Nothing Was the Same (6 page)

After our meeting with Ambinder, we decided we should do something to mark the moment. A believer might have suggested we stop at the hospital chapel, but Richard, who was Jewish, was not a believer. Instead, he said quietly, “Let’s go to Hurd Hall.” We sat together in the hospital’s great clinical teaching amphitheater, where he and I had taught and been taught, and found ourselves absorbed in thought, each trying to comprehend what we had just been told. Neither of us said anything. There was just peace. Just quiet. Finally, Richard put his arm around me, looked around the amphitheater again, and said, “I love this place.” Then we went home.

In the months to follow, we had our future back. Richard threw himself into his science, we saw our friends often, and we arranged to give lectures without being concerned that we would have to cancel them. Richard worked on his studies of schizophrenia and started seeing patients again. I, with delight, got back to writing my book about exuberance; we began to make up for time lost and commitments broken. It was a magical interlude, gentle and love-filled, perfused with thankfulness. It might have lasted, but it didn’t.

Six months after our celebratory meeting with Am-binder, Richard returned to Hopkins for a follow-up visit. Richard’s most recent scans did not look good, said Ambinder. There was a mass in his lung, and it looked like cancer. The thoracic surgeon Ambinder had consulted did not think it was cancer, but neither of us found this reassuring. Unfortunately, we trusted Ambinder’s clinical intuition. We would have to wait for more consults and the results of a lung biopsy.

We snapped back into the dark space we had occupied before with the Burkitt’s, but tried to get on with our lives until we knew for certain whether Richard had lung cancer. We saw friends, we worked, we loved. But there was fear again, and dread. Uncertainty was in everything we did. For each time we did something of consequence, there was a moment of ice-cold fear, a question unasked: Is this the last time we will do this? How long do we have? How will he die? When? Where?

There was a possibility that Ambinder was wrong—anything was possible—and this slim chance allowed us to make it through for a while. The last days of November slid into December, a time of year we both loved, and a time in Washington we particularly loved. We lived what we knew to live. My mother and I bought a Christmas tree and a juniper wreath and we strung the lights. We listened to carols and watched, as we did every year,
The Bishop’s Wife
. We waited, with the rest of America, for the outcome of
Bush v. Gore
in the United States Supreme Court. We waited for the results of Richard’s lung biopsy, which, when we got them in mid-December, were unequivocal. Richard had lung cancer, it had spread to both lungs, and it was inoperable.

Our initial reaction was paralysis, then shock. These feelings protected us for an hour or so, and then everything became a nightmare. I poured us each a scotch and we crawled into bed to talk and to hold each other. We were not by temperament inclined to view difficulties in our lives as unfair—we never questioned that we had been immensely lucky in friends and opportunities and in having each other—but this day was an exception. It was the first and the last time we ever said it, but it did seem unfair. We had just gotten back to our normal lives, or thought we had, after months of chemotherapy, a bone marrow transplant, and long months of terrible anxiety. We had spent our store of emotional energy on fighting his lymphoma and, once we knew he was cured, had put the experience behind us as well and as fast as we could. We had grown accustomed to having an open future again and to knowing our days as less worried, lighter and easier. We were beginning to take for granted making love again, and laughing without constraint. We had shed the greater part of our morbid irony.

It was a long night. I slept little and badly, constantly reaching out for Richard, burrowing my head in his shoulder, listening to him breathe. Richard, more practical than I, took a prodigious amount of diazepam and slept soundly. The next morning, we talked about what to do to make the best of things. Neither of us knew how long he would live—the life expectancy for his kind of lung cancer was six months—but we had always enjoyed each other’s company, and we were determined not to allow the prospect of death to take that from us. Indeed, as we desperately sought some hint of a silver lining, we realized we would have more time in each other’s company than we had ever had. This would be a good thing.

Somehow the morning and the afternoon passed; they must have. I built a fire in the fireplace, put on Christmas carols, and told Richard that I had planned a romantic evening—music, wine, and dinner in front of the fire—and that no matter what happened, I was, as always, his for the asking.

Richard began to cough, a deep and frightening cough. I panicked and immediately assumed the worst: we were going to have even less time than we had imagined. With a bitterness I did not know I had, I thought: Enough—God never opens a window that he doesn’t close another two. My bitterness was premature. Richard pointed frantically at the fireplace, which was filling fast with smoke. Soon, the living room and finally the entire house were full of smoke. We were living an Addams Family nightmare. Squirrels, it seemed, had built a nest in our chimney, and while they broiled, we smoked.

Hacking, Richard and I made our way up to the top floor of the house, abandoning carols and romance as we went. I was disconsolate at what I had done, desperate that my plans for an evening of love had so ridiculously gone up in smoke. I couldn’t even get the first evening right; what would happen in the months ahead?

Richard, seeing how I felt, put his arms around me.

“Thank you for the fire,” he said.

He paused slightly.

“Did you know that smoke is a carcinogen?” he asked.

There was a moment of horrible silence. Then I saw the smile on his face, and we both burst out laughing. We were on our way to dealing with something unknown and awful but at least we were going to be in it together. And, we would have Richard’s wit to help.

Richard’s prognosis focused our thinking. I canceled as many of my lectures and academic commitments as I could in order to stay at home and look after him. We canceled professional trips to Davos and London and Rome, but kept our plans to visit Los Angeles in a few weeks’ time. We had close friends and family there and could read and relax. We could walk alongside the ocean. Richard was still alive, and we did not plan beyond that.

Certainly, the Christmas season was sad, but it was at times quite wonderful as well; we laughed even more often than we usually did, and reached out to each other with more need and a tender pleasure. It was Christmas made lovelier for our thinking it was our last. Life, strangely and redeemingly, went on in a rather normal way. Knowing that death was likely within the year, we laughed and loved and took little for granted.

A week or so before Christmas, we had dinner in Georgetown with close friends of ours, Bob and Mary Jane Gallo, both of whom had been unimaginably kind to us during the long months of Richard’s chemotherapy and bone marrow transplant. Bob, a virologist and an AIDS researcher, was talking science with Richard when he stopped suddenly, looked directly at Richard, and said, “It’s great. I can’t believe how much better you look.” My heart dropped fast and froze. It was only two days after the Hopkins pathologist had confirmed the diagnosis of lung cancer, and we were still trying to figure out how to tell our friends and colleagues.

Richard told them about the diagnosis. Bob looked stricken and was, for a while, uncharacteristically quiet. He and Richard were particularly close. Bob had been the head of a major laboratory at the National Cancer Institute (NCI), part of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, for decades; both were doctors. No one needed to say aloud what it meant to be diagnosed with inoperable lung cancer, particularly in the wake of a recent bone marrow transplant. I could see Bob taking it all in, and I could see Richard watching Bob taking it all in.

Bob shifted out of silence. He asked Richard to fax him the biopsy results as soon as we got home and to have the pathologist send him any viable cells obtained during the biopsy. He would consult with other scientists and oncologists to find out which experimental protocols might help. His own laboratory had recently synthesized a naturally occurring compound that promoted a form of cell death. He thought it might be possible to use this against proliferating cancer cells. To this end, he proposed growing cells from Richard’s lungs in mice genetically engineered to have no immune system. (These mice were later christened “Little Richards,” and, for a while, the tumors thrived as they should and died as they should. And then they didn’t.) Bob said he would read up on Richard’s particular type of lung cancer, talk with experimental vaccine and gene therapy specialists, and place calls to colleagues at the National Cancer Institute, Dana-Farber at Harvard, M. D. Anderson, and Sloan-Kettering. He would immediately consult with Richard’s oncologist at Hopkins.

By evening’s end, friendship, wine, and the possibility—the unlikely possibility—that science might outgambit Richard’s cancer gave us enough hope to confront the immediate future. Our friends heartened us; our belief in science kept us from abject despair. It was the beginning of a quest that was to be marked by a thousand acts of kindness and capability from friends, colleagues, and strangers. It was a journey to save Richard, and it took place during an unnerving era in medical science. It was a time when, as now, hope could reasonably exist next to a prognosis of death; a time when the odds of staying alive or dying were whirling, inconstant things; a time when science could suggest, but not guarantee, breathtaking results.

Our difficulty would be to navigate between false and reasonable hope, and to avail ourselves of new knowledge that might save Richard’s life while, at the same time, keeping close to our hearts the inescapable truth that Richard was likely to die. The truth would be what it would be; it would be what we would have to come to terms with, and it would demand our first commitment. We did not want to send ourselves on a fool’s errand, flying after every new and as yet unproven treatment, but neither did we want to give up and cease to explore possibilities that might save or prolong his life.

When I look back on those darkly wonderful days of Christmas, I remember the gentleness and love we had for each other, and I can feel still the warmth we took in from friends and colleagues who reached out to us with such generosity. Dread would hit unawares at times, paralyzing us for a moment or an hour. But we found the dread to be as often as not reversible; love and friends, and our awareness of the shortness of the time that we had, worked well enough, often enough, to keep us from drowning. Richard ran his lab meetings from our living room and worked, as ever, into the early morning hours. I burned Christmas cookies, and broke my heart trimming our tree with ornaments we had gathered over the years. I hung the snowflakes made of gingerbread and the glass candy canes on the tree branches, and then added an ugly clay parrot we had gotten at a scientific meeting in Puerto Rico and a half-dozen handblown glass balls from our days together in London. Only the tinsel went onto the tree without my hanging a memory upon it.

Richard, as he did every year, put the angel on top of the tree. But this year, I had to help him. I felt him, so physically weak, tremble against me, and we looked at each other with alarm. Then we just held each other. Knowing that he was going to die, and knowing how little we knew about what was ahead of us, gave us an intimacy unlike anything we had known before.

We drove nearly every day through Rock Creek Park, a great and beautiful park less than a block from our house. We looked for deer, which Richard inevitably caught sight of first, and followed the creek as far as we could; we saved the life of a box turtle wandering on the parkway. We found places off the tangled capillary roads of the park that we did not know existed, and knew ourselves freshly beholden to the park’s beauty for what it gave us now that we had not known we needed. A pleasure became a necessity.

We went one day to our old house in Georgetown, where we had lived for many years; we pulled up outside of it and sat in the car admiring the small pond we had built in the front yard. Building and stocking the pond had been a lesson in our differences, never more apparent than while debating what to do with the pond once the work on it had been completed. We had decided to buy water lilies. This entailed going to a water lily farm in Maryland, the kind of small adventure both of us loved. Neither of us knew anything about water lilies, so Richard described the size of our pond to the salesman, who, while polite, was less than impressed.

Richard said, “I think one plant will do.”

“I agree,” said the salesman. “Two would be more than you really need.”

“She will want at least seven or eight,” Richard said, nodding in my direction. “Why don’t we take three?”

We drove back to Washington with our three water lily plants on my lap, talking about what we didn’t know about water lilies. There was a silence for a while and then Richard said, “I trust you won’t go overboard with the goldfish?”

“Of course not,” I said indignantly. “I’ll get only as many as makes sense for the pond.” I looked at Richard, who looked deeply skeptical and then burst out laughing.

“Right,” he said. “I can only imagine. We’ll be feeding everything in the neighborhood that walks on four feet.”

I made up in goldfish for what I thought we lacked in water lilies. At least a hundred came to join us. Before two summers passed, the water lilies had taken over the pond and were on the move over the pond’s stone ledge. The fish flourished, despite the occasional electrical storm that left some of them fried and floating.

One evening, Richard brought a half-eaten goldfish into the kitchen and dangled it in front of my eyes. “Congratulations,” he said. “We’ve created alfresco dining for the raccoons. They eat here, tell their friends, and then take one for the road.” The fish continued to thrive, the raccoons continued to fish in our pond, and I never heard the end of it. Now, years later, I asked Richard if he remembered our trip to buy water lilies and the legions of goldfish I had gotten for the pond. He laughed out loud: How could I not? he said.