Nothing Was the Same Read Online Free

the debilitating treatment he had undergone years earlier for Hodgkin’s disease, an aggressive combination of radiation and chemotherapy that had cured him of his disease but at considerable cost. “We all long to be some whole we thought we were in the past, the self we were before becoming ill,” he wrote. “The diseases and the magic bullets have left their traces or scars but they are not a part of me in the way yours are. All the more so because yours are integral to your personality. Because of this I am luckier than you; I can love a manic-depressive in a way you cannot love a Hodgkin’s disease.”
    Richard’s arms broke many falls for me. There were times, especially early on, when I would be hit by despair that had no good reason and gave no quarter and all hope would bleed out of me. “In the midst of seemingly unbelievable happiness with you, London, life, I find myself awful and dark and full of bleak thoughts and feelings,” I wrote to him when I was living in England. “It came on as I suppose it always does, with a sense of tiredness, then the long deep clouds and finally just despair and Why again? What’s the point? One’s born just to die; feeling good is unreal and only to mock and haunt one when ill. And for a brief while I thought, I have Richard, and if he were here he would hold me and make love to me, make me a cup of tea, give me a pill to let me sleep through the hard rough part. There are moments when you provide a minute of sweetness and belief, and then the blackness comes again. I shall be done for one of these times. No matter what I do, this illness will always bring me to my knees. I accumulate sorrow and grief inside, which only wait until the next time to come out again, to remind me how always tides go out once in.”
    These times of reemergent depression were hard when they came, but our life together was far from grim. On the contrary. I was well and in high spirits most of the years I knew Richard. We had more fun than we knew what to do with. We worked together, saw patients in consultation, and collaborated on many papers and professional projects. We each in our different ways had a chaotic mind and we found a calming quality in the company of each other.
    Richard often told me that my acceptance of and love for him created a world of stillness and constancy he had never known. This, given my temperament, I found astonishing. I suggested one day that surely he was being ironic, but he said he wasn’t. Perhaps, I asked, I was soothing only in comparison with his unfortunate marriage or other fraught relationships he had had? No, he said; there may be an element of truth in that, but not much. Possibly I acted as a stimulant does, in a paradoxical manner, to bring order to his desultory mind? No, he said, you create a quiet world for me. “Your stillness is a sanctuary,” he once wrote to me. “The passion may in time turn me to mush and is extremely attractive. However, it is the capacity for understanding or accepting that is most important. This acceptance is the amalgamating force that makes me love you.” It is strange, I think now, that love could soothe and draw together such different souls, and provide for them such hope, such happiness.
    We complemented each other well. Richard was a reserved man, not someone who reached out emotionally to his colleagues as much as he and they would have liked. I think our relationship allowed him to know others in ways he had not, and once he got used to the idea, he liked it. “There is a loving of you that seems to ooze out to others,” he wrote to me early in his thawing. “Putting my arm around a scientist in my laboratory yesterday—it was a natural unnatural act. [Maybe] it is just latent, having been there all along, waiting for the right stimulus to set it free.” Although his first moves into a more emotional world were tentative—as he put it, “I find reaching out begins to dissipate with time and I start to