RAINING STARS
Richard and I were given a long Indian summer before he died, a year beyond what we had banked on. After the round of tributes from his colleagues, Richard suggested a vacation in California. We had no talks to give or schedule to keep; we could relax, spend time with family and friends, and enjoy what we had. We could worry later about what was to come. It was a perfect interlude. Richard, who was still in reasonable health, sat on the deck of our family house in Pacific Palisades and worked on his laptop, or slept in the sun. In the mornings, I walked to the bluffs overlooking the Pacific or down to the ocean; in the afternoons I sat on the deck next to Richard and read.
Everywhere there were the defining scents and colors of Southern California: sweet jasmine, pungent eucalyptus; bougainvillea vines with their hooked thorns and papery blossoms of tangerine and fuchsia. The jarring blue hibiscus. Richard particularly loved the camphor trees, as I did the eucalyptus, so we drove the streets of the Palisades with the car windows open, inhaling and happy. On one of our daily drives, Richard mentioned that camphor had been used centuries earlier to treat mania. He insisted we stop to gather some leaves: “Just in case,” he said with a smile. I told him that camphor sounded better to me than an injection of the antipsychotic he carried in his black bag, so I gathered up an armful of glossy leaves. We put these in a basket to ward off madness and, as he pointed out, from that point onward not only madness, but also moths kept their distance. We saw friends and family, visited with colleagues at UCLA, and at night drove up the twisting streets into the hills behind our house and looked out on the lights of Los Angeles and the unfurling of moonlight over Santa Monica Bay. We made time stop for a while, and knew how lucky we were.
I fashioned a peace with California during that trip with Richard, one that was long past due. Los Angeles had always nettled me: I loved it, I disavowed it, I tried to put it behind me. I came of age in Los Angeles and, in that sense, it would always be my city: I first knew desire there, and madness; first made love and fell in love. Los Angeles was my original city of passion and disappointment: it was where my mind cracked and where, twenty years after the fact, I still felt a cringing shame for things I had said or done when manic. But it was also where I had first heard Schumann’s piano works and Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis; had, on a summer day, watched the first moon landing; first read Yeats and Lowell and Darwin. Nothing about Los Angeles was straightforward to me.
Great chunks of my life—great frightening, marvelous chunks of my life—were tangled in the passing of Southern California’s strange nonseasons. Washington would be my first home and my last, but California was the fitful, bewildering center. Only Big Sur remained uncomplicated to me. I loved it without reservation, and sought it out time and again because it was wild and beautiful, and because it could settle me in ways that no other place or person could. Even when I went mad in Big Sur, it was an ecstatic madness, an astonishingly beautiful voyage of my mind to Saturn and its rings and moons, and to distant stars. I walked off my unrest along the seacoast of the Big Sur: away, alone, and unbeholden. It was where I went for desolate beauty and for the belief that here, always, I would be at home. Southern California I kept at bay.
Now, with Richard gravely ill, my fractiousness with California seemed a waste of time and energy, not to say indulgent. Richard was dying, it was our last trip together to California, and nothing else was important. I had wasted enough of my life thinking about despair and insanity. It was not California that was wanting, it was me. Robert Frost wrote that when those who withhold themselves from the land yield to it, they find salvation in the surrender. This was true for me. I took a different view of the West Coast, more generous and circumspect; old discontents slipped away.
Richard did not need to surrender. He did not take on unnecessary battles in life, and this gave to him a strength in character I did not have. We loved our long days in California; we took them in and kept them close, wrapped our life in the June sun and the odd scents and surreal colors of the land around us. Richard had a way of giving back to me important things I had lost along the way.
One afternoon he and I sat on a bench overlooking the Pacific, lizardlike in the sun, talking about not much of anything important, only small and binding things. After a while he said, in an even voice, “We should talk about the funeral.” I tried to keep my voice steady, which was impossible.
“Yes, of course,” I said.
Richard’s suggestion was not entirely out of the blue, although in the sun and the quiet it felt that way. Earlier in the day, we had been to see Clarke Oler, an Episcopal priest who had been the rector of my church when I lived in Los Angeles. I had known and been close to Clarke for twenty-five years, and Richard was particularly fond of him. He had officiated at the religious service for our marriage at St. Alban’s Episcopal Church in Westwood, held some time after our civil ceremony in the Shenandoah Valley. We had turned to him to talk about the things we would have to do in the months to come. We talked specifically, at Richard’s request, about possible music and readings for his funeral. Later, as Richard and I sat on the bench overlooking the ocean, on an impossibly beautiful day, we continued our discussion of hymns and pallbearers and the ancient rites of final passage. No amount of God’s sun could take the chill from what we were doing.
We went as far as we could and then, thankfully, Richard said, “Enough of this. Let’s go shop for your birthday.” He suggested a store on San Vincente Boulevard we had been to before and, once there, asked to speak with the jewelry designer. “She likes moonstones and aquamarines,” he told her. “She’s a bit like them: moody and lovely. More moonstone than aquamarine.” He smiled his wonderful smile and caught the designer in his net of charm. And me, as always, all over again. He then traced out the design of the bracelet he wanted for me, one he must have been planning for a while. It was to be alternating cabochon aquamarines and moonstones, strung together by delicate links of gold. He wanted the aquamarines to be oval and the moonstones round; it was to be one of a kind.
The bracelet arrived in Washington several weeks later, a strikingly beautiful strand of mutable gray and pale blue stones. It was indeed moody, and it was stunning. Richard tried to fasten the bracelet on my wrist but could not; the clasp was too fine and his hand shook too much. So we christened it instead, continuing Richard’s tradition of dipping newly gotten jewelry in Italian fountains, gin fizzes, or the North Sea. This time he dipped it in a shot of Dalwhinnie, a single-malt whiskey we were partial to. “For us,” he said, christening the bracelet. “For you. For love.” I could not put the bracelet on then, or ever, without the help of someone else. It was an elegant string of stones, brought into existence by love, but it was not easy to wear. It was our life.
Our last summer was a good one. We returned from Los Angeles to find our garden lit up with a wild proliferation of fireflies at night and the Washington skies lit up with summer thunderstorms reminiscent of the Dies Irae from Verdi’s Requiem. Richard was able to eat steak and corn and peach cobbler, which gave us the illusion of greater health than he had, and we had long evenings of laughter and friendship. Those summer nights with our friends were the moon and the stars to both of us; they will be with me until I cease to remember anything. Our conversations leapt everywhere: from the misbegotten love affairs of our colleagues to scandals in science, from stem cell research to Thomas Aquinas. We talked about the elegance of the universe and how we thought the world would end. We talked on and on through the summer nights, taking in more wine than others would have said was good for us, and spoke of Rome and politics, of our families, and of sundry microbes, any of which would cause a thinking person to pray for a competence the government did not possess. These evenings of friendship were unrivaled times, tinged by the overhanging apprehension of Richard’s mortality. It was fierce and gentle friendship, and it made our way to his death more navigable, less lonely.
There was a fine-tuning of Richard’s and my temperaments during the years we lived with his heart disease, lymphoma, and lung cancer. Before, our differences had triggered sporadic tension; now our basic natures served us better. Our sensibilities and quirks evolved into something more shared and complex, more mingled. The intensity of my moods and periodic flares ebbed with time and with the seriousness of circumstance. Richard’s reserved ways changed into something more intense, outward, and nuanced. He became more responsive to the feelings of others, and held his emotions less close to his chest. He had always been physically affectionate with me, but now he sought me even more. When I came into a room, after even a short absence, he held on to me in a way I had not known him to do before. Just to feel. To sense. To draw upon.
Later, when he no longer had the strength to take a bath, he reached out to take in the world beyond him in newer ways. He would ask, after I had bathed, to breathe in the scents on my arms and my neck, to take in the smell of the honeysuckle or moss rose, lime blossom salts or eucalyptus. He had never done this before, and indeed had laughed at my many bottles and jars. Kay’s Excess of Scents, he would say to our friends: Why have one bottle when you can have seven?
Richard kept his essential privacy; he had been and would remain a private man. But he reached out more to other people. Acquaintances and colleagues saw the warmer side of him that I and a few others had always known. And now, when he reached out for me, vulnerable, I was glad that I could bring to him a calmer self. I was someone he could put his faith in, and it gave me pleasure. For so long, for so many years, I had needed him, leaned upon his love and judgment. Through him, I had rediscovered some semblance of my true North, and now he drew upon his gift to me. There was fairness in all of this.
The summer drew to a close in quiet ways. Richard felt well enough to work hard on his science and to see patients. I wrote and worked at Hopkins and looked after him. The tumor in his right lung grew.
In early September, the Pentagon and the World Trade Center were attacked. I was on an early-morning flight to Atlanta for meetings at the Carter Center; it took off forty minutes before the first hijacked airplane flew into the World Trade Center and landed twenty minutes after American Airlines Flight 77 had crashed into the west side of the Pentagon. By the time I arrived at the Carter Center, it was ringed by Secret Service cars dispatched to protect President and Mrs. Carter.
The telephone lines to Washington were choked, and it was late in the day before I could reach Richard. When at last we were able to talk, he described the eerie sight of hundreds of Washingtonians walking as fast as they could up Connecticut Avenue, briefcases in hand, talking into their cell phones and looking unmoored. I felt panicked at being so far away from him and from Washington, but I could not get back. No planes were flying, buses and trains along the eastern seaboard were moribund, and all rental cars and trucks had been taken within hours of Atlanta’s airport having been shut down. My only option was to rent a limousine, but even that would not be possible for two days. So I settled into obsessively watching CNN and trying to keep in touch with Richard.
The evening after the attacks, a few of us had a quiet dinner with President and Mrs. Carter. They were calm, philosophical, and tough. They spoke from their unique perspective on America about its strengths: the vastness of its lands, the inventiveness and resilience of its people. The weeks to come were to be shot through with the kind of straightforward patriotism they embodied that evening, a good and necessary thing. It was not yet the time for overdone and alienating nationalism.
The trip from Atlanta to Washington was unnerving. Flags were at half-mast everywhere, from Georgia to the Carolinas. The radio reported incessantly on the efforts to recover bodies in New York and Washington and described the fighter jets streaking over both cities; it rendered the grapplings of a nation in shock. I found it difficult to shake the images of an airplane slamming into the walls of the Pentagon. My father, a career military officer, had been posted there for many years. The walls could not have been ripped open. The building was unassailable. There were so many dead.
In Washington, Secret Service cars tore up and down Connecticut Avenue and, more ominously, patrolled Rock Creek Park and the National Zoo. Antiaircraft batteries were installed near the Washington Monument, and machine guns were everywhere one looked at National Airport. There was the near-constant sound of F-16’s flying overhead on their combat patrols. It was an intense time, but a good one as well. Our neighborhood restaurants were packed at night with Washingtonians seeking closer contact with one another. Richard and I went out with friends almost every night. People, even strangers, were gentler for a while. The city was vulnerable. We all were.
In the days and weeks following September 11, Richard became medically practical. He put together a medical kit for the house that contained antibiotics, antivirals, and epinephrine. He divided up reading for the two of us to do: he took anthrax and plague for himself; I was assigned smallpox and botulism. (When I made murmurings that I wanted plague, he laughed and said, “Fair’s fair. You got to choose the movie last weekend.”) We both read up on the psychiatric complications of antibiotics and antiviral medications, which were not inconsiderable.
The city of government pulled together its people and its agencies. Richard, who had conducted a large study with the Department of Defense to evaluate early treatment intervention in major psychiatric illnesses, was asked by colleagues at the Pentagon to help draw up guidelines for dealing with the psychological and psychiatric consequences of mass violence. At the end of October, on a beautiful fall morning, we drove to Airlie House in Virginia for a meeting put together by the departments of Defense, Health and Human Services, and Justice to frame the response of the federal government to the psychiatric casualties of large-scale terrorist attacks.
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.
“To stars,” he said.
I reminded him of the quotation from Byron’s Don Juan that I had used in dedicating one of my books to him: “To those who, by the dint of glass and vapour, / Discover stars, and sail in the wind’s eye.”
“To you,” I said. “To safe sailing.”
When I look back on it now, my Valentine’s gift to Richard was an absurdly optimistic one. I had made reservations for us to spend a week in Big Sur in early April. We had not been there together and it was something we had always wanted to do. It was improbable, but not impossible, to do it now. The trip would be long but manageable; once in Big Sur, we could read and drive along the coast and mull and enjoy ourselves. We could relax; we could stop time again. Richard expressed concerns about the practicalities but was enthusiastic. When we got home, he sat down with my maps of Big Sur and I watched him with delight. Our trip was something to reach for, a race of hope against death.
Within the month, we knew that we would not go to Big Sur together. Richard was too sick. I told him I planned to cancel my lecture at the University of California at Davis, as well as the trip to Big Sur, but he was vehement that I not do this. “You’re exhausted,” he said, “and we have a difficult time ahead.” I argued that I didn’t want to go anywhere without him, but he insisted, and he was right. I was exhausted, physically and mentally. For three years I had been taking him to appointments at Hopkins and visiting him when he was in the hospital, sometimes driving from Washington to Baltimore and back twice a day; waiting with him for the results of scans and blood tests, meeting with doctors, requesting consultations, getting prescriptions filled; reading up on his illnesses and treatments; fixing meals and looking after the house. I was hopelessly behind in my work, struggling to maintain my psychological bearings, and trying to keep up his spirits and those of our friends and colleagues. Above all, I was worried sick about him.
We compromised. I would go to Davis for a day to give my talk, and then drive down to Big Sur for two or three days. My mother said she would come to Washington to help look after Richard while I was gone; she also said she strongly agreed with him that I needed a few days off. She told me that I sounded exhausted and that she was worried about me. She felt, like Richard, that Big Sur was exactly what I needed. I felt guilty about leaving and was fearful that Richard would get worse. Terrible things could happen quickly.
Richard and my mother were right. I needed Big Sur. I needed to stand at the edge of the ocean and see the Big Sur coast and the mountains and renew some of what was broken inside of me. Even if that renewal lasted only as long as it would take to get me through Richard’s death, it would be an essential thing. Big Sur gave me back some of my spirit, and that, in turn, I gave back to Richard.
I went to Pfeiffer Beach shortly after I got to Big Sur and read the note Richard had given to me before I left Washington. “We wanted to do this for so long and didn’t,” he had written in his childlike scrawl. “We have done other things. It will not happen in this lifetime and, as you know, I do not believe there is another. But you will know that I am with you in Big Sur. Love, R.”
I walked on the beach and read and slept in the sun. And then I slept some more. Only after the first day did I realize how bone-weary I really was. Richard and I spoke every hour or so, and as he said he was feeling better, I felt somewhat less guilty than when I had left Washington. I reread one of my favorite books, The Once and Future King, and was struck by King Arthur’s resolution and tempered optimism in the face of tragedy. I understood better this time, in the reading and from knowing Richard, the rarity of that kind of strength.
The weather was glorious, which is not usually the case in Big Sur. I ate California artichokes and figs and apricots and walnuts. I filled myself with the sun and the breeze and the ocean and the great tall trees. I looked to the sea and I lifted my eyes to the hills, from which, with the Psalmist, I drew my strength. It passed through my mind that I would not be able to be in Big Sur with anyone other than Richard.
When I returned to Washington, Richard was worse. Within two weeks, he was shorter of breath than he had ever been and he had lost nearly ten pounds. He caught pneumonia. He ate next to nothing and slept more; I watched him lose a bit of his life each day. The intimacy in being together during the approach of death is unimaginable. We knew that what he was going through was final. We lay so close to each other in our bed that we were aware of everything that went on in the other’s body. It was a long and private farewell.
In mid-April, Ettinger told us that Richard’s disease had “progressed.” The way in which he said this gave us no hope. Bob Gallo made arrangements for Richard to enroll in an experimental drug trial at George Washington University Hospital and sent his medical records and scans to a gene therapist at Vanderbilt. Richard was enrolled to participate in the NIH vaccine protocol in the fall, but it seemed unlikely that he would live that long.
He started on Iressa as part of an experimental trial to test the drug’s efficacy in patients with lung cancer. It had “shown promise,” a phrase we had come to doubt, but there were not many options left. His energy was deteriorating, he spent less time at his computer, and it was only infrequently and with great difficulty that he was able to get up and down the stairs. Friends visited more often now, but their visits were shorter.
We had quiet evenings and somewhat disjointed days from that point on. We waited. We hoped against the reality that we knew. Richard slept more, and I lay next to him and didn’t sleep. I read to him for hours a day, although he often fell asleep, and friends and colleagues continued to stream in. At the end of April, Richard and I decided we should have a dinner party for our closest friends to thank them for their friendship and for their extraordinary efforts in trying to save his life. It was our last dinner party, but it was wonderful. I set the table with masses of candles of different heights and azaleas from the garden and made a dinner of papaya with lime and crystallized ginger and figs and salmon and champagne. Everything was alight and beautiful, and the evening was warm with friends who knew exactly what was what.
The next day, I went to Rock Creek Cemetery to pick out a burial plot for Richard and myself. Richard was too ill to come, but he knew the cemetery because we had been there on several occasions to visit the Saint-Gaudens memorial for Clover Adams. It was the last day of April and there were great blossoming trees everywhere. I called Richard from my cell phone at different sites to describe them to him and to ask which he preferred. We agreed on a place in one of the older parts of the cemetery, near clusters of old trees and within sight of a lily pond. Richard loved the idea of our being near a lily pond in perpetuity and suggested, with a laugh, that I could drop an occasional goldfish into the pond when I came to visit him. It was a sad business.
I did not leave the house unless I absolutely had to. If I was not with Richard, I was distractible and anxious. The only thing that helped was to be with him. In early May, Bob Gallo recommended to Ettinger that Richard try an additional drug, one he had been working on in his laboratory and that had shown antitumor activity. Richard took Gallo’s drug along with the Iressa and the Folkman regimen, nibbled at his cottage cheese and canned peaches, and remained in unflappably good spirits. He did not complain. He worked on writing up scientific papers when he had the energy and asked me to read to him when he did not.
There were terrible things to do. Some were small—I bought a black hat with a veil from a saleswoman who was kind enough to match my silence with hers—and others were not. I went to a funeral home to make arrangements and was assisted by a very nice man who asked me if my husband knew I was there. I was surprised by the question, and said, “Yes, of course.”
“You would be surprised how many wives don’t tell their husbands they are coming here,” he said.
Not for the first time or the last, I was grateful to Richard for his directness in dealing with death and his incapacity to deny the inevitable. I picked out a simple birch casket and explained to the funeral director that Richard would just as soon be thrown to the fishes but that I wanted his physical presence for myself, and for how others would remember him. I told him that Richard was a doctor and a scientist who had saved many lives and that I loved him beyond reckoning. I told this man more than I needed to tell him, but then I am sure I was not the first to do this.
In May, Richard and I continued the discussion of funeral plans that we had started in California. Only now we were not on a bench under the sun and we knew that time had run out. Richard was propped up against pillows at the head of our bed and I sat up against the footboard. We discussed friends he wanted to serve as pallbearers and ushers and who should give the eulogies, who should do the readings. A friend of ours, John Harper, who had been the rector of St. John’s Church on Lafayette Square, where I had been a parishioner before switching to Christ Church in Georgetown, had been by to visit Richard on several occasions during his illness. He gave Richard tapes of hymns, and indicated to him the ones most often used in funeral services. Richard asked if there was any way he could have all Christmas carols, but the priest suggested this was probably not going to be acceptable. Richard and I just laughed; he was a thorough nonbeliever, but he loved Christmas carols even more than I did.
Richard asked me to read to him the funeral service in The Book of Common Prayer, and then asked if there were any biblical passages about medicine or science. I said I did not know, but spoke later with Stuart Ken-worthy, the rector of my church, who suggested a reading from the Gospel of Luke. Then we turned to hymns. Richard knew unequivocally that he wanted “Amazing Grace,” and had picked out two others he liked from the music John Harper had given him. He asked me what my favorites were so that he would include one that I particularly liked. We lay in bed and listened to the three hymns I suggested and he gave his reactions.
Under the circumstances, he said wryly, he thought he would pass on “How Great Thou Art.” He neither liked nor disliked my favorite, “Lead, Kindly Light,” so he said he thought he would pass on that one as well. He asked to listen to “Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise” again and then said, with the honesty of a dyslexic who had engaged in a lifetime war with poetry, “I have no idea what the words mean, but I like the music.” So he chose a hymn he knew I loved and one that he did not understand. As he pointed out, he didn’t really have to understand it.
We did a run-through of the funeral program. I read from the copy of The Book of Common Prayer that we had used in the blessing of our marriage in Los Angeles, and we played the hymns in the order of the program that they would occur. I got out Jessye Norman’s recording of “Amazing Grace,” which Richard loved, and we listened to it. When it had finished, I looked at Richard, who had a slight smile on his face. “Sounds great!” he said. “Let’s do it!” He laughed easily, I less so.
The days and nights did not get any better for Richard. He slept more and, despite oxygen, now and again would gasp for air as a fish will when taken from the sea. He did not respond to either of the experimental drugs and, with that, a cold dread came into the house and stayed. I returned to the funeral home to talk with the man who had assisted me before. He was kind and direct and reassured me, “We will take good care of your husband.” They had taken care of Oliver Wendell Holmes and Franklin Delano Roosevelt, he said, and Thurgood Marshall and John F. Kennedy. I told him my husband would be pleased, especially about Thurgood Marshall. I turned to leave.
“We’ll see you later,” he said.
I tried to respond but my heart had stopped.
It was early June 2002. The foxglove was high in our front garden, and the honeysuckle was climbing every which way over the stone walls. I picked armfuls of pink and white peonies and put them in the bedroom. Never, in seventeen summers with Richard, had I seen so many butterflies as there were now, in this early June. I tried to catch a small white one to keep Richard company, but I couldn’t keep up with it. And, as Richard said, I shouldn’t have tried. The butterfly ought to be free to fly in the garden.
He said this without envy or regret.