Nothing Was the Same (13 page)

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.

M
OURNING AND
M
ELANCHOLIA

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.

I learned to live in expectation of assault. From nowhere, a memory of Richard would compel me, like some recollected scent, into a region of my mind whose existence I had forgotten. Then I would coil to protect myself, huddle as prey against predator.
He cannot be gone
, I would rail against the gods, caught again in the presence of his absence.
He will not be back
, I would know after each new confrontation. It became clearer over time, less wavering.
He will not be back. He has been away too long
.

Grief taught through indirection. It was an unyielding teacher, shrewd and brutal. It attacked, soft and insidious at times, gale force at others, insistent that I see Richard from first one slant and then another—sometimes in fragments, at others full-on—until I could put him, and the two of us as we had been together, in the more distant place where all to do with him had to be. Memory and regret bypassed my rational mind and saw themselves straight into the festering places.

I fought hard against this, defiant.
If he cannot stay
, I would rail at Grief,
do not bring him back
. But grief teaches in its own way, and thoughts of Richard came and went in a manner not of my choosing. Grief, pre-Adamic and excellently evolved, knew how best to do what it had to do. Richard had to come and go, return and leave again, if he was to take leave in the way he must. He had to take leave in order that I might find a new place for him; in order that I might find a new way to be with him, in order for life to go on. Or so I found some peace in believing.

Grief, said C. S. Lewis, is like “a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape.” This is so. The lessons that come from grief come from its unexpected moves, from its shifting views of what has gone before and what is yet to come. Pain brought so often into one’s consciousness cannot maintain the same capacity to wound. Grief conspires to ensure that it will in time wear itself out. Unlike depression, it acts to preserve the self. Depression is malignant, indiscriminately destructive. Grief may bear resemblance to depression, but it is a distant kinship.

Physically, I felt far better after Richard’s death than I had during my bouts of depression. I slept restlessly but well enough, and when I did not, medication usually worked. My mind narrowed to a more insular universe. In an essential sense, I was alone. Grief, like depression, is a journey one must take largely unattended. I pulled in my dreams and kept company with the past. The future was set aside, put in abeyance. I had less energy, but enough to see me through. This is never so in depression. Weariness pervades the marrow when one is depressed; it is what renders despair intolerable. I bled out during my depressions. This was not so after Richard died. My heart broke, but it beat.

My mind knew that things were not right after Richard died; it knew that everything about me needed tending. Solitude allowed tending, and grief compelled solitude. Time alone in grief proved restorative. Time alone when depressed was dangerous. The thoughts I had of death after Richard’s death were necessary and proportionate. They were of his death, not my own. When depressed, however, it was my own death I thought about and desired. It was my own death I sought out. In grief, death occasions the pain. In depression, death is the solution to the pain.

I was notably restless in the months after Richard died and, disturbed by this, I spoke to my psychiatrist, concerned that I might be getting ill again. He reassured me that such restlessness was an unavoidable and probably necessary part of grieving. In time, it became less distressing; it was never the perturbing agitation of mania. So, too, the sadness of grief was never so extreme as that of depression. It did not obliterate my reason. I was profoundly unhappy and distraught in the months after Richard died, but not hopeless. My mood, fixedly bleak during depression, was not so during grief. It was mutable and commonly rose in response to the presence of my family and friends. I was generally able to meet the demands of the world. I conserved my energy but was able to call upon it when I had to. Like a butterfly in the rain, I sought hiding places and kept my wings folded tight about me until I had no choice but to move. When I had to move, I did, albeit gingerly and not far. In time, the weather cleared. Even during the worst of my grief I had some sense that this would happen, that the weather would clear. I did not have this faith during the merciless months of depression.

My mind did not retain full clarity after Richard died. Far from it. But my confusion during grief was different from that which I had experienced when depressed. During both, I ruminated: my thoughts, repetitive and dark, churned over and over and made me doubt that I would ever create or love again. When I was depressed, however, each thought was not only dark but death-laden and punitive. No simple good came from the ruminations of melancholy.

Grief cut me more slack. Memories came unsought and disturbed my equanimity. Still, they carried with them an occasional sweetness, a periodic tincture of life. My thoughts did not dwell on the pointlessness of life; they dwelled, instead, on the pain of missing a life. Hope can find a place in a mind missing love. It cannot find a place in a mind taken over by depression. In grief, one feels the absence of
a
life, not life itself. In depression, it is otherwise: one cannot access the beat of life.

Grief, however, creates a strange sensitivity. The world is too intense to tolerate: a veil, a drink, another anesthetic is required to blot out the ache of what remains. One sees too much and feels it, as Robert Lowell put it, “with one skin-layer missing.”

After Richard died, I reflexively shied away from anything that might hit a minor key, sound a deeper note. I struggled to find ways to keep from being overwhelmed by what I saw and heard around me. I found solace at his grave, in part because of this disturbing sensitivity. I knew I would find quiet there. There was comfort in the old trees and in the stillness of the buried. I newly appreciated the colors of the earth; vibrant ones jangled my nerves, seemed garish and intrusive. For many months after Richard’s death, I brought no primary colors into our house. I hung beige drapes and purchased dull linens and drab clothes. It was a beige time in my life, which I later took to calling my “antifrock” period. My new dresses were meant to conceal, to inhibit the responses of others. They were the opposite of summer frocks: they were anything but free and light.

The parts of me that froze when Richard died had to thaw slowly; otherwise, I would drown. Life had to return inchmeal; my heart could open up only small territories at a time. I turned by instinct to music to help with this, but it was not the solace I thought it would be. Only hymns, which quieted my nerves, brought predictable comfort. Schumann and Beethoven ripped my heart apart. Their music, ordinarily a source of immense pleasure, pierced me in a manner I found unbearable. The beauty was too human and yet unearthly: it was too intense, too direct an emotional hit. Schumann and Beethoven awakened in me things best left alone. In the one completely irrational act of my grief, I gave away my entire classical musical collection. I did not want to have access to such pain.

I cloaked my senses in other ways. The first Christmas Eve after Richard’s death I went to a Presbyterian church, not the Episcopal church to which I belong. In an immediate way, I did not want to run into people I knew or to remember times I had been there with Richard. More viscerally, I did not wish to risk a sudden flooding of memory at midnight. I did not want to come out of the church into a crisp night with bells ringing and the chance of snow. It would be a pure assault on the senses. Although confirmed as an Episcopalian, I had attended Presbyterian churches often over the years; for that first Christmas, I found the prospect of their services more gentling: less ancient in ritual, no kneelers and no kneeling, more congregational. Communion would be in the pews, not at the altar; wine would be in small cups, not in a silver chalice. The carols of Christmas Eve would be altogether more comforting than the Mass of Christmas morning. I would offset the intensity of the Anglo-Catholic liturgy with the sparer Scottish church tradition.

Yet my Presbyterian Christmas gave only the slightest of reprieves. When, toward the end of the service, the church was darkened and each of us sat with lighted candle and sang together “Silent Night,” I cried. I cried, missing Richard. I cried because “Silent Night” was his favorite carol. I cried because there was really nothing I could do to keep his memory at bay.

“I miss him in the weeping of the rain,” wrote Millay. “I miss him at the shrinking of the tide.” Yes. But I miss him everywhere.

From the beginning, poetry consoled in a way that music could not. I read deeply, if fitfully, after Richard died. Such consolation was never possible for me during the times I was depressed. When depressed, I could not concentrate well enough to read; little made sense to me and the written word left me cold. When depressed, nothing could open my heart or give me courage. I was too dulled, too incapable of receiving life; I was dead in all but pulse. Only after depression took its leave could I turn to the experiences of those who had known deep despair or been mad—Robert Lowell, Byron: so many.

Grief, on the other hand, rendered me able to take solace from those who had written so well about loss and suffering. After Richard died, I turned instinctively to Tennyson’s
In Memoriam
, which I had read when seventeen, recovering from my first siege of suicidal depression. I found it then, as I found it after Richard’s death, to be an astonishing work: a passionate journey through suffering; a poem of great doubt and greater love. It is a poem that makes sense of the complexity and ferocity of grief, a poem of regret and renewal and letting go. Tennyson’s grief is raw in
In Memoriam
, and in the nakedness of his pain is a peculiar, defining power.

Perturbation is elemental to Tennyson’s elegy, and it was one of the things that first drew me in. He strews his poem with images of howling, blasting, lashing: rooks are “blown about the skies;” the sky is sown with “flying boughs.” There is a “wild unrest that lives in woe.” “Can calm despair and wild unrest / Be tenants of a single breast?” he asks. It is clear throughout that they can and are. Nature is portrayed as “careless of the single life,” as “red in tooth and claw.” Grief, for Tennyson, is a sickened and violent thing: “The blood creeps, and the nerves prick / And tingle; and the heart is sick.” Time is “a maniac scattering dust, / And Life, a Fury slinging flame.”

I found solace in Tennyson because I found his grapplings with grief so pained that I believed them. He wrote of the dreadful missing, the nights and seasons that pass unshared. He brought to his portrayal of grief lines of staggering beauty; he offered a solace that was not an easy solace. Each anniversary of death, each Christmas, each ringing in of the new year found in Tennyson a passing, a changing, an evolving apprehension.

There is no straight path in Tennyson’s poem of grief. Understanding comes, only to dissipate; faith enters but to leave; and resignation to death is now and again incomplete. Yet death must be acceded to if it is to give way to life. This Tennyson makes clear in his great image of the wild, tolling bells:

Ring out, wild bells, to the wild sky
,
The flying cloud, the frosty light:
The year is dying in the night;
Ring out, wild bells, and let him die
.

Ring out the old, ring in the new
,
Ring, happy bells, across the snow:
The year is going, let him go;
Ring out the false, ring in the true
.

Ring out the grief that saps the mind …

Grief transforms the nature of how death is experienced. There is wisdom in the pain attached to grief; it is not irredeemable suffering. It is not suffering without an end: despair cannot indefinitely “live with April days, / Or sadness in the summer moons.”

I found that in my old copy of
In Memoriam
I had bracketed lines toward the end of the poem. After Richard’s death I wrote out these lines as an act of faith, a hope that I might grow into them. The years of grief, Tennyson had written, “Remade the blood and changed the frame, / And yet is love not less, but more”: