Nothing Was the Same (15 page)

I acted on my covenant with love in private and public ways. I planted a weeping cherry tree at Richard’s grave and watched it grow graceful and gentle, complexly branched. I completed at last a needlepoint tapestry I had been working on for ten years, a wreath of moss roses against a background of navy blue. I had started it in London and given it to Richard on our wedding night. We lay together that night and listened to Paul Robeson sing the seventeenth-century words of Ben Jonson. The rosy wreath in my needlepoint was my marriage gift:

I sent thee, late, a rosy wreath
,
Not so much honouring thee
,
As giving it a hope, that there
It could not withered be
.
But thou thereon did’st only breathe
,
And sent’st it back to me:
Since when it grows, and smells, I swear
,
Not of itself, but thee
.

It was the final verse of a poem about the transcendent nature of love and about renewal; it said all I felt for Richard. The tapestry had been nearly finished by our wedding night, but not quite: as was my wont, my enthusiasm had exceeded my accomplishment. Ten years later, too late for Richard to see, I took up my needlepoint again. It galled me that I had been so blasé with time, that I had left the wreath unfinished. I do not think Richard would have cared, but I did. I regretted so many things left undone.

More recently, I donated in Richard’s memory a collection of photographs to the Johns Hopkins Hospital. They are images of artist Anna Schuleit’s floral tribute to patients institutionalized at Harvard’s Massachusetts Mental Health Center, where Richard did his residency. Schuleit had observed what those who work in psychiatric hospitals know all too well: patients on psychiatric wards, unlike those on medical and surgical ones, seldom receive flowers from their visitors. Moved by this, she created a remarkable installation,
Bloom
. She filled the hospital with twenty-eight thousand potted flowers and arranged them by color on each of the four floors. Live sod—forty-nine hundred square feet of it—was laid out wall-to-wall in the basement. She planted two thousand pots of African violets, blue pansies, ferns, and heathers in the hallways, offices, and patient rooms. Fifteen thousand orange tulips were trucked to Boston to add color and to pay respect to the hospital and to those who had lived and been treated there. Hundreds of these tulips were later replanted on the unmarked graves of patients at a state asylum.

Richard, who trained at the Mass Mental in the early days of psychopharmacology, had gotten into frequent and heated arguments with his psychoanalytically trained clinical supervisors there. He found it inexplicable to have to justify using medications in patients with psychotic illnesses such as schizophrenia and mania. The experience made a deep impression upon him and taught him to question received wisdom in psychiatry. It also made him even more determined to find new ways to treat the severe mental illnesses.

I thought that giving these photographs to Hopkins, a place whose scientific and clinical traditions he admired and was beholden to, would create a symmetry of sorts. The photographs would also, perhaps, call to mind the life of a doctor and scientist who, like so many of his colleagues, had done what he could to alleviate the suffering of those with mental illness.

George MacKay Brown spoke about the preservation of things. He had, he said, a “deep-rooted belief that what has once existed can never die: not even the frailest things, spindrift or clover-scent or glitter of star on a wet stone.” Words and thoughts and actions preserve. They preserve differently than one might choose, but they do preserve.

Grief had taught, if nothing else, that to move forward I would have to imagine a life without Richard. The place I kept for him could not be one that continued to keep the future on ice. Reconstituting Richard and our relationship would mean reconstituting myself. I had no counsel for this but experience and the imagination of everyday life. I had often said to my patients who were struggling in the wake of mania or suicidal despair: We are each an island. It is your task to bring to your own island what you need to live long and well: love, beauty, diversion, friends; work that sustains; a meaningful life. Look at Maui, I would say: everything was brought in by man, insect, bird, or wind. It is your life; it is short. Treat your island with regard. Do not let it go to weed; do not give it over to anyone else. Understand the possibilities. Know the dangers. Keep away the ungenerous and the unkind.

Inventing places had always been what I did best. As a child, I had constructed worlds around me to contain my bubbling enthusiasms, to keep my dreams out of harm’s way and to set them in order. When very young, I had loved
Katy No-Pocket
, the story of a mother kangaroo who was born without a pouch. Her life changed in every way when a construction worker gave her a carpenter’s apron so that she could carry not only her own baby, but the babies of the other animals as well. I was captivated by the idea of having masses of pockets of different shapes and sizes that could hold my ideas and projects. In my mind’s eye, I filled them with notebooks and colored pencils, my kaleidoscope and a magnifying glass, books and vials and my rapidly expanding family of pet mice.

In the third grade, I took this carpenter’s apron inward. I imagined a life for my mind inside the shell of a many-roomed turtle. I hung clouds on door hooks, and filled an alcove with bins of stars. There was a separate area for my microscope, books, and experiments, and a dirt room for my lizards and mice. In the center, I constructed an open aviary for my songbirds, my parrot, and my great horned owl. Sometimes, during class, I would retreat into my shell and take a cloud down from its hook, blow into it, and send it on its way. Now and again, I would pick a star from its bin and sketch it, spin it round, or cradle it in my hands. At other times, I would dress up the mice in tiny cowgirl outfits.

The turtle was a reassuring, if unlikely, fiction. I was by nature an extrovert, quick-moving and talkative; configuring myself as a turtle could scarcely have been more improbable. Yet wandering around inside my shell al lowed me to escape dull teaching, create order from clutter, and give shape to my hopelessly scattered thoughts and daydreams. My imagination was a good friend to me.

Later, I would create mental sanctuaries to help me contend with madness and despair. It was part of a lifelong struggle to sort through experience and to still my ways. Richard had been good for me in this regard; he had kept my mind from pelting off in all directions. He had tamped it down in his quiet way and kept its cascades within the riverbanks. I imagined less when he was alive; I did not need my islands of conjured places and imposed rhythms. But when he died, I sought again the kind of construing that would help me with my grief. The future was a place like any other; it could be imagined.

I was aided in my resolution to move forward in my life by the book I was writing about exuberance. While Richard was alive it had given me purpose and both of us heart. I liked the people whose passionate lives I was studying, and Richard had liked, each morning, for me to read to him what I had written. It was a pleasure jointly held. After he died, the idea of writing a book about joy seemed absurd to me. Exuberance seemed ridiculous, vapid, and irrelevant. I could not imagine why I had found the topic important. Exuberant by nature, I now found it hard to enter into the lives of my subjects, harder still to write about them. I had been weaving a tale for Richard’s mornings and nights, brewing a physic to keep death away. It hadn’t worked. He was dead. It seemed another of my chagrining enthusiasms.

Inevitably, as grief let up and I took to life again, writing about joy seemed a more comprehensible, and indeed a quite wonderful, thing to do. I had written, before Richard died, about love and exuberance and why they are essential to who we are as a species. Now I had to know how to end the book, for I knew somehow that I would find in the ending what Richard had given to me. I knew this with certainty, but it was a certainty based on faith, not reason.

The final chapter, which was to focus on discovery and the restless optimism of the American pioneers, became a treatise on imagination and the resilience of human nature. This chapter, I said to myself, will be for Richard. This will be what Richard brought back to me, and it is what I will give to him. Everything in this chapter, I knew, would be for Richard, and from that point on I had little difficulty in finishing the book.

I wrote, in the final chapter, about the resilience of the men and women who had sailed on the
Mayflower
in
1620
with only hope and will and the capacity to imagine the future. They had exerted their will and engaged their capacity to imagine against high seas and famine and disease; they survived. I wrote about Willa Cather’s
O Pioneers!
and what she had said about the mind of the pioneer that “should be able to enjoy the idea of things more than the things themselves.” I described Vachel Lindsay’s expansive, wandering Johnny Appleseed, who carried life into the frontier and into the future: “In that pack on his back, / In that talisman sack…. / Seeds and tree-souls, precious things, / Feathered with microscopic wings.” And I recounted Ole Rölvaag’s great saga of the Dakota plains, about the pioneer Per Hansa, in whom “there dwelt high summer” and “a divine restlessness,” a man of surpassing imagination, who “strode forward with outstretched arms toward the wonders of the future.” Pioneers, Rölvaag wrote, were those who had thrown themselves “blindly into the Impossible, and accomplished the Unbelievable.”

I wrote of the expansive, roaming spirits of Whitman and Lindbergh and others who had reached for territories beyond. Finally, and most to my heart, I wrote of the life that comes from death: of the emergence of the great fields of flowers on the Somme battlefield where death had been all-dominant and not a tree was left alive; of Peter Ackroyd’s description of beauty and life even in the wake of the German bombings of London during World War II. The streets, he wrote, bloomed with ragwort, lilies of the valley, and white and mauve lilac. There was life, even in the midst of devastation.

I found my way back into life through my writing, as Richard had told me I would, and in the end I found it easier than I thought it would be. I was writing for Richard and about him; I was writing about his enthusiasm for discovery, and the pleasure his mind took in new ideas and new places. I was writing about the life he had given back to me in the wake of my manias and depressions, about love and how it returns in its own way, in its own time. I was writing about the mystery of joy and the joy of love. Richard was dead, but love and ideas were not. Richard had taught me a saving amount and we had, in our common life, headed instinctively to the fields beyond. We always had looked yonder.

The mind imagines, even as it knows that its imaginings are fleeting things. When I was in Scotland two years ago, on my yearly lectureship at the University of St. Andrews, I opened the curtains in my room to see the Old Course and the town covered in snow. The North Sea was white, and one had to know that it was there in order to imagine it. Everywhere I looked it was breathtakingly beautiful. I went to chapel with a friend, and by chapel’s end a large snowman, with stone eyes and a university scarf around its neck, had appeared in the college quadrangle. By teatime, snowmen of all sizes and in all manner of neckwear dotted the Old Course, the college gardens, and the gardens of the town. In so many places, the students and the townspeople had built snowy defiances of time, small tributes to imagination and impermanence.

The next morning, the grass was poking up through the snow, but three snowmen still stood on the Old Course. Within the hour, the grounds crew was chopping them up and the magic of the day before was gone. It didn’t
matter
. The creators of the snowmen had placed their joy in the
creating
, fully knowing the transience of their creations. The life of a snowman was short, its cold sands would soon be run, but the very fact that it was ephemeral made its existence a glorious thing. “The hands which give are taking,” wrote the Scottish poet William Soutar. “And the hands which take bestow: / Always the bough is breaking / Heavy with fruit or snow.”

It is in our nature to want to hold on to love; it is grief’s blessing that we come to know that there are limits to our ability to do so. To hold on to love, I had to find a way to capture and transform it. The only way I knew to do this was to write a book, this book, about Richard. It would be about love and what love had brought, about death and what death had taken. I would write that love continues, and that grief teaches.

I returned to Big Sur, sat up against the cushions in the window seat in my room overlooking the rocks and the sea, and picked up the fountain pen Richard had given me years earlier to write
An Unquiet Mind
. Richard had said then, Write from your heart, and I had. I would write again from my heart, but this time I would write alone.