Nothing Was the Same (8 page)

We approached the meetings with the same double-channeling that now characterized everything in our lives: one channel of consciousness was on Alert, for the progression of Richard’s cancer, and, at a far more distant level of concern, for the threat of another attack on Washington. The other channel was on Normal, for the unthreatened part of our lives. They were separate channels, gliding by each other. On occasion they met, as they did during our days at Airlie House. The countryside was lovely—there were rolled stacks of hay in the fields, and black walnut pods underfoot. We sat on a bench in the gardens, utterly peaceful, as if cancer did not grow in Richard’s lungs; as if the meetings we had come to attend were not about the obliteration of minds in the wake of the obliteration of cities.

I listened to Richard’s comments during the meetings, struck, as always, by his reasonableness. He argued that we are a resilient species: we made it out of the trees, out of the last Ice Age, through an apocalyptical flood, and out of our mothers’ wombs. We would make it now. He made the case, as others did, that the government should not get swept up in programs that sounded good but were not backed by data. The scientific evidence was strong, for example, that interventions such as psychological debriefing did as much harm as good. Yet a cottage industry had evolved to send “debriefers” into areas that had been hit by natural catastrophes such as hurricanes, earthquakes, and floods. Debriefers had gone en masse to New York after the attacks on September 11. Physicians, as Hippocrates had declared, should first do no harm. Richard talked about ways to prevent psychosis and suicide in the psychiatrically vulnerable.

I sat in the back of the room and listened to him. He was dying, but still he was determined to do what he could do to help. I loved listening to him; I loved the way he thought. I loved him. But that night in bed, when I heard him coughing through much of the night, I could not sleep. The world would go on without him, although not as well, but I had no idea what I would do.

Richard’s cough came and went, and with it came and went our anxieties. Shortly after we returned from Airlie House, Richard had his two-month checkup at Hopkins, which was preceded by our usual dread. This time, however, unlike at our earlier visits, there had been no significant tumor growth in his lungs. Ettinger was clearly surprised and delighted by this; we were equally delighted, and stunned. Richard had been following an experimental protocol developed by Judah Folkman at Harvard, taking a combination of medications to starve the blood supply to his tumors and injecting himself twice daily with interferon to strengthen his immune system. He was now well past the survival time predicted for his type of cancer, and we hoped he might be among the newly emerging group of cancer patients whose disease neither worsened nor improved. They lived with their disease. They lived. This possibility, and the possibility of new experimental drugs and vaccine therapy, gave us enough hope to override the intruding presence of his cough, the cold numbers we read in the oncology journals, and the uniformly discouraging second opinions we received from other doctors.

In late autumn, Richard enthusiastically turned his interest and energy to the upcoming Leonid meteor showers. He had been in love with the stars and the skies since he was a young child, when his stepfather had first taken him to Chicago’s Adler Planetarium. His stepfather had encouraged him to read about the stars, and this, in turn, had been a powerful motivator for Richard to overcome his dyslexia. His childhood passion for astronomy was evident still. Astronomers predicted that the meteor storm of November
2001
would be the most spectacular sky event of the twenty-first century. Observers during a typical meteor shower might see ten meteors an hour; this meteor storm promised a thousand an hour, perhaps ten thousand or more. There was no way we were going to miss this night of shooting and falling stars.

We woke up at 4:30 a.m. and drove into Rock Creek Park, which was already thick with cars. Washington may be jaded to human nature, but it keeps itself open to beauty. The meteor showers were magnificent in every way: spectacular bursts of green, white, and blue lights flaming across the sky, mixed with the flashing lights of the AWACS patrolling overhead. Shooting stars exploded in every direction high in the air. How perfect this is, I thought. How perfect it is that we have this, that we are watching this astonishing beauty together. How perfect that Richard is alive to see it. It is a gift for Richard’s grace. We caught bits of these falling stars, put them away for the days to come.

Richard talked quietly but passionately about the shooting stars as they rained down over Rock Creek Park. How beautiful they were, he said, how transient. Then he talked about young American soldiers, watching under an Afghan sky. Some would see the Leonids, some would be spotting targets for bombs, and some would be seeing the bombs burst. But, Richard wondered, what would Bin Laden see as he was being hunted down? Did he share the same awe for glowing dust and raining stars?

We sat in the park for a long time, watching the shooting stars and making wishes upon them, kissing with a kind of sweet abandon. Looking at star fields can induce a piercing terror at one’s finite place in the universe. This night it did not. It was just Nature at her most ravishingly beautiful, and we saw it together. It was a moment, one bead among many on our wire of time, and I would not exchange it, or our kisses, for anything in the world.

The Christmas season was a whirl of lights and carols and friends. Richard was feeling well, but I think we knew it would be our last Christmas together. Despite or because of this, it was less fraught than the year before. Perhaps we knew to take it as it came; perhaps we had sifted through some of the awful thinking one must do in light of death. But it was a festive time: trimming the tree was a gayer thing, each ornament less weighted with dark sentiment. Most of our evenings were spent by the fire (“Kay,” Richard would ask me, “would you like to make one of your special fires?”), and he and I and my mother would talk or listen to carols, have a glass of wine, and stare into the fire, dreamy and happy. The future was not unimportant; it was just put to the side for a while. Richard was dying, my mother was getting older, our dog was white in her muzzle and stiff in her walk, but we took what we had. Our lives were differently precarious, but we knew that this season was one to hold close, and we did.

“Sad?” asked the poet Douglas Dunn about the last days he had with his wife. “Yes. But it was beautiful also. / There was a stillness in the world. Time was out.”

As we did every year, we drove through the neighborhood to look at Christmas lights, and on Christmas night we watched, as we always did,
The Bishop’s Wife
. Richard nibbled on plum pudding and provided his usual running commentary on why Loretta Young should have run off with Cary Grant instead of staying with David Niven. Each year, I would say, “You’re much more like Cary Grant than David Niven.” And, because it was true for me, I would say, “Cary Grant wouldn’t have had a chance next to you. You’re the best-looking man I know.”

This Christmas, Richard was frighteningly thin, and he looked his age, which he had never done. His hair was no longer thick or raven black. I leaned over and kissed him and said, “You’re still the best-looking man I know.”

He smiled at me, but I saw tears in his eyes.

“Really?” he asked.

“By far,” I said. “By far.”

We settled into our days. The first snow of the season came thick, soft, and gorgeous in mid-January, filling the park and covering our trees and garden. Richard was sleeping more now and eating less, but as long as I was near him when he slept I felt that our small part of the world was good. Richard’s two-month evaluation at Hopkins came and went. There was a slight new infiltrate in his left lung, but this did not seem to bother Ettinger. It didn’t sound good to me, but I wasn’t an oncologist. Ettinger declared Richard’s disease “stable” and recommended that his treatment remain the same. Ambinder came into Ettinger’s office to visit us, clearly happy to see Richard looking at least reasonably well. Richard said, “You always seem surprised that I’m still alive.” Ambinder smiled and didn’t deny it.

Richard took me to our neighborhood Italian restaurant for dinner on Valentine’s Day. It was a serious and sad evening. It was the only time we discussed what would happen to me after he died, and it was obvious that he had given a great deal of thought to what he would say. He started by telling me how much he loved me and how happy I had made him. He said he wished he could say that he would be keeping an eye out for me once he was gone but, as I knew, he didn’t believe in such things. He did believe in the lasting influence of love. You have good friends, family, and colleagues, he said. You have a good doctor and work that is important. You will have to take care of yourself. You will have to take your medication and get your sleep. No one will be around to remind you. It was as though he had rehearsed the speech and did not know what to say next.

“But what will I do without you?” I asked him. “What will I do?”

Richard came over to my side of the table and put his arms around me. “I don’t know,” he said. “But you will be all right.”

I had not cried in front of Richard since he had been diagnosed with lymphoma nearly three years earlier, but now the tears were streaming down my face. Richard pulled out his Valentine’s gifts for me, hoping, I suppose, that what he had gotten for me might help. The first present was an NIH file folder, which had a stylized glass beaker on the front; he had decorated the folder with large red and pink hearts. It looked ridiculous, and I loved it. Inside the folder were two sheets of paper. The first was the dedication page for his manuscript
Cancer Tales
. It was straightforward and very Richard. “To Kay,” it read. “Without whom I would not be.”

Richard’s second gift was a copy of a letter he had written to me more than fifteen years earlier. I was living in London at the time and was in the midst of a deep and unshakable depression. He had called me one night from Washington and been unnerved by the depth of my despair. He wanted to know what he could do to help when I felt so at the end of the world and beyond hope. He said he knew depression clinically but not personally and he was frightened.

I reread his letter, written so long ago now, and thought how far we had come in our understanding of one another, how lucky we had been to have each other, and how his misspellings could still make me smile. “I like your spelling of ‘flare’ better than the correct one,” I told him through my snufflings. He looked at the letter and said, “Well, it looks correct to me.” A lifetime of dyslexia had not
altered
his confidence in how
certain
words should look.

11/28/85 Thu

Dr, Kay R. Jamison
34 Beaufort Gardens
London S.W.3
England

Dearest K
,

I have seen the green ice and the ten
minute retreats, but last night I heard
total blackness. When I was twelve we
visited Mammoth Cave in Kentucky The
guide said that it was twenty decrees
darker than total darkness, a statement
I have never understood. I still do not
understand it scientifically. I have
now/however, felt it. It is like a
black hole drawing all light into it
.
On the phone I felt life being sucked
out of me threw the wires; gladly
given. Unfortunately, there was no
conservation of matter and what left me
was not to be found in the receptacle
.
on the other end. It was as if there
was a total annihilation of substance
and energy. It brought back memories of
my most primitive childhood nightmare
.

Being with you seemed like the only
answer, Then I could see it, throw a
blanket over it, put a glass of water
by the bed, find its lithium, thyroid
and if necessary get help. I need some
guidelines on the later, I need to know
when to worry. Is length of depression
or depth the crucial issue or some
combination? If I ask you are you
taking your medicines, how specific do
I need to be? If I ask you are you
eating and drinking do I need to ask
you calorie by calorie and glass by
glass? What will tell me that you are
toxic? In Los Angeles I can call Dan
Auerbach, Who do I call in London;
Anthony storr, the Darlingtons?

I ara not glad the black hole Is there
but I am glad I have seen it. When you
fall in love with a star you accept
solar flairs, black holes and all
.

Love
,

R

He had always thought of me as an intense star, he said, alluding to the last paragraph. He brought out a small box and gave it to me. “This
is
for your solar flares and the black holes. And for our shooting stars over Washington.” Inside was a gold ring with sixteen small stars on it. He dipped it in my wine and put it on my finger, next to my wedding ring and the gold ring he had given me in Rome.