KAY JAMISON'S JOURNEY THROUGH GRIEF

I first discovered doctor and author Kay Redfield Jamison when I read her first book, An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness. The memoir, told from the unique perspective of someone who both suffers from bipolar disorder and acts as a doctor treating those who suffer from it as well, impressed me deeply. Fiercely honest and fiercely intelligent, beautifully written and above all courageous, it is the kind of experience a good memoir should be, the kind that deepens our understanding of what it is to be human.

I just finished Nothing Was the Same, her latest book, and it has many of those same strengths. The story begins with the death of her husband, Richard Wyatt, before flashing back to their lives, their meeting, their courtship, and their marriage. They met in mid-life, and built the kind of marriage that can only come, perhaps, from that age. It is quirky and yet tender, romantic yet profoundly realistic as well. As I read, I felt the sadness of the passing of this exceptional man, yet I also felt buoyed by my meeting with him.

There were many passages in the book that I loved, but two stood out so much that I want to share them with you. The first comes from the beginning, and spoke to me in part because it uses the same metaphor, of grief as a landscape, that inspired my own Grief Country. Jamison writes:

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.

At the very close of the book, she observes:

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 grief teaches.

Thank you, Kay Jamison; you are truly not only a doctor but a healer--sometimes a different, and often a more profound, thing.