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By Root 511 0

through, what had been most terrible, what had frightened me the most, and what he could do to help me when I was ill. Somehow, after that conversation, everything became easier for me: I felt, for the first time, that I was not alone in dealing with all of the pain and uncertainty, and it was clear to me that he genuinely wanted to understand my illness and to take care of me. He started that night. I explained to him that, due to the relatively rare side effects of lithium that affected both my vision and concentration, I essentially could not read more than a paragraph or two at a time. So he read to me: he read poetry, Wilkie Collins, and Thomas Hardy, with one arm around me in bed, smoothing my hair now and again, as though I were a child. Moment by moment, with infinite patience and tact, his gentleness—and his belief in me, in who I was, and in my basic health—pushed back the nightmare fears of unpredictable moods and violence.

It must have been clear to David that I despaired of ever returning to my normal self, because he set about, in his rather systematic way, to reassure me. The next evening, when he came home, he announced that he had arranged dinner invitations from two senior British army officers, both of whom had manic-depressive illness. The evenings that we spent with these two men and their wives were unforgettable. One of the men, a general, was elegant, charming, and very smart; his lucidity was beyond question. He was—other than an occasional restlessness in his eyes and a slightly melancholic, albeit savingly sardonic, tinge to his conversation—indistinguishable from the animated, self-assured, and entertaining types one encounters at London and Oxford dinner parties. The other officer was also wonderful—warm, witty, and, like the general, had a “frightfully, frightfully” upper-crust accent. He, too, had an occasional sad aspect to his eyes, but he was terrific company and has remained, over many years, a close friend.

At no time during either of the dinner parties was manic-depressive illness discussed; it was, in fact, the very normality of the evenings that was so reassuring and so important to me. Being introduced to such “normal” men, both from a world much like the one I had known as a child, was one of David’s many intuitive acts of kindness. “It is the history of our kindnesses that alone makes this world tolerable,” wrote Robert Louis Stevenson. “If it were not for that, for the effect of kind words, kind looks, kind letters … I should be inclined to think our life a practical jest in the worst possible spirit.” After knowing David, I never again saw life in its worst possible spirit.

I left London with a terrible sense of apprehension, but David wrote and called often. In the late fall we spent time together in Washington, and, as I finally was feeling myself again, I enjoyed life in ways that I hadn’t for years. Those November days remain in my memory as a gentle yet intensely romantic swirl of long walks in the cold, visits to old houses and yet older churches, light snows covering the eighteenth-century gardens of Annapolis, and icy rivers threading their way out of and beyond the Chesapeake Bay. The evenings were filled with dry sherry and meandering dinner conversations about almost everything; the nights were filled with wonderful lovemaking and much-sought, long-absent, untroubled sleep.

David returned to London; I returned to Los Angeles; we wrote and spoke often, missed one another, and threw ourselves into our respective lives of work. I went back to England in May, and we had two weeks of long, warm pre-summer days in London, Dorset, and Devon. One Sunday morning, after church, we walked up into the hills to listen to the ringing of the church bells, and I noticed that David had stopped, was standing still, and breathing heavily. He joked about getting too much strenuous exercise at night, we both laughed, and left it at that.

David was posted to the British Army Hospital in Hong Kong, and he made plans for me to visit him there. He wrote in detail about the evening events