Nothing Was the Same by Kay Redfield Jamison

feel I am still ahead. For me, not being in debt means I do not have to be concerned about death.
    Richard’s views on death were not my own—death to me is unimaginable and horrifying—but he gave me an enviable slant on it.

R AINING S TARS
    Richard and I were given a long Indian summer before he died, a year beyond what we had banked on. After the round of tributes from his colleagues, Richard suggested a vacation in California. We had no talks to give or schedule to keep; we could relax, spend time with family and friends, and enjoy what we had. We could worry later about what was to come. It was a perfect interlude. Richard, who was still in reasonable health, sat on the deck of our family house in Pacific Palisades and worked on his laptop, or slept in the sun. In the mornings, I walked to the bluffs overlooking the Pacific or down to the ocean; in the afternoons I sat on the deck next to Richard and read.
    Everywhere there were the defining scents and colors of Southern California: sweet jasmine, pungent eucalyptus; bougainvillea vines with their hooked thorns and papery blossoms of tangerine and fuchsia. The jarring blue hibiscus. Richard particularly loved the camphor trees, as I did the eucalyptus, so we drove the streets of the Palisades with the car windows open, inhaling and happy. On one of our daily drives, Richard mentioned that camphor had been used centuries earlier to treat mania. He insisted we stop to gather some leaves: “Just in case,” he said with a smile. I told him that camphor sounded better to me than an injection of the antipsychotic he carried in his black bag, so I gathered up an armful of glossy leaves. We put these in a basket to ward off madness and, as he pointed out, from that point onward not only madness, but also moths kept their distance. We saw friends and family, visited with colleagues at UCLA, and at night drove up the twisting streets into the hills behind our house and looked out on the lights of Los Angeles and the unfurling of moonlight over Santa Monica Bay. We made time stop for a while, and knew how lucky we were.
    I fashioned a peace with California during that trip with Richard, one that was long past due. Los Angeles had always nettled me: I loved it, I disavowed it, I tried to put it behind me. I came of age in Los Angeles and, in that sense, it would always be my city: I first knew desire there, and madness; first made love and fell in love. Los Angeles was my original city of passion and disappointment: it was where my mind cracked and where, twenty years after the fact, I still felt a cringing shame for things I had said or done when manic. But it was also where I had first heard Schumann’s piano works and Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis; had, on a summer day, watched the first moon landing; first read Yeats and Lowell and Darwin. Nothing about Los Angeles was straightforward to me.
    Great chunks of my life—great frightening, marvelous chunks of my life—were tangled in the passing of Southern California’s strange nonseasons. Washington would be my first home and my last, but California was the fitful, bewildering center. Only Big Sur remained uncomplicated to me. I loved it without reservation, and sought it out time and again because it was wild and beautiful, and because it could settle me in ways that no other place or person could. Even when I went mad in Big Sur, it was an ecstatic madness, an astonishingly beautiful voyage of my mind to Saturn and its rings and moons, and to distant stars. I walked off my unrest along the seacoast of the Big Sur: away, alone, and unbeholden. It was where I went for desolate beauty and for the belief that here, always, I would be at home. Southern California I kept at bay.
    Now, with Richard gravely ill, my fractiousness with California seemed a waste of time and energy, not to say indulgent. Richard was dying, it was our last trip together to California, and nothing else was important. I had wasted enough of my life