Nothing was the same: a memoir by Kay Redfield Jamison

Author:Kay Redfield Jamison
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Autobiography, Death, Psychology, Richard Jed, Spouses - psychology - United States, Psychological - United States, Psychologists - United States, Grief - United States, Neoplasms - psychology - United States, Hodgkin's disease - Patients - United States, Mental Illness, Bereavement, Grief, Richard Jed - Health, Psychiatrists, Social Scientists & Psychologists, Psychologists, Psychiatrists - United States, Medical, Wyatt, Family & Relationships, Patients, Hodgkin's disease, Self-Help, Psychiatrists' spouses - United States, Psychiatry - United States, United States, Oncology, Personal Memoirs, General, Attitude to Death - United States, Psychiatrists' spouses, Adaptation, Kay R, Biography & Autobiography, Jamison, Biography
ISBN: 9780307265371
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2009-09-22T21:57:09.327000+00:00

JOY BE THE STARLIGHT

We spent most of our last day at home together reading and writing in the room across from our bedroom. Richard worked on a foreword he had agreed to do for a colleague’s book and I read. He was very tired, and fell asleep now and again, but it was a good day. A peaceful and private day. I read to him what I had written the day before for my book on exuberance, a habit we had slipped into after he first became ill with lymphoma. I had quoted Robert Louis Stevenson, and he had asked me to read to him from Stevenson’s original essay on youth and old age.

I made us a cup of tea and began reading. “We may compare the headlong course of our years to a swift torrent in which a man is carried away,” Stevenson had written. “We have no more than glimpses and touches; we are torn away from our theories; we are spun round and round and shown this or the other view of life, until only fools or knaves can hold to their opinions. We take a sight at a condition in life, and say we have studied it; our most elaborate view is no more than an impression.”

Richard was intrigued by Stevenson’s assertion that no matter how carefully man studied something, his understanding was incomplete, an impression only. He seemed both heartened and disconcerted by the observation, and spoke about partial, shifting knowledge in the context of his own science. The advances in the understanding of schizophrenia and the brain were rapid, but however much was being learned, relatively little was actually known. Much of what was known would not last. He talked at length about how much he regretted dying without being a part of the discoveries to come. He would never know what causes schizophrenia or how to prevent it. He did not know now, he said, most of what would be commonplace science in twenty years.

What he said was true. Discovery is the boon and the chafe of science; much of what is learned will be supplanted by newer findings. There was no good answer to his regrets except to say that the pursuit of new knowledge is reward in its own right and that knowledge begets new knowledge. For those doing medical research, there is the reward that comes from easing pain and saving lives. I reminded him of how deeply he had loved his scientific work and being a doctor, and how much he had improved the lives of those who suffer from schizophrenia and other psychiatric illnesses. He had passed on his enthusiasm, curiosity, and intellectual rigor to the hundreds of young scientists he had trained. For them and for his colleagues, including me, he had been the best possible example of discipline, imagination, and the refusal to give up.

“Perhaps,” he said.

Still, he knew that what I said was true. His colleagues and those he had mentored had made clear to him their respect for his science and his character.

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