Nothing Was the Same is a plangent, affecting memoir of lost love. Kay Redfield Jamison writes of her husband, Richard Wyatt, a man she married halfway between their first meeting and his death from cancer. She is an award-winning academic with particular expertise in manic depression; he, a brilliant scientist.
Theirs was a resolutely secular marriage, even as Richard’s condition worsened, and even as the very best medical care was found wanting.
He was nominally Jewish, though “a thorough nonbeliever.” She had attended Episcopal churches in the past. But neither seemed to hold out any hope of a life beyond this one.
There is no doubt where they were placing their faith: “[O]ur belief in science kept us from abject despair.”
Perhaps this outlook is not entirely surprising. Because as well as cataloging love shared and love lost, the memoir also documents Christian love withheld.
Religious Diatribes
When Jamison went public about her own struggles with bipolar illness, not everyone was supportive. Several professional colleagues started giving her a wide berth, and she notes that she received a number of “religious diatribes” by post. Apparently her illness was somehow “just deserts for not having truly accepted the Lord Jesus Christ into [her] heart, or for not having prayed often or sincerely enough.”
Then there is Stuart, a friend who is an Episcopal rector. He visits Richard on several occasions during his illness, and they plan his funeral together, discussing potential hymns.
“Under the circumstances, [Richard] said wryly, he thought he would pass on ‘How Great Thou Art.’ . . . He asked to listen to ‘Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise’ again and then said . . . ‘I have no idea what the words mean, but I like the music.’”
That last sentence struck me as terribly sad. For both Richard and Kay, there was a certain consoling power in the music but not in the meaning of Christian language. Religious words had a certain power—-but only the kind of power that a lullaby has over a child. The child does not need to understand the words of the lullaby; he or she only needs to sense the numbing repetition, the drowsy, familiar tune—-and then the lullaby has done all it needs to. All it can do.
I wonder, in the desperate search to cure Richard’s cancer, did their Episcopal friend love them well? Did he share with them the seismic significance of Jesus’ words about life after death? The memoir suggests not.
“After Stuart left, I picked up my copy of The Book of Common Prayer, looked up the Order for the Burial of the Dead, and started to read. ‘I am the resurrection and the life, saith the Lord,’ it began, and I thought: Not yet; I will hear this soon enough. I closed the book.”
Familiar with Grief
In September 2001, my mother died of stomach cancer. The medical staff at the hospice were phenomenal: skilled, sensitive, and familiar with grief. The spiritual staff were less effective, however. I remember asking the chaplain how he shared the hope of the resurrection with dying people. I also remember the look of surprise on his face. “Oh, that’s the last thing I would do at that point,” he answered, oblivious to the irony. Under any other circumstances, I probably would have laughed.
If a nurse at the bedside withheld a cure for cancer when she had it in her power to administer it, we would think her monstrous. And yet this man, who could offer resurrection at the bedside, thought the idea ridiculous. Perhaps he, like Kay and Richard, believed that the resurrection is nothing more than a lullaby: a little lie told to children at bedtime to keep them from crying but little more than an embarrassment if carried over into adult life. Far too trivial to be brought up when someone was actually dying.
But Jesus says: “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will live, even though he dies; and whoever lives and believes in me will never die” (John 11:25-26).
When Jesus said this, his aim was not to give us pretty, poetic rhymes with which to try and numb the pain. He means us to know that he, Jesus Christ, has the real, physical answer to real, physical death. And immediately after he said those words, he proved they were more than music—-by raising a man to life who had been in the tomb four days.
This is the only belief that can truly keep us from abject despair. And it is not a placebo. It is the cure.
