Nothing Was the Same (12 page)

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.