An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (17 page)

Very little sank in. I remember sitting down, picking up my work again, writing for a while, and then telephoning my mother. I spoke also with David’s parents and his commanding officer. Even when we were discussing plans for the funeral, which was significantly delayed because the army required an autopsy before David’s body could be returned to England, his death in no way seemed real to me. I went through all of the motions in a state of complete shock—I booked a flight, taught my seminar the next morning, ran a clinic staff meeting, renewed my passport, packed my clothes, and carefully gathered up all of David’s letters to me. Once I was on the airplane, I methodically put the letters into order according to when they had been written; I decided to wait until I got to London, however, before reading them. The next day, in Hyde Park, when I sat down to read, I found I could get through only the first half of the first letter. I started sobbing uncontrollably. To this day I have neither reopened nor reread any of his letters.

I found my way to Harrods to pick out a black hat for the funeral and then had lunch with David’s commanding officer at his club. He was, by virtue of his job, chief psychiatrist for the British army; by temperament, he was kind, direct, and tremendously understanding. He was used to dealing with women whose husbands had died unexpectedly, knew desperate denial when he saw it, and clearly grasped that I had not even begun to comprehend the reality of David’s death. He talked to me for a long time about David, about the many years he had known and worked with him, and what a wonderful doctor and person he had been. He also said he thought it might be “terribly difficult, but a good idea” if he read me portions of the autopsy report. Ostensibly, this was to reassure me that the massiveness of David’s heart attack was such that no treatment or medical intervention would have helped. In actuality, it was clear he knew that the cold-blooded medical language would shock me into beginning to deal with the finality of it all. It certainly helped, although it was not so much the gruesome medical details that lurched me toward reality; it was, instead, the brigadier’s statement that “a young officer had accompanied the body of Colonel Laurie on the Royal Air Force plane from Hong Kong to Brize Norton airfield.” David no longer was Colonel Laurie; he no longer was Dr. Laurie; he was a body.

The British army was unbelievably kind to me. By definition the army is used to death, especially sudden death, and much that is healing comes from their traditions. The rituals of military funerals are in themselves predictable, reassuring, dignified, religious, and dreadfully
final. David’s friends and fellow officers were blunt, witty, matter-of-fact, and deeply compassionate. They made clear the expectation that I would handle things well, but they also did every conceivable thing possible to make a terrible situation more bearable. They never left me alone, but they never hovered; they kept me plied with sherry and scotch; they offered me legal counsel. They frequently, openly, and humorously discussed David; they left little room for denial.

During the funeral itself, the brigadier insisted I sing along with the hymns, kept his arm around me during particularly difficult times, and laughed out loud when I whispered to him, during a somewhat overdone eulogy about officers and gentlemen, that I wished I could just get up and say that David had been great in bed. Despite my revulsion at the grotesque reduction of a man who had been six feet three inches tall into a small box of ashes, and an overwhelming desire to stay back from the grave site, he again pushed me forward to watch, to take it in, to believe it to be so.

I spent the rest of my time in England with friends and, bit by bit, began to understand that the future I had assumed, and the love and support I had come to depend upon, were gone. There were a thousand things I remembered once David had died. And there were many, many regrets: for lost opportunities, unnecessary and damaging arguments, and a deepening realization that there was absolutely nothing that could be done to change that which was true. There were so many dreams lost: all of our plans for a house full of children were lost; all of seemingly everything was lost. But grief, fortunately, is very different from depression: it is sad, it is awful, but it is not without hope. David’s death
did not plunge me into unendurable darkness; suicide never crossed my mind. And there was very real solace in the offsetting and enormous kindness of friends, family, and even strangers. The day I left England to return to America, for instance, an agent at the British Airways ticket counter asked me if my trip had been for business or holiday. My composure, which had been airtight for almost two weeks, suddenly snapped. I explained, through a flood of tears, the circumstances of my visit; the agent immediately upgraded my seat and put me where I could have as much privacy as possible. He must have sent the word ahead to the stewardesses, because they too were unusually kind, solicitous, and left me to my thoughts. Since that day, whenever possible, I fly British Airways. And, each time, I am reminded of the importance of small kindnesses.

I returned home to a tremendous amount of work, which was genuinely helpful, and, unnervingly, to several letters from David, which had arrived in my absence. In the days to follow I received two other letters, long delayed in the mail, and then, inevitably and terribly, they stopped. The shock of David’s death gradually disappeared over time. Missing him never has. Several years after his death I was asked to speak about it. I ended with a poem written by Edna St. Vincent Millay:

Time finally did bring relief. But it took its own, and not terribly sweet, time in doing so.

T
he accumulated pain and uncertainty from David’s death, as well as from my own illness, for several years very much lowered and narrowed my expectations of life. I drew into myself and, for all intents and purposes, shuttered my heart from any unnecessary exposure to the world. I worked hard. Running a clinic, teaching, doing research, and writing books were no substitute for love, but they were interesting and gave some meaning to my badly interrupted life. Having finally cottoned onto the disastrous consequences of starting and stopping lithium, I took it faithfully and found that life was a much stabler and more predictable place than I had ever reckoned. My moods were still intense and my temperament rather quick to the boil, but I could make plans with far more certainty and the periods of absolute blackness were fewer and less extreme.

Still, I was unquestionably raw and unhealed inside. At no point in the eight years since I had joined the faculty—despite the repeated, long months of manias and
depressions, my suicide attempt, and David’s death—had I taken off any extended time from work, or away from Los Angeles, in order to heal and bind up the massive and long-standing wounds. So dipping into that most fabulous of all professorial perks, I decided to take a year’s sabbatical leave in England. Like St. Andrews many years before, it turned out to be a gentle and wonderful interlude. Love, long periods of time to myself, and a marvelous life in London and Oxford gave both my mind and heart the chance to slowly put back together most of that which had been ripped apart.

My academic reasons for going to England were to conduct a study of mood disorders in eminent British artists and writers and to work on a medical text about manic-depressive illness that I was writing with a colleague. My time was split between work at St. George’s Hospital Medical School in London and the University of Oxford. They could not have been more different experiences, each wonderful in very different ways. St. George’s, a large teaching hospital now in the middle of one of London’s poorest neighborhoods, was active and lively in the way that good teaching hospitals tend to be. It was 250 years old and had been home to Edward Jenner, the great surgeon John Hunter, and many other clinicians and scientists famous in the history of medicine; the hospital was also the final resting place for Blossom, the cow that Jenner had used in carrying out his smallpox vaccine research. Her somewhat mangy but magnificent hide hung under glass in the medical school library. When I first saw it, at a distance and without my glasses, I thought it was a strange and oddly beautiful abstract painting. I was delighted when I found out it was actually the hide of a cow, and not that
of just any cow, but such a medically famous one. There was something very nice about working near Blossom, and I spent many happy hours in her company, working, or thinking about working, and looking up now and again at her motley but charming remains.

Oxford was totally different. I was a senior research fellow of Merton College, one of the three original Oxford colleges founded in the thirteenth century. Merton’s chapel had been built during the same period, and some of its incredibly beautiful, deeply stained glass windows date from then as well. The library, built a century later and one of the finest medieval libraries in England, was also the first to house books upright on shelves instead of keeping them flat in chests. Its collection of early printed books is said to have been hampered by the fact that the college was convinced that the printing press was only a passing fad, one that would never be able to replace handwritten manuscripts. Some of that extraordinary confidence—so unburdened by either the realities of the present or the approaching of the future—still seeps through the Oxford colleges, creating, variously, annoyance or amusement, depending upon one’s mood and circumstance.

I had a lovely suite of rooms at Merton overlooking the playing fields, and I read (albeit with difficulty) and wrote in total peace, interrupted only by a college servant who brought coffee in the mornings and tea in the afternoons. Lunch was almost always with the senior fellows, a remarkably interesting, if occasionally odd, group of senior lecturers and professors representing all fields of study within the university. There were historians, mathematicians, philosophers, and literary scholars, but whenever possible I would sit next to Sir Alister Hardy, the
marine biologist, who was a fascinating man and an extraordinary storyteller; I listened for hours to his accounts of his early scientific explorations to Antarctica, as well as his discussions of his ongoing research into the nature of religious experiences. We shared strong common interests in William James and the nature of ecstatic experiences, and he leapfrogged fields, from literature to biology to theology, without effort or pause.

Merton was not only among the oldest and wealthiest of the Oxford colleges, it was also widely acclaimed for having the best food and the finest wine cellar. For that reason, I not infrequently found myself in Oxford for college dinners. Those evenings were evenings far far back in time: sipping sherry and talking with the dons before dinner began; walking together, in procession, into the old and beautiful dining hall; watching with amusement as the black-gowned, scraggly undergraduates rose to their feet as the dons came in (the deference had a certain appeal; curtsying, perhaps, was not such a bad thing after all). Heads bowed, quick prayers in Latin, students and dons alike, we all would wait for the college warden to sit; this then, would be followed by an immediate and overpowering din of undergraduates scuffling with chairs, laughing, and shouting loudly up and down the long dining tables.

At the high table, the conversations and enthusiasm were more restrained, and, always, there was vintage Oxfordtalk, usually clever, often hilarious, occasionally stifling; excellent dinners with superb wines were all noted on elegantly calligraphied and crested menus; then we filed out into a smaller, private dining room for brandies and ports and fruit and candied ginger with the warden and fellows. I cannot imagine how anyone
got any work done after these dinners, but, as everyone I met who taught at Oxford seemed to have written at least four definitive books on one obscure topic or another, they must have inherited, or cultivated, very different kinds of livers and brains. For my part, the wine and port would inevitably catch up with me, and, after pouring myself onto the last train to London, I would stare out of the window into the night, caught up, for an hour or so, in other centuries, and happily lost between worlds and eras.

Although I went to Oxford several times a week, most of my life was centered in London. I spent great and vastly enjoyable amounts of time wandering through parks and museums and took long weekends with friends who lived in East Sussex, walking along the downs overlooking the English Channel. I also started riding again. I felt the return of an amazing sense of life and vitality when taking a horse out through the misty mornings of Hyde Park during the cold, late autumn, and even more so galloping pell-mell over the Somerset countryside, through beech woods and across farmlands. I had forgotten what it felt like to be that open to wind and rain and beauty, and I could feel life seeping back into crevices of my body and mind that I had completely written off as dead or dormant.