his face.
“Great,” he said. “The best thing about the dog was that she never barked, and now you’ve taught her how.”
To underscore his point—I had forgotten to give her the dog biscuit she had earned—she started barking frenetically and unceasingly. And then, relentlessly, she bayed.
“Brilliant job, Vicious,” said Richard, laughing. “Now leave.” She went to her bed and we to ours.
Now, sitting in my reading chair, facing Pumpkin, who was sleeping in Richard’s, I realized that it was not that I didn’t want to go on without him. I did. It was just that I didn’t know why I wanted to go on. It would have to be an act of faith.
In the weeks after Richard’s funeral, I tried to read the hundreds of condolence letters I had received, but I found it hard to read more than one or two at a time. His friends and colleagues wrote wonderfully about him; their observations were perceptive and generous and brought him, for a moment or two, back to life. But this hurt as often as it helped. The characteristics that others most often ascribed to him—“private,” “unassuming,” “gentle,” “charming”—were ones that I most associated with him as well. And most missed. Many commented on his wit and his generosity to junior colleagues. Several European scientists invoked the word civilized, which he would have liked enormously. When the solution to schizophrenia was found, wrote one colleague, Richard’s legacy would be complete. I wish he could have read these letters; I wish he could have known how strong and consistent the thread of qualities was, how much respect he had commanded for his mind and for his ways, for how he had dealt with death. “At a time when so many people would justifiably have limited their scope to their own affliction,” wrote a friend and colleague, “his mind was still ranging across the universe, searching for curiosities and making observations.”
Many were kind enough to express their belief that I had brought Richard great happiness, and I found this genuinely consoling. Jonathan Glover, the British philosopher, wrote, “If I knew enough chemistry, I would know the name for a compound made from two very different chemicals—you and he were that sort of unit.” I loved the image, and thought about chemicals that might fit his notion. My mind was slow and muddled, however, and I could not think past lithium and rubidium, elements I had written about and that were
opposite in many of their properties. But they would not unite in the way I wanted them to, better together than apart. Richard, I realized, would have come up with something quickly; it would have been clever. Richard is dead.
Richard is dead. Richard, lover of chemicals, lover of stars, would have delighted in the lines of poet Robert Crawford: “All the chemicals that make up our bodies,” he wrote, “first emigrated here from far, raw stars.” I have Richard now, in far emigrant bits. It is a raw consolation, but a consolation nonetheless.
Most of the condolence letters described Richard, rather than offering advice about how to deal with his being dead. This was just as well. Short of the banal, there was little anyone could meaningfully suggest. Death trumps everything. Two of Richard’s former professors from Hopkins, themselves married, wrote words that were true, and their truth became more apparent over time: “We know love makes a difference,” they said, “and we send love.”
The advice I took most to heart, however, was from a friend of mine, a poet, who spoke of the futility of advice. “I’ve always handled similar emergencies very badly by working and drinking myself into states of stupor and desolation,” he wrote. “If I say that I think it’s probably best to get out and about then I know I haven’t a leg to stand on. I’ll excuse myself from my own worthless advice by saying Everyone’s Different. I’m thinking of you, and hoping you’re all right.” I wasn’t all right, but it helped to know that he was thinking of me and that he understood the limitations of words and advice.
I went often to Richard’s grave. The day after he was buried, I took tiger lilies from the garden and put them on the red clay earth that topped his grave. I brought him white and apricot-colored honeysuckle, and hydrangeas and petunias as well, which gave beauty and a bit of home to the stark mound of dirt. The water lilies in the pond nearby were high-stalked and yellow. I looked carefully, but there were no goldfish. Richard would smile at the possibilities, I thought. In the weeks to come, the top earth settled on his grave, and I settled into a way of being there. Each armful of flowers that I brought—the last sprigs of honeysuckle, black-eyed Susans, rose of Sharon—left a mark of life, a trace of loveliness. They died, but he is dead. We all die. There is a naturalness to this.
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