Nothing Was the Same by Kay Redfield Jamison Read Free Book Online Page A

room again but still could see no flowers. The only place left was the bathroom, so I opened the door. Richard had outdone himself. The bathtub was filled with floating blossoms of white and pink and lavender. It was a stunningly beautiful sight. I looked at the flowers more closely; they looked suspiciously familiar.
    They were. The day before, the staff of the Keats-Shelley House had kindly sent me a beautiful bouquet of roses and lilacs to thank me for my lecture. Richard, while I was out on my walk, had removed the flowers from the vase, cut their stems, and set them a-sail on the water. It was low-cost and very Richard.
    He said eagerly, “Keep looking. You’ll need to get down on your knees for this.” Feeling mildly ridiculous, and wheezing because I’m allergic to roses, I got down on my hands and knees to explore the blossoms as they drifted in the bathtub. My hands were wet and cold and my knees soon sore, but I kept at it and finally discovered, attached by a paper clip and a rubber band to the stem of one of the roses, a pill bottle with a note inside: “Check the bed.” It was a hunt. Richard was in his element.
    After a prolonged search of our exceedingly large bed, I found a small red box. It was from a jeweler in Rome and inside, on silk, was an antique gold ring. Underneath one of the pillows was a note. “Thank you for the happiest year of my life,” Richard had scratched in his dyslexic hand. “I know that talking and writing about your illness has been hard. I am very proud of you—not only as your husband, but as your colleague.”
    The next morning, Richard dipped my new ring into the waters of the Trevi Fountain and then slipped it onto my finger, next to my wedding band. It would be with me when he could not, he said; it would lessen the hurt from the cool silences or sharp remarks that might come my way. After we returned to Washington and criticism did lay me low, Richard was wry and loyal and he brought me back again. When things went well, his joy was undiluted, and we hung the moon.
    We laughed and made love through those Italian days, and thought our happiness imperishable. It was a time of such closeness that even now I cast into those memories for assurance. I had Richard, we had each other, and it was enough.
    Time sped by without our believing that it could end. Love pushed back our fears that his or my illness might come back, that one of us might die. It was a blithe time, and it did not last.

PART TWO

    L AST C HAMPAGNE
Medical etiquette called for a
physician to call for two glasses
of champagne and to drink them
silently with his patient when that
patient was a medical man who
had just passed any hope of
recovery. The meaning of the
champagne was understood: the
need of awkward words obviated .
—RICHARD DAVENPORT-HINES

B ROKEN P ORTIONS
    Richard was thirty-three years old when he was diagnosed with stage IVB Hodgkin’s disease. This, in 1973, was a death sentence. A large tumor in his chest was growing rapidly; the cancer had already spread to his spleen, liver, and bones. Two vertebrae had disintegrated from the malignancy in his spine. There was nothing to be done, Richard said, except to read carefully through his life-insurance policies, write up the experiments he had been working on, and think of a way to say goodbye to his three-year-old daughter and his twin sons, born only months earlier.
    Richard’s colleagues insisted he fly out to the West Coast for a consultation with Henry Kaplan, the Stanford oncologist who had pioneered a radically aggressive treatment for Hodgkin’s disease. Over the next two years, Richard received massive doses of radiation and chemotherapy, which saved his life. He attributed this stay of death to the fearlessness and the restless brilliance of his physician. Kaplan’s “secular miracle,” as Richard put it, lost no wonder for him because it came from a doctor rather than an ancient faith or prayers. On the contrary, it