Nothing Was the Same Nothing Was the Same

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Nothing Was the Same Nothing Was the Same Page 15

by Kay Redfield Jamison


  I thought that giving these photographs to Hopkins, a place whose scientific and clinical traditions he admired and was beholden to, would create a symmetry of sorts. The photographs would also, perhaps, call to mind the life of a doctor and scientist who, like so many of his colleagues, had done what he could to alleviate the suffering of those with mental illness.

  George MacKay Brown spoke about the preservation of things. He had, he said, a “deep-rooted belief that what has once existed can never die: not even the frailest things, spindrift or clover-scent or glitter of star on a wet stone.” Words and thoughts and actions preserve. They preserve differently than one might choose, but they do preserve.

  Grief had taught, if nothing else, that to move forward I would have to imagine a life without Richard. The place I kept for him could not be one that continued to keep the future on ice. Reconstituting Richard and our relationship would mean reconstituting myself. I had no counsel for this but experience and the imagination of everyday life. I had often said to my patients who were struggling in the wake of mania or suicidal despair: We are each an island. It is your task to bring to your own island what you need to live long and well: love, beauty, diversion, friends; work that sustains; a meaningful life. Look at Maui, I would say: everything was brought in by man, insect, bird, or wind. It is your life; it is short. Treat your island with regard. Do not let it go to weed; do not give it over to anyone else. Understand the possibilities. Know the dangers. Keep away the ungenerous and the unkind.

  Inventing places had always been what I did best. As a child, I had constructed worlds around me to contain my bubbling enthusiasms, to keep my dreams out of harm’s way and to set them in order. When very young, I had loved Katy No-Pocket, the story of a mother kangaroo who was born without a pouch. Her life changed in every way when a construction worker gave her a carpenter’s apron so that she could carry not only her own baby, but the babies of the other animals as well. I was captivated by the idea of having masses of pockets of different shapes and sizes that could hold my ideas and projects. In my mind’s eye, I filled them with notebooks and colored pencils, my kaleidoscope and a magnifying glass, books and vials and my rapidly expanding family of pet mice.

  In the third grade, I took this carpenter’s apron inward. I imagined a life for my mind inside the shell of a many-roomed turtle. I hung clouds on door hooks, and filled an alcove with bins of stars. There was a separate area for my microscope, books, and experiments, and a dirt room for my lizards and mice. In the center, I constructed an open aviary for my songbirds, my parrot, and my great horned owl. Sometimes, during class, I would retreat into my shell and take a cloud down from its hook, blow into it, and send it on its way. Now and again, I would pick a star from its bin and sketch it, spin it round, or cradle it in my hands. At other times, I would dress up the mice in tiny cowgirl outfits.

  The turtle was a reassuring, if unlikely, fiction. I was by nature an extrovert, quick-moving and talkative; configuring myself as a turtle could scarcely have been more improbable. Yet wandering around inside my shell al lowed me to escape dull teaching, create order from clutter, and give shape to my hopelessly scattered thoughts and daydreams. My imagination was a good friend to me.

  Later, I would create mental sanctuaries to help me contend with madness and despair. It was part of a lifelong struggle to sort through experience and to still my ways. Richard had been good for me in this regard; he had kept my mind from pelting off in all directions. He had tamped it down in his quiet way and kept its cascades within the riverbanks. I imagined less when he was alive; I did not need my islands of conjured places and imposed rhythms. But when he died, I sought again the kind of construing that would help me with my grief. The future was a place like any other; it could be imagined.

  I was aided in my resolution to move forward in my life by the book I was writing about exuberance. While Richard was alive it had given me purpose and both of us heart. I liked the people whose passionate lives I was studying, and Richard had liked, each morning, for me to read to him what I had written. It was a pleasure jointly held. After he died, the idea of writing a book about joy seemed absurd to me. Exuberance seemed ridiculous, vapid, and irrelevant. I could not imagine why I had found the topic important. Exuberant by nature, I now found it hard to enter into the lives of my subjects, harder still to write about them. I had been weaving a tale for Richard’s mornings and nights, brewing a physic to keep death away. It hadn’t worked. He was dead. It seemed another of my chagrining enthusiasms.

  Inevitably, as grief let up and I took to life again, writing about joy seemed a more comprehensible, and indeed a quite wonderful, thing to do. I had written, before Richard died, about love and exuberance and why they are essential to who we are as a species. Now I had to know how to end the book, for I knew somehow that I would find in the ending what Richard had given to me. I knew this with certainty, but it was a certainty based on faith, not reason.

  The final chapter, which was to focus on discovery and the restless optimism of the American pioneers, became a treatise on imagination and the resilience of human nature. This chapter, I said to myself, will be for Richard. This will be what Richard brought back to me, and it is what I will give to him. Everything in this chapter, I knew, would be for Richard, and from that point on I had little difficulty in finishing the book.

  I wrote, in the final chapter, about the resilience of the men and women who had sailed on the Mayflower in 1620 with only hope and will and the capacity to imagine the future. They had exerted their will and engaged their capacity to imagine against high seas and famine and disease; they survived. I wrote about Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! and what she had said about the mind of the pioneer that “should be able to enjoy the idea of things more than the things themselves.” I described Vachel Lindsay’s expansive, wandering Johnny Appleseed, who carried life into the frontier and into the future: “In that pack on his back, / In that talisman sack…. / Seeds and tree-souls, precious things, / Feathered with microscopic wings.” And I recounted Ole Rölvaag’s great saga of the Dakota plains, about the pioneer Per Hansa, in whom “there dwelt high summer” and “a divine restlessness,” a man of surpassing imagination, who “strode forward with outstretched arms toward the wonders of the future.” Pioneers, Rölvaag wrote, were those who had thrown themselves “blindly into the Impossible, and accomplished the Unbelievable.”

  I wrote of the expansive, roaming spirits of Whitman and Lindbergh and others who had reached for territories beyond. Finally, and most to my heart, I wrote of the life that comes from death: of the emergence of the great fields of flowers on the Somme battlefield where death had been all-dominant and not a tree was left alive; of Peter Ackroyd’s description of beauty and life even in the wake of the German bombings of London during World War II. The streets, he wrote, bloomed with ragwort, lilies of the valley, and white and mauve lilac. There was life, even in the midst of devastation.

  I found my way back into life through my writing, as Richard had told me I would, and in the end I found it easier than I thought it would be. I was writing for Richard and about him; I was writing about his enthusiasm for discovery, and the pleasure his mind took in new ideas and new places. I was writing about the life he had given back to me in the wake of my manias and depressions, about love and how it returns in its own way, in its own time. I was writing about the mystery of joy and the joy of love. Richard was dead, but love and ideas were not. Richard had taught me a saving amount and we had, in our common life, headed instinctively to the fields beyond. We always had looked yonder.

  The mind imagines, even as it knows that its imaginings are fleeting things. When I was in Scotland two years ago, on my yearly lectureship at the University of St. Andrews, I opened the curtains in my room to see the Old Course and the town covered in snow. The North Sea was white, and one had to know that it was there in order to imagine it. Everywhere I looked it was breathtakingly beautiful. I went to chapel with a friend, and by chapel�
�s end a large snowman, with stone eyes and a university scarf around its neck, had appeared in the college quadrangle. By teatime, snowmen of all sizes and in all manner of neckwear dotted the Old Course, the college gardens, and the gardens of the town. In so many places, the students and the townspeople had built snowy defiances of time, small tributes to imagination and impermanence.

  The next morning, the grass was poking up through the snow, but three snowmen still stood on the Old Course. Within the hour, the grounds crew was chopping them up and the magic of the day before was gone. It didn’t matter. The creators of the snowmen had placed their joy in the creating, fully knowing the transience of their creations. The life of a snowman was short, its cold sands would soon be run, but the very fact that it was ephemeral made its existence a glorious thing. “The hands which give are taking,” wrote the Scottish poet William Soutar. “And the hands which take bestow: / Always the bough is breaking / Heavy with fruit or snow.”

  It is in our nature to want to hold on to love; it is grief’s blessing that we come to know that there are limits to our ability to do so. To hold on to love, I had to find a way to capture and transform it. The only way I knew to do this was to write a book, this book, about Richard. It would be about love and what love had brought, about death and what death had taken. I would write that love continues, and that grief teaches.

  I returned to Big Sur, sat up against the cushions in the window seat in my room overlooking the rocks and the sea, and picked up the fountain pen Richard had given me years earlier to write An Unquiet Mind. Richard had said then, Write from your heart, and I had. I would write again from my heart, but this time I would write alone.

  I sat for a long time, looking out on the rocks of the Big Sur, which I had known long before I had known Richard. I started to write. I wrote about the durability of love and hope, about a man I had been with for nearly twenty years, a man who had been my husband, colleague, and friend. I wrote about fearlessness and grace and the power of love. I poured my heart into my writing, and when I walked on the beach at Big Sur Richard was with me there. He was with me in the quietening of my mind. Richard was with me in Big Sur, and he would be with me when I left Big Sur. It would not be the journey we had reckoned on, but it was what we had. We both were inclined to look yonder.

  Acknowledgments

  I owe much to the kindness of others. My greatest debt is to my family and friends; within that group, I am particularly indebted to “The Snowflake Club”: Jeremy Waletzky, Robert and Mary Jane Gallo, Jeffrey and Kathleen Schlom, Silas Jones, and my brother, Dean Jamison. All have been unbelievably kind to me, as they were to Richard before he died. I once tried to thank them for everything they had done but could not find the words. Instead, I borrowed Byron’s tribute to his friend John Hobhouse: “To one[s], whom I have known long, and accompanied far, whom I have found wakeful over my sickness and kind in my sorrow, glad in my prosperity and firm in my adversity, true in counsel and trusty in peril—to friend[s] often tried and never found wanting.” I have been blessed, as Richard was, by these friends, whom we never found wanting. I will always owe a deep-felt debt to Thomas O’Connor, as well, who helped me to shape the beginning of this book, and supported me throughout my writing of it.

  I am particularly grateful for the friendship and support of Raymond De Paulo, M.D., and Adam Kaplin, M.D., Ph.D, colleagues in the Johns Hopkins Department of Psychiatry, and to Hopkins surgeon Jacek Mostwin, M.D., D.Phil., whose discussions with me about medicine, literature, and life I value more than I can say.

  I would like to thank others who provided friendship and/or who read earlier versions of this book and made helpful suggestions: Joanne Althoff, Robert Barnett, Samuel Barondes, Larry Blossom, Keith and Brenda Brodie, James Campen and Phyllis Ewen, Robert and Alice Crawford, Jacqueline Davies, Douglas Dunn, Robert and Kay Faguet, Christina and Antonello Fanna, Stephen Fried and Diane Ayres, Charles and Peggy Gosnell, Donald Graham, William Graham, Ara Guzelimian, John Harper, Charles and Gwenda Hyman, Stuart Kenworthy, Helen Kindle, Athanasios Koukopoulos, Wendy Lesser, Heidi Jamison, Marshall, Linda, Danica, and Kelda Jamison, Walter Johnson, Phillip Mallett, Andreas Marneros, Paul McHugh, Christopher Mead, Sallie Mink, Alain Moreau, John Julius Norwich, Clarke and Wendy Oler, Robert and Elaine Packwood, Regina Pally and James Korb, James Potash, Harriet Potik, David and Jo Ann Reiss, Norman Rosenthal, Jerilyn Ross and Ronald Cohen, Barbara Schweizer, Sabrina Serrantino, Richard and Jill Side-man, Karen Swartz, Bety and Carlos Tramontana, Per Vestergaard, Jim and Liz Watson, Peter Whybrow, and Kin Bing Wu. Joanne Leslie, who is like a sister to me, was close to Richard as well. Her participation in the rites of Richard’s burial was particularly meaningful to our family.

  Richard received excellent medical care from his internists in Washington, Drs. David Patterson and Bryan Arling; Dr. Kenneth Baughman, his cardiologist at Johns Hopkins (now at Harvard); and Drs. Richard Ambinder and David Ettinger, his oncologists at Johns Hopkins. His medical and nursing care at Hopkins was uniformly excellent, which made a difficult situation less difficult. Dr. James Watson was kind enough to get us in touch with the late Dr. Judah Folkman at Harvard, whose generosity with his time and whose treatment protocol almost certainly extended Richard’s life by many months.

  This book would not have been possible without the incomparable help of William Collins and Ioline Henter. Most particularly, I could not have written this book or managed my life without the help and friendship of Silas Jones. I am grateful for financial support from the Dalio Family Foundation, the Dana Foundation, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

  I, like many nonfiction writers, have been concerned about the damage done to the credibility of autobiographical writing by those who have written fraudulently about their lives. I have provided my editor at Knopf with extensive documentation for what I have written in Nothing Was the Same. This documentation includes copies of Richard’s letters to me and mine to him, which are quoted from in this book; relevant contemporaneous accounts of events portrayed, as well as excerpts from journals and letters, correspondence from colleagues, friends, and the public; copies of public records; and copies of Richard’s lectures and writings that are quoted in the book. In deference to privacy, I chose not to write about Richard’s former wife and his children.

  Carol Janeway, my editor at Knopf, has been a close friend and an excellent editor; she was a good friend to Richard as well. I am very appreciative of the help of David Nee, also at Knopf, and that of my copyeditor, Sibylle Kazeroid.

  My mother, Dell Jamison, died before I finished writing this book. She believed that the most important thing in life is not the cards that one is dealt, but how one plays them. She was, by far, the highest card I was dealt.

  Permissions Acknowledgments

  Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

  Faber and Faber Ltd.: Excerpt from “The Apple Tree” from New Selected Poems by Douglas Dunn. Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.

  Henry Holt and Company, LLC and The Random House Group Ltd.: Excerpt from “Reluctance” from The Poetry of Robert Frost, edited by Edward Connery Lathem, copyright © 1934, 1969 by Henry Holt and Company. Copyright © 1962 by Robert Frost. Reprinted by permission of Henry Holt and Company, LLC and The Random House Group Ltd.

  Iain Antony Macleod and The Joseph Macleod Estate: Excerpt from “Love Song” by Joseph Macleod (Adam Drinan) (Poetry Scotland, 1949). Reprinted by permission of Iain Antony Macleod and The Joseph Macleod Estate.

  National Library of Scotland: Excerpt from “Song” by William Soutar. Reprinted by permission of the Trustees of the National Library of Scotland.

  A Note About the Author

  KAY REDFIELD JAMISON is Professor of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. She is codirector of the Johns Hopkins Mood Disorders Center and a member of the governing board of the national Network of Depression Centers. Dr. Jami
son is also Honorary Professor of English at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. She is the author of the national best sellers An Unquiet Mind and Night Falls Fast, as well as of Touched with Fire and Exuberance. She is the coauthor of the standard medical text on bipolar illness, Manic-Depressive Illness: Bipolar Disorders and Recurrent Depression, and author or coauthor of more than a hundred scientific papers about mood disorders, creativity, and psycho pharmacology. Dr. Jamison is the recipient of numerous national and international scientific awards, as well as a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Fellowship.

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2009 by Kay Redfield Jamison

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by

  Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York,

  and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon

  are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Frontispiece photograph by D. T. Jamison;

  page 203: Big Sur, California, painting by Alain Moreau

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Jamison Kay R.

  Nothing was the same : a memoir /

  by Kay Redfield Jamison. — 1st ed.

  p. ; cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-27313-0

  1. Jamison, Kay R. 2. Wyatt, Richard Jed, [date]—

  Health. 3. Hodgkin’s disease—Patients—United States—Biography.

  4. Psychologists—United States—Biography.

  5. Psychiatrists—United States—Biography. 6. Psychiatrists’ spouses—United

  States—Biography. I. Title.

  [DNLM: 1. Jamison, Kay R. 2. Wyatt, Richard Jed, [date]

 

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