Free Nothing Was the Same by Kay Redfield Jamison

won’t go overboard with the goldfish?”
    “Of course not,” I said indignantly. “I’ll get only as many as makes sense for the pond.” I looked at Richard, who looked deeply skeptical and then burst out laughing.
    “Right,” he said. “I can only imagine. We’ll be feeding everything in the neighborhood that walks on four feet.”
    I made up in goldfish for what I thought we lacked in water lilies. At least a hundred came to join us. Before two summers passed, the water lilies had taken over the pond and were on the move over the pond’s stone ledge. The fish flourished, despite the occasional electrical storm that left some of them fried and floating.
    One evening, Richard brought a half-eaten goldfish into the kitchen and dangled it in front of my eyes. “Congratulations,” he said. “We’ve created alfresco dining for the raccoons. They eat here, tell their friends, and then take one for the road.” The fish continued to thrive, the raccoons continued to fish in our pond, and I never heard the end of it. Now, years later, I asked Richard if he remembered our trip to buy water lilies and the legions of goldfish I had gotten for the pond. He laughed out loud: How could I not? he said.
    I think, until that moment—sitting in our car in front of our old house with its very small fish pond, watching the snow as it came down in great, beautiful flakes—I had not fully realized how wondrous laughter is, how fortunate we had been to have so much of it, so easily.
    Christmas day was quiet and close. My mother was staying with us, and we had coffee and opened presents in front of the tree; the fireplace, now a source of mordant one-liners from Richard, had been cleaned and worked well. Richard gave me a pair of gold earrings from Newport, Rhode Island, with a note to wear them “in good times and in bad.” In the months, and then the years, to follow, I did exactly that. They became a bellwether of my moods and expectations: an amulet to act against bad days, a glyph of hope or delight during good ones. We had dinners with friends, and drove around our neighborhood looking at lighted Christmas trees in window bays, their joy up against the dark. It was a good Christmas, all things considered.
    We saw in the new year with a finger of whiskey, shortbread, and a shiver of dread.

    Ambinder had turned over Richard’s care to David Ettinger, a Hopkins specialist in lung cancer. He was to prove to be a very good doctor, open to the ideas of the scores of physicians and scientists we consulted from hospitals and laboratories across the country. Two of the scientists we consulted, Jim Watson of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory and Bob Gallo, director of the Institute of Human Virology at the University of Maryland, had been friends of ours for many years. Jim contacted numerous scientists about their work, tracked down results from clinical trials that had not yet been published, invited me up to Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory to attend meetings on experimental cancer treatments, and introduced us to Judah Folkman at Harvard, whose treatment recommendations Richard and I believed prolonged Richard’s life by many months.
    Bob Gallo, in addition to talking with scores of oncologists, gene therapists, and vaccine researchers, continued to grow—and to try to kill—Richard’s tumor cells in his own laboratory. He also introduced us to Jeff Schlom, a prominent cancer vaccine scientist at the National Cancer Institute, who together with his wife, Kathleen, was unbelievably helpful and kind to Richard and me; they became close friends, in a class by themselves.
    The winter and spring of 2000 came and went and brought with them a generally quiet rhythm to our days. We spent our mornings and afternoons in the room across from our bedroom; it caught the best of the light coming into the house and became a room of our own, private and quiet and undisturbed. Richard worked on his laptop in a chair across from mine, and I read or