2009, Vintage
In this memoir dedicated to her late husband Richard Wyatt, Kay Redfield Jamison (An Unquiet Mind, The Night Falls...) recounts their falling in love and their years together; his losing battle against cancer and her loss of this man so integral to her existence; and the difference between grief and depression.
Her bi-polar illness sometimes rendered their life and relationship difficult, but in a letter he wrote:
I am not glad the black hole is there but I am glad I have seen it. When you fall in love with a star you accept solar flairs, black holes and all.
Jamison says her husband was a reserved man, yet once in front of a group of friends he exclaimed, "I love you so much."
Throughout the memoir, Jamison shares with us, readers, works that touched her during life with her husband and in her grieving.
Watch:
The Bishop's Wife , 1947
To Paint The Stars: The Life & Mind Of Vincent van Gogh, 1991
Listen:
Missa Solemnis, Beethoven
Dies Irae, Requiem, Verdi
Immortal, Invisible, God only Wise (hymn)
Read:
Poetry:
Douglas Dunn, Thirteen Steps and the Thirteenth of March Elegies (poetry)
Robert Lowell
In Memoriam, Tennyson
Reluctance, Robert Frost
Other works:
Of Plymouth Plantation, journal of William Bradford
The Once and Future King, T.H. White
"...what has once existed can never die: not even the frailest things, spindrift or clover-scent or glitter of star on a wet stone." - George MacKay Brown
The hands which give are taking,
And the hands which take bestow:
Always the bough is breaking
Heavy with fruit or snow.
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