BOOK REFLECTIONS
Mourning, Not Melancholy:
A Review of Nothing Was the Same: A Memoir by Kay Redfield
Jamison
It
has been said that grief is a kind of madness. I disagree.
There is a sanity to grief, in its just proportion of emotion to
cause, that madness does not have. Grief, given to all, is a
generative and human thing. It provides a path, albeit a broken
one, by which those who grieve can find their way. Still, it is
grief’s fugitive nature that one does not know at the start that
such a path exists. I knew madness well, but I understood
little of grief, and I was not always certain which was grief
and which was madness. Grief, as it transpires, has its own
territory. (p.5)
Kay Redfield Jamison, Professor of Psychiatry at the Johns Hopkins
University School of Medicine and co-director of its Mood Disorders
Center, is a renowned expert in the study of manic-depressive
illness and the author of several books on the topic, including the
co-authorship of the standard medical text on the illness:
Manic-Depressive Illness: Bipolar Disorders and Recurrent Depression
and a memoir of her own struggle with the illness: An Unquiet
Mind. As her honorary professorship in English at The
University of St. Andrews attests, she is also a lucid and elegant
writer.
In her earlier memoir An Unquiet Mind,
Jamison unflinchingly portrayed her life and death struggle with
manic-depressive illness. The effect on the reader of this, at once
deeply personal yet clinically exacting portrayal of a most gifted
yet difficult life, is to re-appraise the deepest meaning of
“sanity” in its most distinctively human meaning. Jamison’s illness
truly buffets her about, threatening her very survival. And yet,
with the help of excellent treatment, She plumbs the depths of her
uniqueness as a person, a uniqueness of which her illness and her
response to that illness is an essentially constitutive part.
Adrian van Kaam points out that our limits are the outline of our
call. In Jamison’s life and work we see how her call develops in
significant part from her response to this life threatening illness.
It becomes for her not merely an affliction that victimizes her but
a summons to touch her own deepest capacities for life and for
service to others.
In Nothing Was the Same Jamison
continues the story of the deepening realization of her unfolding
life direction, the unique “way” of her life, this time through her
attentive and wakeful going through of the territory marked out by
the grief aroused by the dying and death of her beloved husband of
twenty years, Richard Jed Wyatt, M.D., the Chief of the
Neuropsychiatry Branch of the National Institute of Mental Health.
This, as the earlier memoir, is striking in its honesty, its realism
and lack of sentimentality, its challenging insights into the worlds
of medicine and neuropsychiatry, and its powerfully communicated
substrata of transcendence. As her earlier work challenges the
reader to reappraise the true meaning of sanity, so this memoir
draws the reader into the transcendent dimensions of relationship
and grief .
Although in retrospect we learn of the
earlier years of their lives together, for the most part the memoir
treats in detail Jamison’s experience of the final years of her
married life, following the diagnosis of Richard’s terminal
lymphoma, and of the time of mourning immediately following his
death. What emerges is a very personal description of a time of
fear and sadness, but also of profound life, love, and gratitude.
As Jamison at once lives in anticipation of the death of her beloved
“husband, colleague and friend,” she seems to experience so much
more acutely the beauty, challenge and awesomeness of the Universe
and of their and her place in it. As she describes the peace and
beauty of what she knows to be their last Christmas together, the
words of the poet Douglass Dunn come to her mind.
Sad? Yes. But it was beautiful also.
There was a stillness in the world. Time was
out. (p. 101)
The depth and intimacy of their final months together become a
preparation for the navigation of the grief that will follow, and
Jamison’s continuing life and participation in the life of the world
and cosmos after his death. In the late autumn preceding that last
Christmas together, Kay and Richard turned their interest to the
Leonid meteor shower. At 4:30 am the two of them drive to Rock
Creek Park in Washington to observe what is promised to be “the most
spectacular sky event of the twenty first century.” It does not
disappoint.
How perfect this is, I thought. How perfect it
is that we have this, that we are watching this astonishing beauty
together. How perfect that Richard is alive to see it. It is a
gift for Richard’s grace. . . . Richard talked quietly but
passionately about the shooting stars as they rained down over Rock
Creek Park. How beautiful they were, he said, how transient. Then
he talked about young American soldiers, watching under an Afghan
sky. Some would see the Leonids, some would be spotting targets for
bombs, and some would be seeing the bombs burst. But, Richard
wondered, what would Bin Laden see as he was being hunted down? Did
he share the same awe for glowing dust and raining stars? (pp.
99-100)
This is a couple whose deeply personal lives, even in the most
difficult and painful of times, are mindfully connected to the
realities of the larger world. There is a place in our
consciousness, Adrian van Kaam calls it the transconscious,
where the “local” and the “global” are not separated but united. Kay
and Richard’s life together and their commitment to their work on
behalf of others reflect openness and participation in the larger
human and cosmic world. It is this dimension of their relationship
that will show the way for Jamison to navigate the “territory” of
grief after Richard’s death.
Never far below the surface in their life
together was the reality of Kay’s manic-depressive illness.
Jamison’s reflections are filled with reminiscences of all the ways
that Wyatt’s wisdom, experience and most of all love and attentive
care had been the source of her well-being for the years of their
marriage. On Valentine’s Day less than four months before his
death, Richard takes Kay out to a local restaurant.
It was a serious and
sad evening. It was the only time we discussed what would happen to
me after he died, and it was obvious that he had given a great deal
of thought to what he would say. He started by telling me how much
he loved me and how happy I had made him. He said he wished he
could say that he would be keeping an eye out for me once he was
gone but, as I knew, he didn’t believe in such things. He did
believe in the lasting influence of love. You have good friends,
family, and colleagues, he said. You have a good doctor and work
that is important. You will have to take care of yourself. You
will have to take your medication and get your sleep. No one will
be around to remind you. It was as though he had rehearsed the
speech and did not know what to say next.
“But what will I do without you?” I asked him. “What will I
do?”
Richard came over to my side
of the table and put his arms around me. “I don’t know,” he said.
“But you will be all right.” (p. 102)
The final section of the memoir is a
reflection on the days of Richard’s dying and of the weeks that
follow. One of the most striking aspects of Jamison’s experience in
this acutely lonely and painful time is her exquisite attunement to
the movements of her own “unquiet mind.” In Contemplative
Psychology, Hans de Wit recognizes two basic elements of the
great spiritual traditions, what he calls “the awareness and
conceptual strategies.” Through her life-long struggle with
manic-depressive illness, Jamison had become an adept practitioner
of the awareness strategy, and the concluding chapters of the memoir
become a primer in this practice.
But my struggles with manic-depressive illness
had taught me more than I knew. I had a facility with extreme
emotions and knew better than I would have liked how fast a mood can
shift. I assumed suffering to be an integral part of life. My
disease and my temperament, so beholden to each other, had taught me
from the time I was young that contradictory and shifting moods were
as real and meaningful as more settled, consistent ones. I had no
expectation that calm was anything but a transient state. I knew,
as well as I could know anything, that confusion and darkness
inhabit lands next to light-filled and quiet ones. (p. 179)
Immediately following Richard’s death, Jamison is acutely aware of
the possibility of the arising of mania in her, a mania that could
well be followed, following the days of the funeral and burial, by a
falling into depression. Anyone who has gone through the experience
of the death and funeral of a loved one, followed by the ensuing
days of absence, may recognize these tendencies. Here, Jamison’s
personal reflections become a universal call to proper vigilance and
a careful response to the occurrence of shifting moods in such
critical moments of life. Grief, Jamison testifies,
“is not a disease; it is necessary.” (p. 181)
The experience of grief, for Jamison,
teaches her that “to move forward I would have to imagine a life
without Richard. . . . Reconstituting Richard and our relationship
would mean reconstituting myself.” (p. 196) In The Transcendent
Self, Adrian van Kaam speaks of the transition moments of life
as transcendence crises. The outcome of such a crisis is a
new current form of life. For Jamison the new current form of life
has to be a life at once without Richard while, to some degree, one
still pervaded by his presence. Her way of imagining this new life
was to write this memoir.
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 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. (pp. 202-3)
