Nothing Was the Same (11 page)

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.

One morning—during the early weeks, when I still spoke aloud to him—I said, “I missed you, sweetheart, when it rained so hard last night. I missed you this morning, when it was no longer raining. I missed you, wondering if the rain would begin again.” And then I stopped. I could not bear to think of him alone, so deep in the ground. So unaware of the rain and how much I missed him.

It was peaceful, all the same, and I imagined that soon the grave-tenders would put sod on top of his grave and perhaps I could plant a tree or flowers. I like being here, I thought. I like his company. There was something good and deep that compelled me to his grave, to keep company with him, to comprehend who we had been and what we would become. We had been together in one way, alive and sensate; this had changed. I would have to imagine and invent, as he did, in order for us to have a different way of being together. I would have to know him differently. We would not grow old together—this was implicit in everything I knew and felt; it was among the more terrible realities of his death—but something would survive. I would make it so.

One afternoon, when I got to Richard’s grave, I saw that it had been covered with fresh earth, used to fill in the area that had settled. This had raised his grave to the level of the surrounding ground. Everything now seemed final. Richard was no longer among the newly dead; his grave had lost its recent look. Now he was only one of the cemetery’s many dead: less new, more permanent. He was freshly dead to me, but not to nature and the parish grounds.

Soon his gravestone was in place and it felt good to lean against it, to trace his name in the granite. It was late summer and the leaves were beginning to come down. In no time at all, they would be heavy on his grave. I faced toward his headstone. I had assumed his head was in that direction, but I dropped a breath when I realized I did not know if this was actually true. I didn’t know where on Richard I was standing and it unmoored me. Why did it matter? It just did. It mattered a great deal. I had to distract myself from my morbid thoughts. I went to my car and retrieved my
Field Guide to Eastern Trees
and took it back to Richard’s grave. He would like my being a bit more systematic about Nature than I ordinarily am. I could put aside my gruesome thoughts and think of oaks and sycamores.

On my birthday, a week after Richard’s funeral, my mother and I drove to the cemetery. She took a lily and a white rose to put on his grave, and I took pink zinnias, honeysuckle, and purple petunias. We both stood there, quiet and hurting. Mother looked unbearably sad—she and Richard had been very close—and I wanted to comfort her; she had done this so often for me. I could not think of anything to say, however; at least nothing that was true. We stood in silence.

“He took such good care of you,” she said finally.

Of course, I thought. She must wonder how I will go on without him,
if
I can go on without him. They had shared their worries about me and, similar to each other in habits of restraint, had laughed about my expansive notions of life. Now, everything had changed. She felt anew her old responsibilities. I put my arm around her and told her that I would be fine. I believed this, and I believed it enough for her to believe it.

“I’ll miss him,” she said softly.

That evening, I put on my new aquamarine earrings from Richard and joined my friends and family in a birthday celebration for which I had no heart. Afterward, my mother suggested we watch a videotape of a talk that Richard had given several years earlier. He had been asked to speak about what it was like to be married to someone with manic-depressive illness. The three of us had watched the tape shortly after he had given the talk and then it had been put aside. I didn’t know if it was a good idea or not, but Mother seemed eager to watch it, and, as I remembered, in the talk he had said repeatedly how wonderful she was. My mother, the least vain person I have ever known, wanted to hear this directly from Richard. For my part, I wanted to see Richard as he had been when well, but I was wary. Still, I had to do it sometime.

It was an unsettling, good thing to have done. It was disturbing to see what I no longer had, but reassuring to know that I had had it for as long as I did. In the videotape, Richard talked about me with love and bemusement. He described my awful moods with tolerance, my euphorias and absurd enthusiasms with warmth and affection. He recounted our first Christmas together, when we argued over whether our tiny tree really needed a dozen strands of lights. He had thought me extravagant; I had thought him incapable of grasping the idea that there was no such thing as too many Christmas lights or too much joy.

He made it clear that it was hard on our relationship when I was agitated or irritable, but he made it as clear that he felt our relationship was well worth it. He spoke in a collective sense of how
we dealt
with my illness, how
we
managed it. He said that it was important to be supportive of my strengths and not too hard on my weaknesses. He talked about how much he loved the passions of my mind, and related in detail how, the evening before, I had read to him about elephants and their amazing ways. He didn’t back away from how difficult it was to live with a sometimes tumultuous illness, but he gave more weight to love than to disease. As he always had. I watched Richard, handsome and smart and alive, and it broke my heart for missing him. It broke my heart, but it gave me courage as well. I had that man’s love, I thought to myself. I had his respect; he desired me. I was lucky. But now what? I didn’t know I could hurt so much.

Richard’s presence in the weeks and months to come was in shards of memory that came from nowhere and found their mark. His presence was in his absence. It was in my restless turning to him at night, in my seeking places out, not thinking, that prompted memories of shared times, or conjured his ways. I walked to the National Zoo one morning, thinking to distract myself from my life, and ended up at the zebra yard. What was it that made me think of Richard when I was looking at the zebra looking at me? It had slipped my mind. Of course: our first date had been at the zoo, and we had studied the zebras. Did I know that zebras’ stripes were different, not only zebra to zebra, but from left to right on the same zebra? Richard had asked me. I did not. I did not know about the left-to-right asymmetry.

“Well, let’s see if it’s true,” he had said.

I was about to learn a great deal more about zebras than I would have chosen to learn. They bark and they whinny, Richard told me with delight. They like tall grasses; they run like the wind. They have amazing,
really
amazing, stripes. We turned to the issue of stripes and, for half an hour or so, in the pages of the notebook Richard carried in his pocket, we mapped out the taperings, widths, and curvings of the stripes in front of us. I began to fall in love with Richard over that zebra.

So there I stood, two decades later, laughing and crying in front of a zebra, trying to recapture the alchemy of Richard’s mind and sense of wonder. I couldn’t, not as fully as I would have liked, but it was no accident that I had ended up at the zebra yard. My mind sought out its own saving salt, as an animal will seek it in a field. My mind knew what it needed to keep well, to stay alive. The quirks and curiosities that inhabited Richard’s mind came unbidden into mine, and with them came life.

When Richard was in the hospital for his bone marrow transplant, I had read to him, from
Wind, Sand and Stars
, Saint-Exupéry’s account of his forced landing onto the Sahara. “Our home is yet in truth a wandering star,” he had written. “I had kicked against a hard, black stone, the size of a man’s fist, a sort of molded rock of lava incredibly present on a bed of shells a thousand feet deep. A sheet spread beneath an apple-tree can receive only apples; a sheet spread beneath the stars can receive only star-dust. Never had a stone fallen from the skies made known its origins so unmistakably.”

The traces of Richard’s mind that drifted into my own were likewise unmistakable. They could only be from Richard. I came to welcome these times when his imagination wandered into mine. They kept him alive to me and necessary. They kept me tethered to him, as I had been for so long. I did not want to be free of him yet. Why would I?

I returned to Hopkins a month after Richard died and found that it had lost some of its magic for me. The competence and quickness of mind I so loved in my colleagues, and the Oslerian tradition of medicine that defined the character of the hospital, had been eclipsed by Richard’s illness and the dread that had been yoked to our every visit to his Hopkins doctors. Richard and I had had such an uncomplicated love for Hopkins; it was muddied now by the failure of his treatment. The love would come back in time, I knew, but it would be more complex. The excellence of his medical care had stood against a disease that was going to win. This juxtaposition was one I would come to see more in my own field, and it had the effect of making me understand Hopkins better and appreciate it more.

My first day back at the hospital was difficult. It was reassuring to return to a world I knew and where people made their caring clear. But after giving a talk to the residents, I had to leave. Life went on, teaching went on, science and good doctors went on. I couldn’t. Not this first day. I was at sixes and sevens. I couldn’t go back in time, but neither could I move forward. I hadn’t then what I needed to be a part of a high-energy endeavor. As I passed by the cancer center, I felt a wave of revulsion. I wanted to run past the graveyard and to forget all that had happened there.

I was restless in everything that I did. It was not the unbearable agitation of mania but, instead, an anxious fluttering that had attached itself to my grief. I walked and walked and then walked some more in an attempt to allay the disquiet. It worked, but not well. I left dinner parties midway through and seldom made it to the end of a film or a concert. My reading was fitful. I started, put aside, and picked up again a wide assortment of books. Each time it was the same. I read a chapter or two and then put the book aside. I started to reread
Watership Down
, thinking to reenter the book Richard and I had read aloud together, but I became anxious, knowing what lay in store for the rabbits. Neither fiction nor nonfiction brought me the escape I hoped for.

My years of dissembling when depressed, of persuading others that I was fine when I was not, turned out to be useful in navigating the no-man’s-land between my grief and others’ queries and concerns. It took far longer to reconfigure myself after Richard’s death than I thought it would, and certainly longer than most people allow. A colleague, not someone distinguished for his sensitivity, asked me, after Richard died, to review a paper for a psychiatric journal. “My husband just died,” I found myself snapping.

“It’s been three months,” he said.

And so it had.

Time means different things to different people. To some in the BlackBerry scramble, three months is long enough. I was inhabiting a slower and more confused world, with a different experience of time altogether. I could not imagine turning from my inward life and sadness to the cold-blooded thinking necessary to do a scientific review. I wanted time to myself with Richard. Soon enough, I would have to enter into the rest of my life without him. This was a time between times, and I did not want to leave it before I had to.

I seemed well enough to my colleagues and friends, and I wasn’t depressed. This, together with the fact that I had a horror of weighing heavy on those I knew, made it hard for them to know how distressed I really was. I don’t know why I kept such hurt to myself—I wish I had not—but I did not want others to see how much I missed Richard. There was a pressure, as well, or I felt there to be a pressure, to assuage the anxiety of others. A slight measure of sadness was fine, but it was better to leaven it a bit with laughter or reassurance, or by changing the subject. I did admit to a few friends that it was hard, and that, for me, was a major admission. I have always found it difficult to ask others for help, and this was the first time in my life that I was aware of reaching out with my heart so obviously upon my sleeve. So I reached out, but I didn’t.