Trimming the tree was a melancholy affair. Ornament by ornament, I hung our memories on the tree. Gingerbread snowflakes, glass candy canes, an ugly clay parrot, handblown glass balls from London. In a small act of mourning, I did not put any tinsel on the tree. No one would notice, but it was of moment to me. Tinsel was a part of the excitement of childhood Christmases, its absence a bit of Lent.
I had to go to the store to buy more lights for the tree—I wished I could tell Richard this, but at least I could imagine his laugh. It was another good moment. That moment of imagined laughter could not last, of course. As I started to go out the door, I heard a crash, massive, and then tiny shatterings. The tree had fallen over, and several of our most sentiment-laden ornaments had shattered on the brick hearth. I am not superstitious, but I was, then, overcome with a dreadful foreboding. Darkness would come from darkness.
The following day, I took Richard’s research assistant out to lunch and, in the midst of our conversation, told her that my Christmas tree had fallen down, how ominous it seemed, and that nothing like that had ever happened to me before. Her face turned pale. The previous evening, she said, her Christmas tree had fallen over—the first time that had ever happened to her—and three ornaments had been broken, including one Richard had given her ten years earlier. Perhaps, we decided, it was Richard, acting in ways best known to himself.
That afternoon, I laid branches cut from the bottom of the Christmas tree against the granite of Richard’s gravestone. I listened to “Adeste Fidelis” and it pierced my heart, entered into it like a river that until that moment had been diverted. Richard slipped into my dreams that night. It started well. He and I were talking about going to a scientific meeting in Hawaii and I asked him, “Are you well enough to fly that far?”
He looked well, and said with surprise, “Yes, of course. Why do you ask?”
I felt a moment of unimaginable relief. Perhaps I had been wrong.
I said, “I think you are dead.”
He held me close to comfort me, as he had so many times, and said, “It’s Christmas, I know. I’m so sorry, sweetheart.” And he left. It was so real, so much worse than not dreaming of him at all.
I could not face my own church on Christmas Eve. I had too many memories of being there with Richard, and I dreaded running into anyone I knew, so I went to the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church for their candlelight communion service. My mother had worshipped there as a young bride during World War II and listened to the great Peter Marshall; she spoke often of the sense of purpose and healing his sermons had brought to wartime Washington. Abraham Lincoln had sought solace in the church during the Civil War. It seemed a good place to go. I tried to sing the carols but couldn’t and bolted from the church after the last one. It had snowed during the service and the trees and grounds of the city were white and first-snow beautiful. A bit of the magic of Christmas Eve came back. I thought, I will write “I LOVE YOU” in the snow on his grave on Christmas morning, and I felt my heart lighten. Driving home, my mood changed: the snow seemed an ominous thing on his grave, more constraining even than the earth. This was not the snow of childhood; it was the oppressive snow of having lived through too many winters.
I was never alone during the Christmas days, not for any consequential period of time. My friends and family and colleagues saw to that. Bob and Mary Jane Gallo, Jeff and Kathleen Schlom, Jeremy, my mother and brother and I went to 1789, a restaurant in Georgetown, shortly before Christmas, continuing Richard’s and my tradition of going there on anniversaries and other special days, including the night we got married. In a tribute to friendship, and because Richard and I loved Wilson “Snowflake” Bentley’s work, I gave everyone a Steuben crystal paperweight engraved with a snowflake. We christened ourselves “The Snowflake Club,” in honor of our coming together as individuals, as snow crystals do, to form unique and stronger bonds as snowflakes. Each of us had our own history, shaped by our separate journeys, but we had hooked onto one another and come together, different and stronger. No matter the circumstances, great or grim, there was laughter, always; kindness, always; a generous giving of time, always. I trusted my life to each of them, as Richard had his.
That first Christmas after Richard’s death, we, the newly christened Snowflake Club, listened to the carolers in front of the fire and lifted our glasses to Richard. The warmth and friendship helped me to overcome my missing of him to an extent I would not have thought possible. Only when the tables were quieter and the mood more reflective did I find myself near tears. I could feel Jeff watching me, his concern evident, so that even during the quiet moments it was not as grim as it could have been. It was the first night of winter.
Christmas morning, I flailed. I was as restless as I had been peaceful just a few days earlier. My grief was acute, stabbing. I had lost my mate; it was a primitive animal feeling. I was not depressed, I was simply overcome by waves of sadness. Such fizz and delight as I had had with life seemed long ago and bound to Richard. Richard is not here.
I want my husband back, I chanted yet again to myself. I want my husband back. It was a flat recitation that did not relieve the quiet terror. It didn’t have a prayer.
Christmas night was less terrible than I thought it would be. For the first time I could remember, I was aware of needing Christmas. I needed the infusion of promise, of joy and remembrance, that came in the ancient rites and carols, the company of friends, and the lights in a dark season. There was life before Richard and there would be life after his death. I took this on faith and I almost believed it.
I turned a corner that Christmas after Richard died. Dread had outpaced the reality; a certain peace drifted into my world. Perhaps it was illusory. But the softness of the carols and the candlelight in the church darkness, beautiful and sad, stayed on for a while, after the season.
“A gentler feeling crept / Upon us,” wrote Tennyson of the first Christmas after his friend Arthur Henry Hallam’s death. “Surely rest is meet: / ‘They rest,’ we said, ‘their sleep is sweet.’”
For a while, at least, there was some respite from the pain of missing Richard. I took roses out to his grave when I went, an act of defiance. The ice in the ground vase was uncrackable, so I splayed the flowers on the snow: scarlet against white and granite, blotches of life and fury.
The new year did not start well. Pumpkin was sick. She was sluggish and turned her nose aside when I offered her food. Even blueberries and Stilton cheese, her favorites, were left untouched. The veterinarian said that she had liver cancer and that it had spread; she would not live for long. He advised me to put her down. Silas and I talked about it and agreed that this was the kindest thing to do.
On Pumpkin’s last day, I put on one of Richard’s shirts so that a bit of him would be with her at the end, and then Silas and I held her while the vet gave her an intravenous tranquilizer and sodium pentothal. She just went, in peace, in every way different from the grotesque machinations attendant to Richard’s death. Her long velvety ears lay out around her head, as they had always done. It was a quiet, dignified death.
The house felt hollowed out by Pumpkin’s death. There were none of the distractions of funeral plans and visitors and family that had filled the house after Richard died. Now there was a new empty space beside me at night, a new quietness. There was no snuffling or snoring, no sounds of her walking around in circles on top of her bed. Six months earlier there had been two to say good-night to. Now there was no one. Pumpkin had been a part of my life with Richard for nearly fifteen years; an important tie to him was gone. She was gone. He was gone.
It was Silas who found the answer to some of his and my sadness about Pumpkin’s death. He came into my study one afternoon with photographs and descriptions of basset hounds that were being fostered by a rescue program. He left the pictures on my desk and said, “I know it’s too early. But it’s something to think about.” On his way out the door, he added, “There’s one that has her feet up in the air. She looks kind of cute.
” I thanked him but told him it was far too early to be thinking about it. My heart was broken and past repair.
Silas is as intuitive as he is smart, and he knows me well. He had piqued my curiosity. I picked up the papers after he left; I didn’t have a chance, as he well knew. The basset hound with her feet in the air was six years old and living in a foster home with nine other dogs. She looked like she had a certain pizzazz. We agreed it couldn’t hurt to meet her.
A few days later, we drove out to Virginia to take a look. It was over before it began. Fifty-five pounds of basset came bounding over to me and licked my face, and that was that. I pulled out part of the money Richard had left in his basset fund and gave it to the rescue group. We named her Bubbles, for reasons obvious to anyone who met her. Pumpkin had been shy, content with life as it was, and timorous. Bubbles was effervescent and intrepid. They could not have been more different, which was a godsend.
Bubbles sat on my lap the entire way back to our house, nose sticking out of the window, comfortable with Silas and me, as if she had known us forever. When we arrived at the house, she ran directly into the garden room, looked around, leaped up onto the sofa, and walked along its top as if she were a cat. She stared briefly out into the garden, dropped gracefully down onto my new white rug, squatted daintily, and relieved herself. Bubbles had arrived.
It was good and necessary, having a new life in a house that had seen so much sickness and death.
La vie recommence—life starts again.
Not long after Bubbles joined the household, I drove down to North Carolina to give a talk at Duke University. The former president of the university and his wife had been good friends of Richard’s and they had kindly extended their friendship to me. I spent the night at their house and they saw me off in the morning with a bag of homemade gingersnaps. When I returned home, I put the gingersnaps out of Bubbles’s reach on the countertop. It was to turn out that nothing was out of Bubbles’s reach; she turned chairs into stepladders, and her nose into a positioning device to move the chairs. Later that night, I went up to my bedroom and saw Bubbles asleep on the sofa with her nose resting on something. I thought for a moment that she had caught a squirrel, but it was the bag containing the gingersnaps. She had taken the bag from the kitchen counter and carried it upstairs, and was now guarding the cookies with her nose. For days she carried the bag of gingersnaps around with her. She never ate them.
Now and again, I would see in Bubbles the traces of days when she had lived in a household with children: an insistent paw raised to shake hands, a shameless grab for affection by rolling over on her back and kicking her feet. She displayed the vulnerability of having lost something that mattered. We were close that way. She had lost her family; I had lost Richard. We had each other now. It wasn’t the same, but it was good. She was as gentle with my feelings as she had been with her bag of gingersnaps.
In the spring, I went to the American Psychiatric Association meetings in San Francisco and felt Richard’s absence everywhere: at dinners with colleagues, where I was now just one, not half of a couple; at the scientific sessions, where I could scarcely concentrate well enough to follow the drift of the talks, and in trawling Drug Company Row. I went to my hotel room the first night of the meetings and wept. They meant nothing to me without Richard. There seemed little point to anything without Richard.
I had to force myself to go to the research poster sessions and listen to the young scientists present their data; they were enthusiastic and not yet wary of life. But forcing myself to go was a good thing. I was beginning to see that work was a saving grace, that listening to new ideas and promising clinical findings was important and sustaining. Richard had told me this on our last Valentine’s Day: “Your work is important. It will help when you are missing me. It will draw us close.” He was right. Work was a solid thing, a thing of intrinsic value. Writing and teaching take one through sadness, countervail it. Curiosity drives one forward; discovery confers life.
Richard was a romantic about science and ideas. I had loved him for this and it was a part of him that stayed close to me during the early, terrible times. Those things of the mind that we had shared were lasting things. They were things that had drawn us together when we first met and they were things we were talking about on our last day together. Richard took ideas seriously. He did not fritter away either his mind or time.
I thought of this side of Richard not long ago when I was at the University of Lund in Sweden to give a talk. It was early December and the ancient university town was lighted everywhere, with tiny white lights in the windows of houses and in the shops: so many bits of light and beauty against the dark. I wished, in a way that ached, that I could be with Richard in the town, share the experience of the town and its people and history with him, make love with him again, fall asleep in his arms. We both loved university towns, especially ones where learning and teaching had gone on for so many hundreds of years. We loved the feel of them; we loved the idea of them.
I had a memorable time in Lund with my Swedish colleagues, but I missed Richard. He would have noticed so many things; he would have loved Lund and its history of scientific thinking. He would have liked the seriousness with which the history of ideas was taken. One evening during dinner, I noticed that several of the Lund professors wore two gold rings instead of one. One was a wedding ring and the other, a colleague explained, was a gold ring given to them when they completed their doctoral examinations. I found this a singular thing, a vow to knowledge, as to God or a spouse, and it would have made its way into Richard’s heart.
I had much work to get done after Richard died. I had to finish my book on exuberance and then, with a colleague, revise our fourteen-hundred-page medical text on bipolar disorders and recurrent depression. There was no choice but to work hard, and this was a blessing. I had slipped away from my profession during the years that Richard was ill. I wanted to return. I needed to return.
The initial year after Richard’s death was the most difficult, the pain the most raw, the cobbling together of protective ways thin and fragmentary. This changed slowly. The first anniversary of Richard’s death marked a small but symbolic juncture. My colleagues at an international conference on bipolar disorders presented me with an award for my work and asked me to make a few remarks. I said that I owed my life to the work of the hundreds of scientists and clinicians in the room, as did anyone who had bipolar illness. This was true, and it is something I felt deeply. Then I spoke about Richard, saying that he had died exactly a year earlier, that he had encouraged me to write about my illness. That he had supported me in every conceivable way as a husband, colleague, and friend. I could not go on. If I did, I knew I would fall apart.
My colleagues saw this, I think, and brought me back in the kindest possible way. They started to applaud, continued to applaud, and would not stop. Some whistled and cheered. It was a prolonged, extraordinary, and heartfelt response, one that not only brought a wave of warmth into my life when I needed it, but also reminded me that it is work that matters, work that is done in the context of love and life and death. I knew these things, of course, but my colleagues brought their importance back into my heart. All in the room were in the profession of healing; all worked to ameliorate suffering. It was one minute against a year, but I found renewal in that moment of generosity.
We put our faith in things great and small. We assign to them meaning they may actually have, or meaning that we need for them to have in order to carry on. I go to Richard’s grave with flowers in my arms that I will to last, with orange tulips in one hand and a hammer to break the ice in another. Why and to what avail? That there is a vivid moment of color against the granite? It will not last.
Martin Luther, it is said, declared that even if the world were to end tomorrow, he still would plant his apple tree. Every Christmas, I go to Richard’s grave and gather the evergreen boughs tight around the tulips and roses to warm them, to protect them for another hour. I find pleasure that there is
beauty near Richard, even though it does not last. It is a small thing, but it matters. I do not want him to be forgotten, or to lie alone.
MOURNING AND MELANCHOLIA
I did not get depressed after Richard died. Nor did I go mad. I was distraught, but it was not the desperation of clinical depression. I was restless, but it was not the agitation of mania. My mind was not right, but it was not deranged. I was able to reason and to imagine that the future held better things for me than the present. I did not think of suicide. Yet Richard’s death stirred up such a darkness in me that I was forced to examine those things depression and grief hold in common and those they do not. The differences were essential, the similarities confounding.
I did not, after Richard died, lose my sense of who I was as a person, or how to navigate the basics of life, as one does in depression. I lost a man who had been the most important person in my life and around whom my future spun. I lost many of my dreams, but not the ability to dream. The loss of Richard was devastating, but it was not deadly.
I knew depression to be unrelenting, invariable, impervious to event. I knew its pain to be undeviating. Grief was different. It hit in waves, caught me unawares. It struck when I felt most alive, when I thought I had moved beyond its hold. I am so much better dealing with his being gone, I would say to myself, assured by some new pleasure in life. Then I would be flung far and cold by a wave of longing I could scarcely stand.
Nothing Was the Same Nothing Was the Same Page 12
