LILACS AND A ROMAN RING
Richard and I got married in the autumn of 1994, midway between our meeting and his dying. After a short but surpassingly happy honeymoon in Venice and Rome, we returned to Washington, Richard to his science and me to revising a book that was to be published in a year’s time. The honeymoon, insofar as it signaled a time away from the concerns of the world, was over. The book I had written, an explicit account of my manic-depressive illness, guaranteed this.
Richard was unambiguous that I should write about my bipolar illness. Of course there would be consequences, he said. Some would be obvious and others would not. My disclosures would make me an easy target of criticism and would no doubt be of some embarrassment to him. The book might be a critical and financial failure. Still, he said, it was the right thing to do. People who suffered from mental illnesses, and their families, needed every voice they could get. As a scientist who studied schizophrenia, a long-time mental health advocate, and a doctor who treated severely ill patients, he knew, as much as anyone could, the need for public discussion. At a more personal level, he was the husband of someone with manic-depressive illness and had seen its damage firsthand. He also had seen how I and others had been hurt by discriminatory policies and shaken by unkind, if inadvertent, remarks made by our colleagues in private practice and in academic medicine.
He made it clear that he would do whatever was necessary to provide emotional and financial support. The former was critical, the latter not inconsequential. I had been financially independent since leaving high school and had worked my way through college and graduate school. Later I had worked absurdly long hours to pay off my student loans and medical bills, as well as to retire the colossal debts incurred during my free-spending days of mania. I was used to being independent. I did not want to rely upon Richard financially, but, given the alternative, I was grateful for his offer. He believed, and made me believe, that love would see us through, that we were doing the right thing and doing it together. I would not have written An Unquiet Mind without Richard’s encouragement to tell the truth of my life. To the extent that others may have been helped by that, it is to him that a debt is owed.
The decision to write about my illness had been difficult. I am a clinical psychologist who holds licenses to practice in California and in the District of Columbia, and I had privileges at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. I am someone who studies and writes about the illness I have, and I knew that as a result of my disclosure my work would be subject to questions of objectivity by my colleagues. The deeply personal nature of my book would require that I give up my clinical practice, at least for the foreseeable future. The professional and financial consequences of doing this were substantial. I had spent long years in clinical training and had been treating patients for nearly two decades. I enjoyed broad clinical responsibilities when I was director of the UCLA Affective Disorders Clinic and had maintained active private practices, first in Los Angeles and then in Washington. Not seeing patients would be a loss, and a decision I knew I would regret. I loved clinical work and was reluctant to give it up.
I was as well a teacher of young doctors and graduate students and, like most people, had been brought up to be private about personal matters. My father, an Air Force officer and a pilot, kept to the military code that strength of character demanded silence and forbearance in the presence of difficulty. My mother, a warm woman, was similarly reserved in dealing with personal problems. Both assumed, as they assumed the presence of the air, the undeniable correctness of the WASP ethic that one kept one’s problems to oneself, admitted no weakness. Being an Episcopalian didn’t help. The Frozen Chosen had thawed over the years but still veered toward immoderate discretion. I kept my fears hidden and grew up sealed tightly as a vault. I did not confess, concede, or admit. It wasn’t done.
I liked and believed in this view of the world. The people I most admired embodied these values: they complained rarely and got on with life. They didn’t deposit their private struggles into the public domain. Their beliefs, which gave them an edge in assurance and ascendancy, made it difficult to acknowledge pain or personal failings. These matters were nonnegotiable and, in their certainty, they exacted a toll. But they were the only beliefs I knew.
Such values were suited for a simpler world than the one in which I found myself as a young woman contending with a sick mind. My innocence, which had decayed alongside my sanity, never quite came back. Experiences I had as an adult made scant sense in the context of my childhood ethic. I had been brought to my knees by madness and despair, my values shaken beyond easy restoration. I was a clinician and an academic, unavoidably aware of the devastation experienced by those with mental illnesses such as my own. I looked inward and then around me: it did not take much to grasp that privacy and reticence, however admirable, made life more difficult than it needed to be. Silence about mental illness bred a quiet ugliness and set in place the conditions for unnecessary suffering and death.
I found my own silence about manic-depressive illness increasingly intolerable. True, my parents had taught me to keep private matters private, but they also had taught me to think for myself and to have a sense of responsibility toward others. I felt myself a hypocrite, a repellent state that gradually wore down my instincts for professional self-preservation and concealment. I had studied and written about depression and bipolar illness for twenty years, had founded and directed a large clinic specializing in these diseases, and was a full professor at a major university teaching hospital. My illness had been under good control for many years. If I couldn’t be public about it, it was scarcely reasonable to hope that others would.
I asked family, friends, and colleagues for advice. My mother and brother felt strongly that it was a bad idea to go public with my illness; they believed I had been through enough pain and that I would be personally and professionally vulnerable in unforeseen and damaging ways. My father, who himself has manic-depressive illness, encouraged me to write honestly about what I had been through. It was the courageous and right thing to do, he said, and I ought not to censor anything I wrote about him. Friends and colleagues were divided on the matter. Those not clinically trained were more inclined to think that openness was a good thing, in part because it might benefit others with mental illness and in part because they believed honesty to be intrinsically freeing. This was a far from universal view. Some were adamant that criticism was likely to be withering and the professional repercussions severe. Just as things had begun to settle in my life, they pointed out, I was risking additional instability. Those who were clinicians were even less sanguine about my being open about my illness. They, like I, had seen the prejudice and actions taken against colleagues in clinical fields; they had few illusions about tolerance within the profession.
I discussed the decision at length with my psychiatrist, Daniel Auerbach, a first-rate clinician who has been my doctor since my first psychotic break as a young assistant professor at UCLA. Together we weighed the potential damage of disclosure against its possible benefits. I was wary of being labeled by my academic and medical colleagues as a manic-depressive psychologist, rather than being seen as a psychologist who happened to have manic-depressive illness. I knew that for many the question of professional impairment would be a critical issue. This would be a completely legitimate concern. Those who specialized in psychology or psychiatry would present a special set of problems: I risked newly vigilant eyes observing my actions and appraising my moods, newly honed ears listening for skips in reason, real or imagined anger. It was an unattractive prospect.
My psychiatrist, who understood my desire to be direct about my illness, talked with me about the ramifications of openly discussing psychosis, suicide, and my initial reluctance to take medication. He, more than anyone, knew the cost to me of living in silence. But he also knew that once I had discussed my illness openly, my pride would take a sharp body blow. Pride had been a costly but sustaining force for me since childhood. Pride had kept me going when other things did not. I would be giving live ammunition to competitors, or to anyone I had irritated over the years.
His counsel was thoughtful, circumspect, and protective. It was without condescension. If I thought I could do it and had reasoned it through, he said, I could do it. He made the indisputable point that it would be hard, and it was. He did not say it would be insurmountably hard, and it wasn’t.
I knew that my account of my illness and my life would have to be explicit, or there would be no point in writing it. This meant reliving, describing, and making public a troubled and contradictory life. I had hallucinated and been delusional on more than one occasion, been paralytic with depression for months on end. My behavior at times had been bizarre and disturbing. By anyone’s standards, I had been severely ill. I had tried to kill myself and had nearly died from a massive overdose of lithium, the same medication I had written about in medical journals and strongly advocated that others take. In the early stages of my illness, I had taken it only fitfully and reluctantly. One could hope for understanding, but not assume it.
I spoke with the then chairman of my department at Johns Hopkins, Paul McHugh, in part because I respected his judgment and in part because I had to. I told him I hoped it might be helpful to others to write about my oddly intersecting worlds—those of researcher, clinician, teacher, and patient—but that I did not want to put the Department of Psychiatry or the Johns Hopkins Hospital in an awkward position. We both knew the inevitability of the “Who’s in charge of the asylum?” quips. More substantively, there were very real legal, educational, and clinical issues. And no one could predict what the reaction of the public and the media would be.
My chairman listened carefully as I laid out my concerns. When I had finished, he looked at me thoughtfully and said, “You know, Kay, you have it completely backward.” He mentioned the legendary surgeon William Halsted, who was the first chief of surgery at Hopkins. “It was known that Halsted was a cocaine and morphine addict,” he said. “When he was impaired, his colleagues took it as their responsibility to protect Professor Halsted’s patients. But they also looked after Professor Halsted as best they could, so that he could continue to do his research, write, and train young surgeons.” He paused long enough for me to take this in. “If Hopkins can’t do that for you,” he said, “Hopkins has no business being in business.”
He could not have been more understanding. He made it clear that I had his unequivocal support and that I should let him know if anyone on the faculty or the house staff made it difficult for me. He arranged for me to have lunch with the president of the Johns Hopkins Hospital, who likewise gave me his complete backing. He reiterated my chairman’s statement that Hopkins should be at the forefront of lessening the stigma against those with psychiatric illnesses; he hoped my being open about my own illness would make it easier for doctors and other clinicians to seek out, receive, and give good medical care. Both he and my chairman were unambivalent in their message that they would back up my decision in whatever way they could.
They gave me the blessing of a great teaching hospital. I am not so naive as to think this is usual in medical schools and hospitals. I know that it is not. But it is exemplary. And it is from the exemplary, not from that which is done badly, that one learns and moves forward.
Inevitably, it was Richard whose advice and support were most important to me. He encouraged me to write my book, nudged me on when I balked, and took me into his arms when things were hard. He wasn’t one to give up when life was difficult, and he did not give up on me.
I decided to disclose my mental illness in an article that was published in the spring of 1995 in the Washington Post; my memoir An Unquiet Mind came out that fall. Not long after the Washington Post story was published, Richard and I attended the annual meeting of the American Psychiatric Association. Most of our colleagues, although shocked to learn that I had bipolar illness, were supportive of my decision to talk and write about it, and generous in their remarks. More than a few, however, seemed acutely uncomfortable. They averted their eyes, drew away, said nothing. I have never harbored the illusion that psychiatrists are uniquely compassionate or able to find the right words in awkward circumstances, yet I was struck by the silence. It was bone-chilling. There was a sense from some that I should be embarrassed by my revelations and, when I was not, that they were embarrassed for me.
That winter, after my book had been published, I went to a medical conference in Stockholm. One of my Danish colleagues said, “No Danish doctor would write what you wrote.” It was not meant as a compliment. Walking back to my hotel, I saw cut tulips in a store window, scarlet and beautiful against the northern darkness, and felt again the loneliness I had known years ago as a young woman at scientific conferences. Meetings tended then to be very male in nature and were hallmarked by territorial rattlings and simian battles of dominance. To preserve myself against this, I often bought flowers for my hotel room: a splash of color, a trace of beauty, a private femininity.
Now, many years later in Stockholm, that sense of vulnerability, of exposed separateness, was back. I went to a flower shop and bought an armful of red tulips for my room and put them on my bedside table, an antidote to one male colleague’s remark. Most of the Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian doctors at the conference had gone out of their way to be kind to me; they had been warm in their support. But one chance remark, not ill intended, threw me back in time, yanked me down.
For every coldness or drawing back by my colleagues, however, there have been far more acts of kindness and drawing in. At meetings in Dublin, my Irish colleagues were fabulous. The dean of St. Bartholomew’s Hospital toasted me with a glass of champagne to congratulate me on my “personal courage,” and colleagues from Trinity and University College Dublin were kind beyond reckoning. One of the consulting psychiatrists gave me a book of poems by Yeats, with a note that said simply, “Thank you.” Another sent a breathtaking bouquet of tangerine poppies and wild cornflowers to my room. After dinner and an easy flow of wine, two other colleagues, professors of psychiatry in Dublin, took me to the General Post Office, heart of the 1916 Easter Uprising, and pointed to the statue of the dying Cúchulainn. We thought you might like to see this, they said, laughing. He had it really hard.
My private life was now exposed to all and sundry, and I found it hard to live with the new reality. As a child I had been quiet and invisible when troubled; as an adult, I had hidden my mental illness behind an elaborate construction of laughter and work and dissembling. Now, my mind and heart and their respective pathologies were brightly lit on a page, behind a lectern, on a television screen. Yet, despite this, it felt good to be honest, to be a part of the community I until recently had kept to the edges of. I was no longer just a re-searcher and a clinician answering questions about diagnosis and treatment; I could talk of my own madness and fears, feel not so distant, not so hypocritical.
I was overwhelmed by the many thousands of letters I received in response to the publication of An Unquiet Mind. Most were generous; many were disturbing. Religious diatribes were common. I received hundreds of letters from fundamentalist Christians berating me for turning my back on God and abandoning my Christian faith, which I had not been aware I had or had not done. Others thought my illness just deserts for not having truly accepted the Lord Jesus Christ into my heart, or for not having prayed often or sincerely enough. I had left my mind open to Satan, and he had entered in. Madness and despair were precisely what I deserved and would have in this world and in the next. I should expect to burn throughout eternity. I got more than a taste of the intolerance and hatred religious extremity harbors toward those with mental illness; it was unpleasant and frightening.
I was taken aback by the medieval quality of some of the beliefs held, modern incarnations of demons and possession, and by the viciousness of the attacks. One woman, who included a prayer card with excerpts from the Bible, wrote that it was a good thing I hadn’t had children as I had at least “spared the world of one more crazy manic-depressive.” There were several variations on this theme. “You are clearly unaware of the pain and suffering you and other manic-depressives cause,” wrote one person. “How could you have even considered having children, bringing another psychotic into existence?”
There is a large and politically powerful contingent that is virulently opposed to the use of any kind of medication to treat psychiatric illnesses; they weighed in often and with frightening vehemence. Individuals who enjoyed their manias or regarded their ecstatic psychoses as a gift castigated me for colluding with the medical establishment by recommending medication. Others, a smaller group, felt I had written with too much affection about my manias.
Some people questioned whether my psychotic experiences were not in fact perfectly sane, simply visionary states or another, more enlightened form of consciousness. A trip I had taken to Saturn during one of my manic episodes and that I had described in my book seemed to me, when compos mentis, quite clearly psychotic. I soon found I was a piker when it came to inter-galactic travel. Scores described their trips to Mars and Saturn and star clusters far beyond. Some regarded their planetary voyaging as a manifestation of illness, others as a useful extension of their usual mental lives. One person’s madness is another’s perceived gift.
Many wish to believe that the odd is not so odd, the bizarre not so bizarre, and there is little changing of minds once they are set. There are only so many ways to understand the strange and disordered. The Greeks imagined gods to explain what they themselves could not. It is human nature to invent reasons for why the mind shatters, hope plummets, or the will to live dies. Scientific explanations are complicated and, for many, less humanly satisfying than visionary or religious ones. They are also less interesting than explanations based on planetary misalignment, toxins, or childhoods gone awry. There is a disturbing gap between what scientists and doctors know about mental illness and what most people believe.
Some expressed resentment that I had had the advantage of financial security and supportive friends, colleagues, and family: What right did I have to complain? I could not possibly understand the real pain of mental illness. One colleague, hard-edged and drunk, in front of several of our junior colleagues, snapped that she thought because I had had a “privileged” upbringing, I had “no right” to write about the pain of bipolar illness; it was presumptuous. I found this outrageous. It seemed beyond the pale to have to explain to a professor of psychiatry that the pain of bipolar illness, like the pain of cancer, does not discriminate on the basis of “privilege.”
At the end of the day, only Richard could make me feel less awful about the vitriol that came my way. Put the letters aside, he would say. Ignore the ugliness. If you must reread them, put them away for a week or so. He believed, from his own experience of having received stinging critiques on scientific papers, that criticism never seemed as bad on subsequent reading. Often he would call friends of ours and suggest that a group of us go out to dinner, knowing that warmth and laughter and shared tales of scathing reviews or wicked comments would lessen the hurt.
After a particularly difficult time, Richard planned a long weekend for us on the Eastern Shore, thinking that the Chesapeake Bay, which I had loved since childhood, might pull me out of my discouragement and gloom. He insisted that we do nothing but eat, sleep, walk, and make love. No talk of work or illness, no obsessing over the rightness or wrongness of decisions made. No dwelling on hostile letters.
I fell in love with Richard all over again that weekend and, as he knew I would, fell back in love with life. One afternoon, he went out for a drive and came back with a large cottonwood swan under each arm. Decoys, a male and a female, they had been carved by craftsmen on the Eastern Shore; they were beautiful. And, as Richard pointed out, swans mate for life.
Despite the occasional criticism and second-guessing, most people were kind in ways I could not have imagined. Acts of cruelty or criticism have been far outweighed by innumerable acts of warmth and generosity. For every discomfort about the loss of privacy or fear of personal or professional reprisal, there has been a countervailing relief in the honesty.
More than anything, I have been impressed by what people survive: the pain, the injustices of a health-care system that makes no pretense of fairness toward those with mental illness, financial ruin, violence, and most devastating, the suicide of a child, husband or wife, or parent. Everywhere I have gone, I have seen the wreckage left by mental illness and the resilience, inventiveness, and generosity of those who contend with it.
This mixture of devastation and bounty is most obvious in students who struggle with mental illness. I had been particularly eager to reach out to young people with my book, in part because the student years represent the age of greatest risk—the average age of onset of bipolar illness is eighteen or so—and in part because I, at that age, felt so alone with the uncertainty and terror of my own manic-depressive illness. For students who are depressed or who have other mental illnesses, the contrast between how they feel and the energy and high spirits they observe in their fellow students is razor-sharp.
Colleges and universities are incapable of handling the number of students with psychiatric disorders. Usually, administrative awareness of the problem is short-lived and ineffectual, stirred only by campus violence or the suicide of a student. Once the immediate crisis is past, there is little of a constructive nature put into place. On every campus at which I have spoken, students described to me not only the pain and the hopelessness they felt from their psychiatric illnesses, but also the lack of understanding they felt from their professors and college administrators; the lack of adequate health insurance; their fears about being asked to go on medical leave and not being allowed to return to campus; and how aware they are that their behavior is frightening and disruptive to their roommates (and the guilt they feel and are made to feel as a result of this). Always, I am struck by how far-reaching depression’s presence is: a secretary or a department chairman; a football player; the university president or a trustee; a music student, a premed; a business student in suit and tie—anyone might be affected.
When I talk to students, so many of whom have tried to kill themselves, I usually ask them, Did you talk with your parents about this? Few say they have. They invariably ask me, Do you worry about getting sick again? How have you stayed well?, and I tell them, Yes, of course I worry. I worry every day. But it is good to worry. I tell them that it is hard to get well and that it is hard to stay well, but that it can be done. I find myself using Richard’s words: Take your medication. Learn about your illness. Question your doctor. Watch your sleep. Use common sense about recreational drugs and alcohol. Reach out to others. I tell them that bipolar illness is a bad illness to get, but that now is a great time to get it. Science is moving fast, and public understanding is better than it has ever been; they are lucky to have been diagnosed and treated early.
I have been deeply touched by the courage of these students, struggling as they do to study and to compete, to love, and to stay alive. I admire how they have played the hard, unpredictable cards they have been dealt. They take less for granted and appreciate life more than do so many others of their age. I have enjoyed and learned from my time talking with these students over meals, in seminars, after lectures and before. There is a magic in being trusted with the stories of their lives, and if I had nothing but those days and evenings in their company, I would rest content and have little qualm about having made public my private nightmares and weaknesses.
Students have reached out to me and to their fellow students with generosity and ideas. Medical students at the University of California, San Francisco, for instance, who themselves suffer from depression or bipolar illness, set up a support group for other medical students and house staff with similar problems. To my great pleasure they named their group the Redfield Club and asked me to give a lecture in memory of a popular professor of anatomy who had taken his own life. After my talk, they presented me with a first-edition copy of Robert Lowell’s Life Studies. It was a profoundly thoughtful gift and, by no coincidence, contained several poems I had used in teaching over the years. “My mind’s not right,” Lowell had written in one of them. “I hear my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell, / as if my hand were at its throat… / I myself am hell.” I keep the book from the medical students on my desk, reminded of Lowell’s hell and theirs. I am reminded even more of the good that some can seize from pain.
Most of my discussions have been with undergraduate, graduate, or medical students, but, because mood disorders often hit those much younger, I have spoken as well to hundreds of children and young adolescents with depression or bipolar illness. They experience the same pain and have the same fears as those who are older, but, because the illness is usually more severe in the very young, and because they cannot understand as much about their illness as those who are older, they have a particularly hard time of it.
One afternoon, I went to a high school in Northern Virginia to give the commencement address. The school, which specializes in teaching students with severe mental illness, had a graduating class of nine. The auditorium was ratty—a far cry from those in the elite private schools that hold such sway in the Washington area—and it was decorated with a decidedly non-traditional triumphal arc of black balloons. Each child had been to hell in his or her own way, and each had stayed in hell far longer than anyone should have to. Theirs was not a world of math tutors, lacrosse practice, and cello lessons. It was, instead, a world of pain, hospitals, psychosis, suicide attempts, and medication. It was also a world of grit, gallows humor, and little taken for granted. They were gutsy and admirable. The small band of graduating students marched to the stage to receive their diplomas, crosswise and out of step, to a scratchy tape recording of “Pomp and Circumstance.” I can count on one hand the number of times I have had to fight hard to keep from crying in a public setting. This was one of them. Mental illness is pernicious in the young. Courage in the face of it is remarkable.
I was keenly aware of this when I talked with a group of children and adolescents in Colorado several years ago. They ranged in age from seven to seventeen and all suffered from bipolar illness. We talked about what it was like to struggle with depression and mania and to have to take medications with unpleasant side effects, how hard it was to concentrate and to study, and how it was nearly impossible to make friends and family understand. These were things they knew too well, too young. But we talked of hope, as well, and how one could live a good life with the illness. It was hard, but it could be done. I answered their questions as best I could. Then, as I was leaving, a young boy, perhaps seven or eight years old, came up to me and put his hand in mine. He looked up at me and asked, “Are you really okay?”
I put my arms around him and felt him sobbing against me. “Yes, I am,” I said to him. “I really am. You will be, too.” He looked doubtful. I reached into my handbag, pulled out my key chain, and removed the plastic Bugs Bunny charm I had carried for years. I told him it was my extra-lucky charm because it had not just one rabbit’s foot, but four. A small smile appeared. I gave him the key fob and assured him that Bugs Bunny would bring him the same good luck he had brought me.
I hoped that this would be true, but the world and his illness being the way they are, I was not sure that luck would carry him as far as would be fair.
Six months after I first discussed my manic-depressive illness in public, Richard and I spent our wedding anniversary in Rome, where he was giving a medical talk and, as part of a bicentennial lecture series about John Keats, I was speaking at the American Academy in Rome. We had several days together of aimless wandering and evenings with friends and, on our anniversary, a romantic dinner on the rooftop of the Hotel Hassler, where we were staying. It was a sweet lull in the wheeling days that had become our lives. Late one afternoon, after a long walk by myself through the Borghese Gardens, I returned to our room, where Richard had been working on a paper. It was evident he had been up to something.
“I got you some flowers,” he said.
I looked around the room and saw nothing.
“But first you have to find them.”
His smile was broad, his mind afoot. I looked around the room again but still could see no flowers. The only place left was the bathroom, so I opened the door. Richard had outdone himself. The bathtub was filled with floating blossoms of white and pink and lavender. It was a stunningly beautiful sight. I looked at the flowers more closely; they looked suspiciously familiar.
They were. The day before, the staff of the Keats-Shelley House had kindly sent me a beautiful bouquet of roses and lilacs to thank me for my lecture. Richard, while I was out on my walk, had removed the flowers from the vase, cut their stems, and set them a-sail on the water. It was low-cost and very Richard.
He said eagerly, “Keep looking. You’ll need to get down on your knees for this.” Feeling mildly ridiculous, and wheezing because I’m allergic to roses, I got down on my hands and knees to explore the blossoms as they drifted in the bathtub. My hands were wet and cold and my knees soon sore, but I kept at it and finally discovered, attached by a paper clip and a rubber band to the stem of one of the roses, a pill bottle with a note inside: “Check the bed.” It was a hunt. Richard was in his element.
After a prolonged search of our exceedingly large bed, I found a small red box. It was from a jeweler in Rome and inside, on silk, was an antique gold ring. Underneath one of the pillows was a note. “Thank you for the happiest year of my life,” Richard had scratched in his dyslexic hand. “I know that talking and writing about your illness has been hard. I am very proud of you—not only as your husband, but as your colleague.”
The next morning, Richard dipped my new ring into the waters of the Trevi Fountain and then slipped it onto my finger, next to my wedding band. It would be with me when he could not, he said; it would lessen the hurt from the cool silences or sharp remarks that might come my way. After we returned to Washington and criticism did lay me low, Richard was wry and loyal and he brought me back again. When things went well, his joy was undiluted, and we hung the moon.
We laughed and made love through those Italian days, and thought our happiness imperishable. It was a time of such closeness that even now I cast into those memories for assurance. I had Richard, we had each other, and it was enough.
Time sped by without our believing that it could end. Love pushed back our fears that his or my illness might come back, that one of us might die. It was a blithe time, and it did not last.