WILDFLOWERS AND GRANITE

In the weeks after Richard died, time moved erratically; memory was capricious. I could make no sense of how my mind worked and soon stopped trying. Shock protected my heart, but porously. I knew it must be shock because I got done what I needed to do. I knew the protection was porous because, when I was least expecting it, a memory would bring me to my knees. I had then the cold horror: Richard is dead. I will not see him again. There may have been rules that determined which memories came unawares, or when they would choose to strike, but I never discerned them. Logic came from the world without, not the one within.

Practical matters and tradition dictated the things that needed to be done after his death. I had only to find a place to start and an inevitable progression would emerge. I started by sorting through Richard’s things. I knew this would be a minefield to negotiate, but it was what made sense to me at the time: I would go through his desk, his books and clothes, his papers and financial files, and the medications that hadn’t worked well enough.

Richard’s desk seemed the obvious place to start, although I soon found it to be too much him to continue and stopped not long after I had started. There was a glass bowl containing a tangle of keys to our house, his offices and the wards at St. Elizabeths and NIH, to his labs, his car. Most of the keys were labeled, but who would find that helpful now? His wallet lay on his desk; I found it impossible to pick it up, impossible not to. In it was a photograph of me with long hair and a laugh I would never have again. There were credit cards, a driver’s license, and—in an unusual exercise in the poetry of everyday life—a medical license stating that Richard was “duly registered to practice the healing art in the District of Columbia.” Had that phrase, “the healing art,” caught Richard’s attention? I would not know. I could not ask him.

I went restlessly from room to room in the house, finally settling again in his study. I stared at his books for a long while and pulled down a few, incapable of facing them in any systematic way. Anna Freud’s The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defense loomed out at me: Had it always been there? What was it doing on Richard’s bookshelf? He was a die-hard psychopharmacologist and biological psychiatrist. I opened the cover and there it was, a bookplate marked “Ex Libris Richard J. Wyatt, M.D.” It was true, then; Richard had had a copy of Anna Freud’s book in his possession. Strange. I was oddly reassured to see that there was not a single margin note or underlined phrase. Basic Methods in Molecular Biology and The Mesocorticolimbic Dopamine System, on the other hand, were copiously notated and their margins filled with his scrawl. I felt better; the Richard I had known reemerged a bit. I quit his bookshelves when I came across the section of books he had written or coauthored; I wasn’t up for too much Richard too soon. It was beginning to be clear that with Richard dead, work and books and ideas were not going to be such fun again; I was not going to be able to walk across the hallway and ask him a question about science or medicine. Or lure him into bed. He was dead.

There was no avoiding Richard in our own house, of course. His file cabinets were everywhere and their contents gave me some pleasure; they also ripped my heart apart. Five entire file drawers were filled to brimming with letters and cards and other bits and pieces I had sent or given to him over the years. I was touched by the fact that he had kept these things and somehow relieved that he had had concrete evidence of how much I loved him. I had never questioned that he knew how much I loved him, but he was not there to allay my sudden insecurity. Had I shown him often enough, and well enough, how much he meant to me? It was too late now.

I found the notes he had kept about my illness in another file drawer: chartings of my moods and medications, lithium research papers with margin notes and queries, pages photocopied from books about mania. Detailed, reassuring. Who will do it now? Who will ever care enough, or be knowledgeable enough, to do it again? Into one folder, labeled “Suicide/MDI,” Richard had slipped a letter I had written him, with one paragraph bracketed in red ink: “Thursday is the anniversary of my almost having killed myself,” I had written. “For the life of me, I cannot understand why this day is so important to me but—always—it is tied up with my prayers, failures, survivals and—always—I have a glass of wine and a moment to myself and a toast ‘To Life.’ All this by way of saying it is a season of grim memories and I wish I could be held very tight. But knowing you makes it so much less bad, so much less lonely.”

I sat down and reread the letter.

In all our years together, Richard never failed to remember this dark anniversary. It was a day we marked each year with a glass of wine and a toast to life. Later, I would find this date marked in his appointment book with “Kay.” So many things were going to end.

In a different file drawer, I found photocopies of letters Richard had sent to me over the years. It was too painful to read beyond the first two or three, so I stopped and put them into a box that I thought I would open in a few months’ time, after my emotions had settled. I did not open the box for five years. The first letter, which I did read, was one Richard had written to me about why he loved me. “The smile and laugh light up the room,” he had written. “But the reflectiveness holds my attention. There is self-confidence without arrogance, vulnerability without weakness. There is self-preservation, but kindness. Insight is with humor, perception with appreciation, and intellect with judgment. The judgment rules but intuition is the guide.” Was this how he had seen me? It must have been; it was addressed to me and signed by him. I had forgotten this letter and I loved having it now. Will any man love me this way again? What will I do without him? I want my husband back.

I dreamed that night that I was meeting Richard for dinner and I saw him across the room. I got up from the table and went to him, relieved and filled with joy. Something made me hesitate, though, and made me ask: “Are you dead?”

He said, very gently, “Yes,” and I woke up sobbing, bereft, alone.

I should have known that Richard, creator of under-the-bedcovers Easter egg hunts, and author of countless original acts of love, would have left me help to wend my way through grief. He did. On the second day of going through his things, I found a letter under his computer, handwritten, on the precarious downward slant his handwritten letters seemed always to take. He said in it how lucky we had been to find each other and that he had learned from me how to love. And, he wrote, perhaps I had found some relief from my restlessness and passing despairs. He said that he was grateful for the extra time we had had together and that, until the past few years, he had always assumed he loved me more than I loved him. Not because I didn’t love him, he said, but because love was new to him and not to me. “In the past years, however,” he ended his letter, “I have seen your love in everything you have done for me. I love you more than you can know.”

I sat in his study, with his note in my hands, trying to think what I had done for him that anyone else would not have done. I couldn’t think of anything, except perhaps to make transparent my utter delight in his company, and to provide an ampleness of passion and laughter. The love had always been there. It had come and remained without effort, as a star moves in the course that has been set for it.

Two additional envelopes, which I came across under the large box that held his medications, contained cash and explanatory notes. The first was to pay for a birthday present he had charged to a credit card. The gift he had ordered, a pair of aquamarine earrings to match the bracelet he had designed for me in California the year before, arrived at our house a few days after his death, days shy of my birthday.

In the other envelope, Richard had put enough cash for me to buy a basset puppy once Pumpkin, our fourteen-year-old basset hound, died. He had felt for some time that we should get another dog because Pumpkin was old, and he worried that I would be devastated by her death. I had resisted, thinking Pumpkin was used to being the only dog and would find it hard to adapt to another animal in the house.

Certainly, Pumpkin needed consoling during the weeks after Richard died. For days she moped around the house and slept next to Richard’s empty reading chair. I could scarcely look at his chair, remembering him reading or tapping away on his laptop, or thinking about our afternoons when I read to him as the sun filled the room. Finally, after several days, I thought to sit in his chair myself, which helped Pumpkin adjust to his absence. I realized that Richard would have figured out what to do in a few minutes’ time. It would not have taken him days, as it did me.

Pumpkin had been hopelessly smitten with him. After all, as Richard had often said to our friends, she was a female. And females were drawn to him. He liked to recount our naming of her as an example of this. Pumpkin had come into our life as a ten-week-old puppy and, at the beginning, had a somewhat conflicted relationship with Richard. He had not wanted a dog to begin with and was initially adamant that she not sleep in our bedroom with us. It was bad enough that she jumped up on the couch in his study, he said, but he’d be damned if he was going to pay for her to get up on another psychiatrist’s couch because she had been traumatized by some primal scene she had witnessed in our bedroom. It was always disconcerting to hear Richard express a psychoanalytic thought, usually a lingering remnant of his Harvard residency; it meant, among other things, that he was unlikely to change his mind.

In fact, he warmed to her over time. When she was a puppy, still with pink pads on her paws and ears so long that she tripped over them, he nicknamed her “Vicious,” a name he continued to use until he died. Pumpkin, who was morbidly shy and the gentlest of bassets, was incapable of anything resembling aggression. Richard persisted in calling her Vicious, and one day suggested putting our competing names for her to the test. We should be objective, he said. Scientific. He sat at one end of the living room and I sat at the other. Then he dropped Pumpkin down midway between us.

“You call her,” he said.

“Come here, Pumpkin,” I called out to her. She sat, head cocked, listening to my voice. With basset hounds, there is a random correlation between what is asked of them and what is done. She sat expectantly; only her tail moved.

Richard smiled.

“Here, Vicious,” he cajoled her. “Come to Richard.”

She padded over to him straightaway.

“Science has spoken,” he said. “I rest my case.”

On our wedding night, I had asked Richard to sit in the living room while I gathered up the first part of my wedding present for him. This came in the form of Pumpkin, and it had been designed to counter his complaint that, unlike the other dogs we came across in the park, she did not know how to do any tricks. This was true, largely because I had never seen the point in teaching her any.

I thought that teaching Pumpkin to do a trick for Richard might cut down on his comments about her inability to learn and my inability to teach. She and I practiced fastidiously in the days leading up to the wedding, and after Richard and I returned from the Shenandoah Valley, I brought her into the living room, white satin bow around her neck, and waved a dog biscuit in front of her nose.

“Speak,” I said. She barked immediately. We both looked over to Richard for his approval. There was silence instead, then a smile appeared on his face.

“Great,” he said. “The best thing about the dog was that she never barked, and now you’ve taught her how.”

To underscore his point—I had forgotten to give her the dog biscuit she had earned—she started barking frenetically and unceasingly. And then, relentlessly, she bayed.

“Brilliant job, Vicious,” said Richard, laughing. “Now leave.” She went to her bed and we to ours.

Now, sitting in my reading chair, facing Pumpkin, who was sleeping in Richard’s, I realized that it was not that I didn’t want to go on without him. I did. It was just that I didn’t know why I wanted to go on. It would have to be an act of faith.

In the weeks after Richard’s funeral, I tried to read the hundreds of condolence letters I had received, but I found it hard to read more than one or two at a time. His friends and colleagues wrote wonderfully about him; their observations were perceptive and generous and brought him, for a moment or two, back to life. But this hurt as often as it helped. The characteristics that others most often ascribed to him—“private,” “unassuming,” “gentle,” “charming”—were ones that I most associated with him as well. And most missed. Many commented on his wit and his generosity to junior colleagues. Several European scientists invoked the word civilized, which he would have liked enormously. When the solution to schizophrenia was found, wrote one colleague, Richard’s legacy would be complete. I wish he could have read these letters; I wish he could have known how strong and consistent the thread of qualities was, how much respect he had commanded for his mind and for his ways, for how he had dealt with death. “At a time when so many people would justifiably have limited their scope to their own affliction,” wrote a friend and colleague, “his mind was still ranging across the universe, searching for curiosities and making observations.”

Many were kind enough to express their belief that I had brought Richard great happiness, and I found this genuinely consoling. Jonathan Glover, the British philosopher, wrote, “If I knew enough chemistry, I would know the name for a compound made from two very different chemicals—you and he were that sort of unit.” I loved the image, and thought about chemicals that might fit his notion. My mind was slow and muddled, however, and I could not think past lithium and rubidium, elements I had written about and that were opposite in many of their properties. But they would not unite in the way I wanted them to, better together than apart. Richard, I realized, would have come up with something quickly; it would have been clever. Richard is dead.

Richard is dead. Richard, lover of chemicals, lover of stars, would have delighted in the lines of poet Robert Crawford: “All the chemicals that make up our bodies,” he wrote, “first emigrated here from far, raw stars.” I have Richard now, in far emigrant bits. It is a raw consolation, but a consolation nonetheless.

Most of the condolence letters described Richard, rather than offering advice about how to deal with his being dead. This was just as well. Short of the banal, there was little anyone could meaningfully suggest. Death trumps everything. Two of Richard’s former professors from Hopkins, themselves married, wrote words that were true, and their truth became more apparent over time: “We know love makes a difference,” they said, “and we send love.”

The advice I took most to heart, however, was from a friend of mine, a poet, who spoke of the futility of advice. “I’ve always handled similar emergencies very badly by working and drinking myself into states of stupor and desolation,” he wrote. “If I say that I think it’s probably best to get out and about then I know I haven’t a leg to stand on. I’ll excuse myself from my own worthless advice by saying Everyone’s Different. I’m thinking of you, and hoping you’re all right.” I wasn’t all right, but it helped to know that he was thinking of me and that he understood the limitations of words and advice.

I went often to Richard’s grave. The day after he was buried, I took tiger lilies from the garden and put them on the red clay earth that topped his grave. I brought him white and apricot-colored honeysuckle, and hydrangeas and petunias as well, which gave beauty and a bit of home to the stark mound of dirt. The water lilies in the pond nearby were high-stalked and yellow. I looked carefully, but there were no goldfish. Richard would smile at the possibilities, I thought. In the weeks to come, the top earth settled on his grave, and I settled into a way of being there. Each armful of flowers that I brought—the last sprigs of honeysuckle, black-eyed Susans, rose of Sharon—left a mark of life, a trace of loveliness. They died, but he is dead. We all die. There is a naturalness to this.

One morning—during the early weeks, when I still spoke aloud to him—I said, “I missed you, sweetheart, when it rained so hard last night. I missed you this morning, when it was no longer raining. I missed you, wondering if the rain would begin again.” And then I stopped. I could not bear to think of him alone, so deep in the ground. So unaware of the rain and how much I missed him.

It was peaceful, all the same, and I imagined that soon the grave-tenders would put sod on top of his grave and perhaps I could plant a tree or flowers. I like being here, I thought. I like his company. There was something good and deep that compelled me to his grave, to keep company with him, to comprehend who we had been and what we would become. We had been together in one way, alive and sensate; this had changed. I would have to imagine and invent, as he did, in order for us to have a different way of being together. I would have to know him differently. We would not grow old together—this was implicit in everything I knew and felt; it was among the more terrible realities of his death—but something would survive. I would make it so.

One afternoon, when I got to Richard’s grave, I saw that it had been covered with fresh earth, used to fill in the area that had settled. This had raised his grave to the level of the surrounding ground. Everything now seemed final. Richard was no longer among the newly dead; his grave had lost its recent look. Now he was only one of the cemetery’s many dead: less new, more permanent. He was freshly dead to me, but not to nature and the parish grounds.

Soon his gravestone was in place and it felt good to lean against it, to trace his name in the granite. It was late summer and the leaves were beginning to come down. In no time at all, they would be heavy on his grave. I faced toward his headstone. I had assumed his head was in that direction, but I dropped a breath when I realized I did not know if this was actually true. I didn’t know where on Richard I was standing and it unmoored me. Why did it matter? It just did. It mattered a great deal. I had to distract myself from my morbid thoughts. I went to my car and retrieved my Field Guide to Eastern Trees and took it back to Richard’s grave. He would like my being a bit more systematic about Nature than I ordinarily am. I could put aside my gruesome thoughts and think of oaks and sycamores.

On my birthday, a week after Richard’s funeral, my mother and I drove to the cemetery. She took a lily and a white rose to put on his grave, and I took pink zinnias, honeysuckle, and purple petunias. We both stood there, quiet and hurting. Mother looked unbearably sad—she and Richard had been very close—and I wanted to comfort her; she had done this so often for me. I could not think of anything to say, however; at least nothing that was true. We stood in silence.

“He took such good care of you,” she said finally.

Of course, I thought. She must wonder how I will go on without him, if I can go on without him. They had shared their worries about me and, similar to each other in habits of restraint, had laughed about my expansive notions of life. Now, everything had changed. She felt anew her old responsibilities. I put my arm around her and told her that I would be fine. I believed this, and I believed it enough for her to believe it.

“I’ll miss him,” she said softly.

That evening, I put on my new aquamarine earrings from Richard and joined my friends and family in a birthday celebration for which I had no heart. Afterward, my mother suggested we watch a videotape of a talk that Richard had given several years earlier. He had been asked to speak about what it was like to be married to someone with manic-depressive illness. The three of us had watched the tape shortly after he had given the talk and then it had been put aside. I didn’t know if it was a good idea or not, but Mother seemed eager to watch it, and, as I remembered, in the talk he had said repeatedly how wonderful she was. My mother, the least vain person I have ever known, wanted to hear this directly from Richard. For my part, I wanted to see Richard as he had been when well, but I was wary. Still, I had to do it sometime.

It was an unsettling, good thing to have done. It was disturbing to see what I no longer had, but reassuring to know that I had had it for as long as I did. In the videotape, Richard talked about me with love and bemusement. He described my awful moods with tolerance, my euphorias and absurd enthusiasms with warmth and affection. He recounted our first Christmas together, when we argued over whether our tiny tree really needed a dozen strands of lights. He had thought me extravagant; I had thought him incapable of grasping the idea that there was no such thing as too many Christmas lights or too much joy.

He made it clear that it was hard on our relationship when I was agitated or irritable, but he made it as clear that he felt our relationship was well worth it. He spoke in a collective sense of how we dealt with my illness, how we managed it. He said that it was important to be supportive of my strengths and not too hard on my weaknesses. He talked about how much he loved the passions of my mind, and related in detail how, the evening before, I had read to him about elephants and their amazing ways. He didn’t back away from how difficult it was to live with a sometimes tumultuous illness, but he gave more weight to love than to disease. As he always had. I watched Richard, handsome and smart and alive, and it broke my heart for missing him. It broke my heart, but it gave me courage as well. I had that man’s love, I thought to myself. I had his respect; he desired me. I was lucky. But now what? I didn’t know I could hurt so much.

Richard’s presence in the weeks and months to come was in shards of memory that came from nowhere and found their mark. His presence was in his absence. It was in my restless turning to him at night, in my seeking places out, not thinking, that prompted memories of shared times, or conjured his ways. I walked to the National Zoo one morning, thinking to distract myself from my life, and ended up at the zebra yard. What was it that made me think of Richard when I was looking at the zebra looking at me? It had slipped my mind. Of course: our first date had been at the zoo, and we had studied the zebras. Did I know that zebras’ stripes were different, not only zebra to zebra, but from left to right on the same zebra? Richard had asked me. I did not. I did not know about the left-to-right asymmetry.

“Well, let’s see if it’s true,” he had said.

I was about to learn a great deal more about zebras than I would have chosen to learn. They bark and they whinny, Richard told me with delight. They like tall grasses; they run like the wind. They have amazing, really amazing, stripes. We turned to the issue of stripes and, for half an hour or so, in the pages of the notebook Richard carried in his pocket, we mapped out the taperings, widths, and curvings of the stripes in front of us. I began to fall in love with Richard over that zebra.

So there I stood, two decades later, laughing and crying in front of a zebra, trying to recapture the alchemy of Richard’s mind and sense of wonder. I couldn’t, not as fully as I would have liked, but it was no accident that I had ended up at the zebra yard. My mind sought out its own saving salt, as an animal will seek it in a field. My mind knew what it needed to keep well, to stay alive. The quirks and curiosities that inhabited Richard’s mind came unbidden into mine, and with them came life.

When Richard was in the hospital for his bone marrow transplant, I had read to him, from Wind, Sand and Stars, Saint-Exupéry’s account of his forced landing onto the Sahara. “Our home is yet in truth a wandering star,” he had written. “I had kicked against a hard, black stone, the size of a man’s fist, a sort of molded rock of lava incredibly present on a bed of shells a thousand feet deep. A sheet spread beneath an apple-tree can receive only apples; a sheet spread beneath the stars can receive only star-dust. Never had a stone fallen from the skies made known its origins so unmistakably.”

The traces of Richard’s mind that drifted into my own were likewise unmistakable. They could only be from Richard. I came to welcome these times when his imagination wandered into mine. They kept him alive to me and necessary. They kept me tethered to him, as I had been for so long. I did not want to be free of him yet. Why would I?

I returned to Hopkins a month after Richard died and found that it had lost some of its magic for me. The competence and quickness of mind I so loved in my colleagues, and the Oslerian tradition of medicine that defined the character of the hospital, had been eclipsed by Richard’s illness and the dread that had been yoked to our every visit to his Hopkins doctors. Richard and I had had such an uncomplicated love for Hopkins; it was muddied now by the failure of his treatment. The love would come back in time, I knew, but it would be more complex. The excellence of his medical care had stood against a disease that was going to win. This juxtaposition was one I would come to see more in my own field, and it had the effect of making me understand Hopkins better and appreciate it more.

My first day back at the hospital was difficult. It was reassuring to return to a world I knew and where people made their caring clear. But after giving a talk to the residents, I had to leave. Life went on, teaching went on, science and good doctors went on. I couldn’t. Not this first day. I was at sixes and sevens. I couldn’t go back in time, but neither could I move forward. I hadn’t then what I needed to be a part of a high-energy endeavor. As I passed by the cancer center, I felt a wave of revulsion. I wanted to run past the graveyard and to forget all that had happened there.

I was restless in everything that I did. It was not the unbearable agitation of mania but, instead, an anxious fluttering that had attached itself to my grief. I walked and walked and then walked some more in an attempt to allay the disquiet. It worked, but not well. I left dinner parties midway through and seldom made it to the end of a film or a concert. My reading was fitful. I started, put aside, and picked up again a wide assortment of books. Each time it was the same. I read a chapter or two and then put the book aside. I started to reread Watership Down, thinking to reenter the book Richard and I had read aloud together, but I became anxious, knowing what lay in store for the rabbits. Neither fiction nor nonfiction brought me the escape I hoped for.

My years of dissembling when depressed, of persuading others that I was fine when I was not, turned out to be useful in navigating the no-man’s-land between my grief and others’ queries and concerns. It took far longer to reconfigure myself after Richard’s death than I thought it would, and certainly longer than most people allow. A colleague, not someone distinguished for his sensitivity, asked me, after Richard died, to review a paper for a psychiatric journal. “My husband just died,” I found myself snapping.

“It’s been three months,” he said.

And so it had.

Time means different things to different people. To some in the BlackBerry scramble, three months is long enough. I was inhabiting a slower and more confused world, with a different experience of time altogether. I could not imagine turning from my inward life and sadness to the cold-blooded thinking necessary to do a scientific review. I wanted time to myself with Richard. Soon enough, I would have to enter into the rest of my life without him. This was a time between times, and I did not want to leave it before I had to.

I seemed well enough to my colleagues and friends, and I wasn’t depressed. This, together with the fact that I had a horror of weighing heavy on those I knew, made it hard for them to know how distressed I really was. I don’t know why I kept such hurt to myself—I wish I had not—but I did not want others to see how much I missed Richard. There was a pressure, as well, or I felt there to be a pressure, to assuage the anxiety of others. A slight measure of sadness was fine, but it was better to leaven it a bit with laughter or reassurance, or by changing the subject. I did admit to a few friends that it was hard, and that, for me, was a major admission. I have always found it difficult to ask others for help, and this was the first time in my life that I was aware of reaching out with my heart so obviously upon my sleeve. So I reached out, but I didn’t.

Thankfully, and understandably, people moved on with their lives, and I think I made it easier for them to do so. I am glad I did this; I regret that I did this. I wanted to say, I am hurting more than you can know. But I didn’t. I laughed, I colluded, but some of me moved forward with them.

One day, two boxes of Richard’s personal effects from NIH arrived at the house. I sat on the floor, sifting through the contents, aching. I didn’t know what I would find; it was a bit like Christmas, but not really. In the first box, there were two photographs Richard had kept on his desk: one was a picture that my brother had taken of the two of us on the day we married; the second was of me laughing, as though the world were wonderful, as though life were impervious to time. There were books about schizophrenia and medicine and neurobiology; old stereotaxic equipment; a Caithness paperweight I had gotten him on one of our trips to Scotland; a huge print of Van Gogh’s White Roses, from the premiere of our Van Gogh film at the National Gallery of Art. I would keep the books and photographs and give the Van Gogh print to one of his friends.

What would I do with the stereotaxic equipment, which was part of a brain tissue transplantation system Richard and his colleagues had developed and patented to investigate possible treatments for Parkinson’s disease? I pulled out the pieces, arranged the long brass screws in a circle, and obsessed. Should I throw them away? Richard had wanted them enough to keep them. Where would I put all of the pieces? I sat immobilized: Keep or throw away? Keep or throw away? Finally, I scooped them up like pick-up sticks, took them to the kitchen, and put them in a vase. They fell to the sides of the vase like metal flowers. Kept, but changed. I put the vase next to our wedding picture and smiled. He would like this, I thought.

The mail continued to jolt and on occasion offend. Bureaucracies are good at offending and, in this, the Medical Board of California yielded to none. “To whom it may concern,” one of its letters began. “The Medical Board of California, Licensing Operations, has received information that Dr. Richard J. Wyatt may be deceased. If this is true, the Board sends its condolences to the doctor’s family, friends, and associates. For Licensing Operations to make the necessary file changes, please provide us with a copy of the Certificate of Death.” Dr. Wyatt would be missed by his California licensing board.

I went to England several months after Richard died. I was slated to give a talk and I wanted to get away from the world as it had become to me. Once there, I settled into the London Library and collected piles of books from the stacks—biographies of J. M. Barrie and Louis Armstrong, books about the stars—and immersed myself in work on my book about exuberance. I delved into the articles I had collected about the numbers of stars and galaxies in the universe, the numbers of grams of diamond stardust, and I read up on DNA base pairs in trumpet lilies and amoebae. I felt close to Richard, in the sense that I knew he would find the topics of interest, but I scarcely thought at all about the two of us. I realized that I was, for the first time, so absorbed in ideas and images that I had blotted out his absence and the pain of losing him. This infused a small amount of hope, in which I took great heart.

The reveling stopped at the library door. As soon as I walked outdoors I was hit by everything I had put out of my mind. What was I going to do? Where would I go? How could I bear London without Richard? Who would I talk to about stars and amoebae? For whom would I buy a tie? I want my husband back.

There it was again: the truth. I want my husband back.

A few days later in Warwick, at a European conference on suicide, I willed my way through my lecture and then sat in on some of the other clinical papers. I should have passed on this. All I remember is a recitation of the social risk factors for suicide: losing a spouse, living alone, not being married. It was clear. I was vulnerable not only in my brain, by disease, but in my heart. I knew this well enough; I didn’t want to hear it. (Richard once summarized Charlotte’s Web as “a wonderful story about a pig who is protected by a spider and how they take care of each other.” We had been that way: protected. I didn’t think about “risk factors” then.)

Later in the fall, on Richard’s and my wedding anniversary, I slipped on my Roman ring and my ring of stars and, thus armed, went to Richard’s grave. I tried to think about our wedding day but could not overcome his being now so cold and dead. Memory is pale next to life or death. I thought, The ground will freeze, the water in the vase in the ground will freeze, and then what will happen to Richard? I am alone, but he is so utterly alone. I cannot do anything for him now. There are so many things one thinks that one never thought to think about. I felt at sea, assailed, numb. I did not know what I thought or felt—everything was jumbled, in flux, and contrary.

I sat on the marble bench near his grave and read to myself poems by Thomas Hardy, Louis MacNeice, Edward Thomas, and Robert Bridges. The last verse of Bridges’s “Poem,” I read aloud, to Richard:

I will not let thee go.
I hold thee by too many bands
Thou sayest farewell, and lo!
I have thee by the hands,
And will not let thee go.

And then I let him go, for a while.

That November, there was a new profusion of meteor showers. I tried to muster enthusiasm for it, but I could not. At midnight, I went outside to look for meteors but there was a full moon and I could see nothing. I went out again at five in the morning and this time saw several, but they held no wonder for me without Richard. Nothing could come close to our early morning in the park just a year earlier. I could not imagine that I would run away from shooting stars, but I did. I went indoors.

I knew that the Christmas season would be hard; I hoped only that it would not be too hard. There is so much memory wrapped up in Christmas, so much specificity. Richard liked white Christmas lights, I like colored ones; Richard preferred lights to blink, I do not. Each year we put up strands of nonblinking colored lights for me and strands of blinking white lights for him. It looked higgledy-piggledy, but lovely in its own odd way. On that first Christmas without Richard, I did not know what to do about Christmas lights, so I did nothing. I came home one evening to find that Silas Jones, who had worked for Richard and me for years and was, for both of us, a cross between close friend and father, had put up our strange strands of blinking and nonblinking lights. There we were, Richard and I together in spirit, lighting up the house and the yard. It was a warm moment in a cold season.

Trimming the tree was a melancholy affair. Ornament by ornament, I hung our memories on the tree. Gingerbread snowflakes, glass candy canes, an ugly clay parrot, handblown glass balls from London. In a small act of mourning, I did not put any tinsel on the tree. No one would notice, but it was of moment to me. Tinsel was a part of the excitement of childhood Christmases, its absence a bit of Lent.

I had to go to the store to buy more lights for the tree—I wished I could tell Richard this, but at least I could imagine his laugh. It was another good moment. That moment of imagined laughter could not last, of course. As I started to go out the door, I heard a crash, massive, and then tiny shatterings. The tree had fallen over, and several of our most sentiment-laden ornaments had shattered on the brick hearth. I am not superstitious, but I was, then, overcome with a dreadful foreboding. Darkness would come from darkness.

The following day, I took Richard’s research assistant out to lunch and, in the midst of our conversation, told her that my Christmas tree had fallen down, how ominous it seemed, and that nothing like that had ever happened to me before. Her face turned pale. The previous evening, she said, her Christmas tree had fallen over—the first time that had ever happened to her—and three ornaments had been broken, including one Richard had given her ten years earlier. Perhaps, we decided, it was Richard, acting in ways best known to himself.

That afternoon, I laid branches cut from the bottom of the Christmas tree against the granite of Richard’s gravestone. I listened to “Adeste Fidelis” and it pierced my heart, entered into it like a river that until that moment had been diverted. Richard slipped into my dreams that night. It started well. He and I were talking about going to a scientific meeting in Hawaii and I asked him, “Are you well enough to fly that far?”

He looked well, and said with surprise, “Yes, of course. Why do you ask?”

I felt a moment of unimaginable relief. Perhaps I had been wrong.

I said, “I think you are dead.”

He held me close to comfort me, as he had so many times, and said, “It’s Christmas, I know. I’m so sorry, sweetheart.” And he left. It was so real, so much worse than not dreaming of him at all.

I could not face my own church on Christmas Eve. I had too many memories of being there with Richard, and I dreaded running into anyone I knew, so I went to the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church for their candlelight communion service. My mother had worshipped there as a young bride during World War II and listened to the great Peter Marshall; she spoke often of the sense of purpose and healing his sermons had brought to wartime Washington. Abraham Lincoln had sought solace in the church during the Civil War. It seemed a good place to go. I tried to sing the carols but couldn’t and bolted from the church after the last one. It had snowed during the service and the trees and grounds of the city were white and first-snow beautiful. A bit of the magic of Christmas Eve came back. I thought, I will write “I LOVE YOU” in the snow on his grave on Christmas morning, and I felt my heart lighten. Driving home, my mood changed: the snow seemed an ominous thing on his grave, more constraining even than the earth. This was not the snow of childhood; it was the oppressive snow of having lived through too many winters.

I was never alone during the Christmas days, not for any consequential period of time. My friends and family and colleagues saw to that. Bob and Mary Jane Gallo, Jeff and Kathleen Schlom, Jeremy, my mother and brother and I went to 1789, a restaurant in Georgetown, shortly before Christmas, continuing Richard’s and my tradition of going there on anniversaries and other special days, including the night we got married. In a tribute to friendship, and because Richard and I loved Wilson “Snowflake” Bentley’s work, I gave everyone a Steuben crystal paperweight engraved with a snowflake. We christened ourselves “The Snowflake Club,” in honor of our coming together as individuals, as snow crystals do, to form unique and stronger bonds as snowflakes. Each of us had our own history, shaped by our separate journeys, but we had hooked onto one another and come together, different and stronger. No matter the circumstances, great or grim, there was laughter, always; kindness, always; a generous giving of time, always. I trusted my life to each of them, as Richard had his.

That first Christmas after Richard’s death, we, the newly christened Snowflake Club, listened to the carolers in front of the fire and lifted our glasses to Richard. The warmth and friendship helped me to overcome my missing of him to an extent I would not have thought possible. Only when the tables were quieter and the mood more reflective did I find myself near tears. I could feel Jeff watching me, his concern evident, so that even during the quiet moments it was not as grim as it could have been. It was the first night of winter.

Christmas morning, I flailed. I was as restless as I had been peaceful just a few days earlier. My grief was acute, stabbing. I had lost my mate; it was a primitive animal feeling. I was not depressed, I was simply overcome by waves of sadness. Such fizz and delight as I had had with life seemed long ago and bound to Richard. Richard is not here.

I want my husband back, I chanted yet again to myself. I want my husband back. It was a flat recitation that did not relieve the quiet terror. It didn’t have a prayer.

Christmas night was less terrible than I thought it would be. For the first time I could remember, I was aware of needing Christmas. I needed the infusion of promise, of joy and remembrance, that came in the ancient rites and carols, the company of friends, and the lights in a dark season. There was life before Richard and there would be life after his death. I took this on faith and I almost believed it.

I turned a corner that Christmas after Richard died. Dread had outpaced the reality; a certain peace drifted into my world. Perhaps it was illusory. But the softness of the carols and the candlelight in the church darkness, beautiful and sad, stayed on for a while, after the season.

“A gentler feeling crept / Upon us,” wrote Tennyson of the first Christmas after his friend Arthur Henry Hallam’s death. “Surely rest is meet: / ‘They rest,’ we said, ‘their sleep is sweet.’”

For a while, at least, there was some respite from the pain of missing Richard. I took roses out to his grave when I went, an act of defiance. The ice in the ground vase was uncrackable, so I splayed the flowers on the snow: scarlet against white and granite, blotches of life and fury.

The new year did not start well. Pumpkin was sick. She was sluggish and turned her nose aside when I offered her food. Even blueberries and Stilton cheese, her favorites, were left untouched. The veterinarian said that she had liver cancer and that it had spread; she would not live for long. He advised me to put her down. Silas and I talked about it and agreed that this was the kindest thing to do.

On Pumpkin’s last day, I put on one of Richard’s shirts so that a bit of him would be with her at the end, and then Silas and I held her while the vet gave her an intravenous tranquilizer and sodium pentothal. She just went, in peace, in every way different from the grotesque machinations attendant to Richard’s death. Her long velvety ears lay out around her head, as they had always done. It was a quiet, dignified death.

The house felt hollowed out by Pumpkin’s death. There were none of the distractions of funeral plans and visitors and family that had filled the house after Richard died. Now there was a new empty space beside me at night, a new quietness. There was no snuffling or snoring, no sounds of her walking around in circles on top of her bed. Six months earlier there had been two to say good-night to. Now there was no one. Pumpkin had been a part of my life with Richard for nearly fifteen years; an important tie to him was gone. She was gone. He was gone.

It was Silas who found the answer to some of his and my sadness about Pumpkin’s death. He came into my study one afternoon with photographs and descriptions of basset hounds that were being fostered by a rescue program. He left the pictures on my desk and said, “I know it’s too early. But it’s something to think about.” On his way out the door, he added, “There’s one that has her feet up in the air. She looks kind of cute.” I thanked him but told him it was far too early to be thinking about it. My heart was broken and past repair.

Silas is as intuitive as he is smart, and he knows me well. He had piqued my curiosity. I picked up the papers after he left; I didn’t have a chance, as he well knew. The basset hound with her feet in the air was six years old and living in a foster home with nine other dogs. She looked like she had a certain pizzazz. We agreed it couldn’t hurt to meet her.

A few days later, we drove out to Virginia to take a look. It was over before it began. Fifty-five pounds of basset came bounding over to me and licked my face, and that was that. I pulled out part of the money Richard had left in his basset fund and gave it to the rescue group. We named her Bubbles, for reasons obvious to anyone who met her. Pumpkin had been shy, content with life as it was, and timorous. Bubbles was effervescent and intrepid. They could not have been more different, which was a godsend.

Bubbles sat on my lap the entire way back to our house, nose sticking out of the window, comfortable with Silas and me, as if she had known us forever. When we arrived at the house, she ran directly into the garden room, looked around, leaped up onto the sofa, and walked along its top as if she were a cat. She stared briefly out into the garden, dropped gracefully down onto my new white rug, squatted daintily, and relieved herself. Bubbles had arrived.

It was good and necessary, having a new life in a house that had seen so much sickness and death.

La vie recommence—life starts again.

Not long after Bubbles joined the household, I drove down to North Carolina to give a talk at Duke University. The former president of the university and his wife had been good friends of Richard’s and they had kindly extended their friendship to me. I spent the night at their house and they saw me off in the morning with a bag of homemade gingersnaps. When I returned home, I put the gingersnaps out of Bubbles’s reach on the countertop. It was to turn out that nothing was out of Bubbles’s reach; she turned chairs into stepladders, and her nose into a positioning device to move the chairs. Later that night, I went up to my bedroom and saw Bubbles asleep on the sofa with her nose resting on something. I thought for a moment that she had caught a squirrel, but it was the bag containing the gingersnaps. She had taken the bag from the kitchen counter and carried it upstairs, and was now guarding the cookies with her nose. For days she carried the bag of gingersnaps around with her. She never ate them.

Now and again, I would see in Bubbles the traces of days when she had lived in a household with children: an insistent paw raised to shake hands, a shameless grab for affection by rolling over on her back and kicking her feet. She displayed the vulnerability of having lost something that mattered. We were close that way. She had lost her family; I had lost Richard. We had each other now. It wasn’t the same, but it was good. She was as gentle with my feelings as she had been with her bag of gingersnaps.

In the spring, I went to the American Psychiatric Association meetings in San Francisco and felt Richard’s absence everywhere: at dinners with colleagues, where I was now just one, not half of a couple; at the scientific sessions, where I could scarcely concentrate well enough to follow the drift of the talks, and in trawling Drug Company Row. I went to my hotel room the first night of the meetings and wept. They meant nothing to me without Richard. There seemed little point to anything without Richard.

I had to force myself to go to the research poster sessions and listen to the young scientists present their data; they were enthusiastic and not yet wary of life. But forcing myself to go was a good thing. I was beginning to see that work was a saving grace, that listening to new ideas and promising clinical findings was important and sustaining. Richard had told me this on our last Valentine’s Day: “Your work is important. It will help when you are missing me. It will draw us close.” He was right. Work was a solid thing, a thing of intrinsic value. Writing and teaching take one through sadness, countervail it. Curiosity drives one forward; discovery confers life.

Richard was a romantic about science and ideas. I had loved him for this and it was a part of him that stayed close to me during the early, terrible times. Those things of the mind that we had shared were lasting things. They were things that had drawn us together when we first met and they were things we were talking about on our last day together. Richard took ideas seriously. He did not fritter away either his mind or time.

I thought of this side of Richard not long ago when I was at the University of Lund in Sweden to give a talk. It was early December and the ancient university town was lighted everywhere, with tiny white lights in the windows of houses and in the shops: so many bits of light and beauty against the dark. I wished, in a way that ached, that I could be with Richard in the town, share the experience of the town and its people and history with him, make love with him again, fall asleep in his arms. We both loved university towns, especially ones where learning and teaching had gone on for so many hundreds of years. We loved the feel of them; we loved the idea of them.

I had a memorable time in Lund with my Swedish colleagues, but I missed Richard. He would have noticed so many things; he would have loved Lund and its history of scientific thinking. He would have liked the seriousness with which the history of ideas was taken. One evening during dinner, I noticed that several of the Lund professors wore two gold rings instead of one. One was a wedding ring and the other, a colleague explained, was a gold ring given to them when they completed their doctoral examinations. I found this a singular thing, a vow to knowledge, as to God or a spouse, and it would have made its way into Richard’s heart.

I had much work to get done after Richard died. I had to finish my book on exuberance and then, with a colleague, revise our fourteen-hundred-page medical text on bipolar disorders and recurrent depression. There was no choice but to work hard, and this was a blessing. I had slipped away from my profession during the years that Richard was ill. I wanted to return. I needed to return.

The initial year after Richard’s death was the most difficult, the pain the most raw, the cobbling together of protective ways thin and fragmentary. This changed slowly. The first anniversary of Richard’s death marked a small but symbolic juncture. My colleagues at an international conference on bipolar disorders presented me with an award for my work and asked me to make a few remarks. I said that I owed my life to the work of the hundreds of scientists and clinicians in the room, as did anyone who had bipolar illness. This was true, and it is something I felt deeply. Then I spoke about Richard, saying that he had died exactly a year earlier, that he had encouraged me to write about my illness. That he had supported me in every conceivable way as a husband, colleague, and friend. I could not go on. If I did, I knew I would fall apart.

My colleagues saw this, I think, and brought me back in the kindest possible way. They started to applaud, continued to applaud, and would not stop. Some whistled and cheered. It was a prolonged, extraordinary, and heartfelt response, one that not only brought a wave of warmth into my life when I needed it, but also reminded me that it is work that matters, work that is done in the context of love and life and death. I knew these things, of course, but my colleagues brought their importance back into my heart. All in the room were in the profession of healing; all worked to ameliorate suffering. It was one minute against a year, but I found renewal in that moment of generosity.

We put our faith in things great and small. We assign to them meaning they may actually have, or meaning that we need for them to have in order to carry on. I go to Richard’s grave with flowers in my arms that I will to last, with orange tulips in one hand and a hammer to break the ice in another. Why and to what avail? That there is a vivid moment of color against the granite? It will not last.

Martin Luther, it is said, declared that even if the world were to end tomorrow, he still would plant his apple tree. Every Christmas, I go to Richard’s grave and gather the evergreen boughs tight around the tulips and roses to warm them, to protect them for another hour. I find pleasure that there is beauty near Richard, even though it does not last. It is a small thing, but it matters. I do not want him to be forgotten, or to lie alone.