Who told me time would ease me of my pain!
I miss him in the weeping of the rain;
I want him at the shrinking of the tide;
The old snows melt from every mountain-side,
And last year’s leaves are smoke in every lane;
But last year’s bitter loving must remain
Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide.
There are a hundred places where I fear
To go,—so with his memory they brim.
And entering with relief some quiet place
Where never fell his foot or shone his face
I say, “There is no memory of him here!”
And so stand stricken, so remembering him.
Time finally did bring relief. But it took its own, and not terribly sweet, time in doing so.
They Tell Me It Rained
The accumulated pain and uncertainty from David’s death, as well as from my own illness, for several years very much lowered and narrowed my expectations of life. I drew into myself and, for all intents and purposes, shuttered my heart from any unnecessary exposure to the world. I worked hard. Running a clinic, teaching, doing research, and writing books were no substitute for love, but they were interesting and gave some meaning to my badly interrupted life. Having finally cottoned onto the disastrous consequences of starting and stopping lithium, I took it faithfully and found that life was a much stabler and more predictable place than I had ever reckoned. My moods were still intense and my temperament rather quick to the boil, but I could make plans with far more certainty and the periods of absolute blackness were fewer and less extreme.
Still, I was unquestionably raw and unhealed inside. At no point in the eight years since I had joined the faculty—despite the repeated, long months of manias and depressions, my suicide attempt, and David’s death—had I taken off any extended time from work, or away from Los Angeles, in order to heal and bind up the massive and long-standing wounds. So dipping into that most fabulous of all professorial perks, I decided to take a year’s sabbatical leave in England. Like St. Andrews many years before, it turned out to be a gentle and wonderful interlude. Love, long periods of time to myself, and a marvelous life in London and Oxford gave both my mind and heart the chance to slowly put back together most of that which had been ripped apart.
My academic reasons for going to England were to conduct a study of mood disorders in eminent British artists and writers and to work on a medical text about manic-depressive illness that I was writing with a colleague. My time was split between work at St. George’s Hospital Medical School in London and the University of Oxford. They could not have been more different experiences, each wonderful in very different ways. St. George’s, a large teaching hospital now in the middle of one of London’s poorest neighborhoods, was active and lively in the way that good teaching hospitals tend to be. It was 250 years old and had been home to Edward Jenner, the great surgeon John Hunter, and many other clinicians and scientists famous in the history of medicine; the hospital was also the final resting place for Blossom, the cow that Jenner had used in carrying out his smallpox vaccine research. Her somewhat mangy but magnificent hide hung under glass in the medical school library. When I first saw it, at a distance and without my glasses, I thought it was a strange and oddly beautiful abstract painting. I was delighted when I found out it was actually the hide of a cow, and not that of just any cow, but such a medically famous one. There was something very nice about working near Blossom, and I spent many happy hours in her company, working, or thinking about working, and looking up now and again at her motley but charming remains.
Oxford was totally different. I was a senior research fellow of Merton College, one of the three original Oxford colleges founded in the thirteenth century. Merton’s chapel had been built during the same period, and some of its incredibly beautiful, deeply stained glass windows date from then as well. The library, built a century later and one of the finest medieval libraries in England, was also the first to house books upright on shelves instead of keeping them flat in chests. Its collection of early printed books is said to have been hampered by the fact that the college was convinced that the printing press was only a passing fad, one that would never be able to replace handwritten manuscripts. Some of that extraordinary confidence—so unburdened by either the realities of the present or the approaching of the future—still seeps through the Oxford colleges, creating, variously, annoyance or amusement, depending upon one’s mood and circumstance.
I had a lovely suite of rooms at Merton overlooking the playing fields, and I read (albeit with difficulty) and wrote in total peace, interrupted only by a college servant who brought coffee in the mornings and tea in the afternoons. Lunch was almost always with the senior fellows, a remarkably interesting, if occasionally odd, group of senior lecturers and professors representing all fields of study within the university. There were historians, mathematicians, philosophers, and literary scholars, but whenever possible I would sit next to Sir Alister Hardy, the marine biologist, who was a fascinating man and an extraordinary storyteller; I listened for hours to his accounts of his early scientific explorations to Antarctica, as well as his discussions of his ongoing research into the nature of religious experiences. We shared strong common interests in William James and the nature of ecstatic experiences, and he leapfrogged fields, from literature to biology to theology, without effort or pause.
Merton was not only among the oldest and wealthiest of the Oxford colleges, it was also widely acclaimed for having the best food and the finest wine cellar. For that reason, I not infrequently found myself in Oxford for college dinners. Those evenings were evenings far far back in time: sipping sherry and talking with the dons before dinner began; walking together, in procession, into the old and beautiful dining hall; watching with amusement as the black-gowned, scraggly undergraduates rose to their feet as the dons came in (the deference had a certain appeal; curtsying, perhaps, was not such a bad thing after all). Heads bowed, quick prayers in Latin, students and dons alike, we all would wait for the college warden to sit; this then, would be followed by an immediate and overpowering din of undergraduates scuffling with chairs, laughing, and shouting loudly up and down the long dining tables.
At the high table, the conversations and enthusiasm were more restrained, and, always, there was vintage Oxfordtalk, usually clever, often hilarious, occasionally stifling; excellent dinners with superb wines were all noted on elegantly calligraphied and crested menus; then we filed out into a smaller, private dining room for brandies and ports and fruit and candied ginger with the warden and fellows. I cannot imagine how anyone got any work done after these dinners, but, as everyone I met who taught at Oxford seemed to have written at least four definitive books on one obscure topic or another, they must have inherited, or cultivated, very different kinds of livers and brains. For my part, the wine and port would inevitably catch up with me, and, after pouring myself onto the last train to London, I would stare out of the window into the night, caught up, for an hour or so, in other centuries, and happily lost between worlds and eras.
Although I went to Oxford several times a week, most of my life was centered in London. I spent great and vastly enjoyable amounts of time wandering through parks and museums and took long weekends with friends who lived in East Sussex, walking along the downs overlooking the English Channel. I also started riding again. I felt the return of an amazing sense of life and vitality when taking a horse out through the misty mornings of Hyde Park during the cold, late autumn, and even more so galloping pell-mell over the Somerset countryside, through beech woods and across farmlands. I had forgotten what it felt like to be that open to wind and rain and beauty, and I could feel life seeping back into crevices of my body and mind that I had completely written off as dead or dormant.
It took my year in England to make me realize how much I had been simply treading water, settling on surviving and avoiding pain rather than being actively involved in and
seeking out life. The chance to escape from the reminders of illness and death, from a hectic life, and from clinical and teaching responsibilities was not unlike my earlier year as an undergraduate in St. Andrews: it gave me a semblance of peace that had eluded me, and a place of my own to heal and mull, but most important to heal. England did not have the Celtic, magical quality of St. Andrews—nothing, I suppose, ever could for me—but it gave me back myself again, gave me back my high hopes of life. And it gave me back my belief in love.
I had come at last to some sort of terms with David’s death. Visiting his grave in Dorset one cold, sunny day, I was taken aback by the loveliness of the churchyard in which he was buried. I had not remembered very much of it from the funeral, and certainly not its tranquillity and beauty. The deathly quietness was a certain kind of consolation, I suppose, but not necessarily the kind one would seek. I put a bouquet of long-stemmed violets on his grave and sat, tracing the letters of his name in the granite, remembering our times together in England and Washington and Los Angeles. It seemed a very long time ago, but I could see him still, tall and handsome, standing, arms crossed and laughing, at the top of a hill, during one of our walks in the English countryside; I still could feel his presence next to mine, kneeling together in a strange intimacy, at the communion rail in St. Paul’s; and I still could feel, with absolute clarity, his arms tight around me, holding the world at bay, giving me comfort and safety in the midst of total desolation. I wished more than anything that he could see that I was well, and that I somehow could repay him for his kindness and his belief in me. But mostly, as I was sitting there in the graveyard, I thought of all of the things that David had missed by dying young. And then, after an hour or more of being lost in my thoughts, I was caught up short by the realization that I had been thinking, for the first time, about how much David had missed, rather than what we together would miss.
David had loved and accepted me in an extraordinary way; his steadiness and kindness had sustained and saved me, but he was gone. Life—because of him, and despite his death—went on. And now, four years after his death, I found a very different kind of love and a renewed belief in life. These came by way of an elegant, moody, and totally charming Englishman whom I had met early in the year. We both knew that, due to personal and professional circumstances, our affair would have to end once the year did, but it was—despite or because of this—a relationship that succeeded, finally, in restoring love and laughter and desire to a walled-in life and a thoroughly iced heart.
We had first met at a London dinner party during one of my earlier visits to England; it was, wonderfully, and without question, love at first sight. Neither of us had any awareness of anyone else at the dinner table that night, and neither of us—we agreed much later—had ever been so completely and irrationally swept away by the power of our feelings. Several months later, when I returned to London for my year’s sabbatical leave, he called and asked me to go out to dinner. I was renting a mews house in South Kensington, so we went to a restaurant nearby. It was, for both of us, a continuation of what we had felt when we first met. I was spellbound by the ease with which he understood me, and physically overwhelmed by his intensity. We both knew, long before the wine was through, that we were beyond any way of turning back.
It was raining when we left the restaurant, and he put his arm around me as we ran madcap to my place. Once there, he held me very close to him for a long, long time. I felt and smelled the rain against his coat, felt his arms around me, and remembered, with relief, how extraordinary scents and rain and love and life can be. I had not been with a man in a very long time, and, understanding this, he was kind and gentle and utterly loving. We saw each other as often as we could. Because we both were inclined to intense feelings and moods, we could console one another easily and, likewise, give one another a wide berth whenever necessary. We talked about everything. He was almost frighteningly intuitive, smart, passionate, and, occasionally, deeply melancholic; and he came to know me better than anyone had ever known me. He had no difficulty seeing the complexity in emotional situations or moods—his own made him well able to understand and respect irrationality, wild enthusiasms, paradox, change, and contradiction. We shared a love for poetry, music, tradition, and irreverence, as well as an unflagging awareness of the darker side of almost everything that was light, and the lighter side of almost everything that was bleak or morbid.
We created our own world of discussion, desire, and love, living on champagne, roses, snow, rain, and borrowed time, an intense and private island of restored life for both of us. I had no hesitancy in telling him everything about myself, and he, like David, was extremely understanding about my manic-depressive illness. His immediate response, after I told him, was to take my face in his hands, kiss me gently on either cheek, and say, “I thought it was impossible for me to love you any more than I do.” He was silent for a while and then added, “It doesn’t really surprise me, but it does explain a certain vulnerability that goes along with your boldness. I am very glad you told me.” He meant it. They were not just easy words to cover awkward feelings. Everything he did and said after our discussion only underscored the meaning of his words. He understood, took into account, and put into perspective my vulnerabilities; but he also knew and loved my strengths as he saw them. He kept both in mind, protecting me from the hurt and pain of my illness and loving those aspects of me that he felt carried over with passion into life and love and work and people.
I told him about my problems with the idea of taking lithium, but also that my life was dependent upon it. I told him that I had discussed with my psychiatrist the possibility of taking a lower dose in hopes of alleviating some of the more problematic side effects; I was eager to do this, but very frightened that I would have a recurrence of my mania. He argued that there would never be a safer or more protected period of time in my life in which to do it and that he would see me through. After discussing it with my psychiatrist in Los Angeles and my doctor in London, I did, very slowly, cut back on the amount of lithium I was taking. The effect was dramatic. It was as though I had taken bandages off my eyes after many years of partial blindness. A few days after lowering my dose, I was walking in Hyde Park, along the side of the Serpentine, when I realized that my steps were literally bouncier than they had been and that I was taking in sights and sounds that previously had been filtered through thick layers of gauze. The quacking of the ducks was more insistent, clearer, and more intense; the bumps on the sidewalk were far more noticeable; I felt more energetic and alive. Most significant, I could once again read without effort. It was, in short, remarkable.
That night, waiting for my moody, intense Englishman to appear—needlepointing, watching the snow fall, listening to Chopin and Elgar—I suddenly was aware of how clear and poignant the music seemed, how intensely, beautifully melancholic it was to watch the snow and wait for him. I was feeling more beauty, but more real sadness as well. When he arrived—elegant, just in from a formal dinner party, black tie, white silk evening scarf draped, askew, around his neck, a bottle of champagne in his hand—I put on Schubert’s posthumous Piano Sonata in B-flat, D. 960. Its haunting, beautiful eroticism absolutely filled me with emotion and made me weep. I wept for the poignancy of all the intensity I had lost without knowing it, and I wept for the pleasure of experiencing it again. To this day, I cannot hear that piece of music without feeling surrounded by the beautiful sadness of that evening, the love I was privileged to know, and the recollection of the precarious balance that exists between sanity and a subtle, dreadful muffling of the senses.
Once, after several days completely to ourselves and with no contact at all with the outside world, he brought me an anthology of writings about love. He had tagged one short entry that captured the essence not only of those intense, glorious days but of the entire year as well:
Thank you for a lovely weekend.
They tell me it rained.
Love Watching Madness
I dreaded l
eaving England. My moods had held at a more even keel for longer than I could remember; my heart was newly alive; and my mind was in a glorious state, having loped, grazed, and mulled its less medicated self through Oxford and St. George’s. It was increasingly hard to imagine giving up the gentle pace of days I had set for myself in London, and harder still to think of losing the passion and close understanding that had filled my nights. England had laid to rest most of my incessant wondering about the what-ifs and whys and what-might-have-beens; it also had laid to rest, in a very different way, my relentless warrings with lithium, most of which had been nothing but a futile battle against the givens of my own mind. These warrings had cost me dearly in time lost, and, feeling myself again, I was unwilling to risk losing any more time than I already had. Life had become worth not losing.
Inevitably, the year passed: the snows and warming brandies of the English winter gave way to the soft rains and white wines of early summer. Roses and horses appeared in Hyde Park; gorgeous, diaphanous apple blossoms spread out over the black branches of the trees in St. James’s Park; and the long, still hours of summer light cast an Edwardian hue over the days just up to my parting. It had become difficult to remember my life in Los Angeles, much less to think about returning to the chaotic days of running a large university clinic filled with very sick patients, teaching, and seeing a full caseload of patients again. I was beginning to have doubts that I could remember the details of conducting a psychiatric history and examination, much less teaching others how to do it. I was reluctant to leave England, and even more reluctant to return to a city I had come to associate not only with a grueling academic career, but also with breakdowns, the worn, cold, bloodlessness following in their wake, and the draining charade of pretending to be well when I wasn’t and going through the motions of being pleasant when I felt dreadful.