The Ghost Hunters - Deborah Blum [135]
It would be an honest good-bye, Sidgwick told Nora; it would be a fittingly moral end to his life. She knew he was right. But she couldn’t make herself let him go so simply. In the end, he was buried with all the pomp and ceremony and calls to faith of a traditional Church of England service.
“Everything seems left undone in this world,” James wrote to Nora Sidgwick in early September. He’d come to believe, he told her, that her husband had kept psychical research sane and steady. James did not know who could replace Sidgwick in that role.
James and Myers were both sick again, each losing ground after leaving the gentle life at Richet’s chateau. James was en route to Germany for yet another round of medical treatment. He knew that Nora had decided to leave England for a while. She planned a trip to Egypt, where some of her students were working on an archaeological dig and where she might revisit comforting memories of the pleasures of doing math along the Nile.
“Dear Mrs. Sidgwick, you have no idea how many of us mourn with you in this bereavement or what an impression of flawlessness in quality your husband left by his person on all those who knew him, and by his writings on those who never saw him,” James wrote. “A spotless man, a wise man, a heroic man.”
WILLIAM JAMES NOW feared he might never again be well. Month after month, country after country, doctor after doctor, he could not seem to shake off his pain and lethargy. In despair, he wrote to President Eliot at Harvard and offered to resign his faculty position. Instead of accepting, the university extended his leave, Eliot assuring James that he was a philosopher-psychologist worth the investment.
Relieved and grateful, James decided to winter in Italy, hoping that its famously balmy climate would restore the good health achieved on the French Riviera. In Rome, James began a more aggressive treatment as well, injections of compounds taken from the lymph glands, brains, and testicles of goats. Its advocates guaranteed that the murky serum delivered animal health and vigor.
As December arrived and the year drew toward a weary end, James wrote to Myers that his health was on the mend; “my brain power is almost nil. But the arterial degeneration, mirabile dictu, does actually seem to be taking a back track.” He urged Myers to come to Rome and try the therapy. Even more urgently, James implored Myers to forget the death prophecy from Mrs. Thompson’s séances—which had come up again at the chateau— to let go his promised reunion with Annie Marshall, and to put his energy into all the good life and work yet to come. “I do hope & trust, dear Myers, that your health is keeping up, and that in spite of devils, prophets, mediums and imps, you are to live long for the comfort of your family, the delectation of your friends, and the instruction of the world,” he urged.
Myers wrote back, agreeing to come to Rome and try the recommended injections to please his friend, although he doubted that they would save him. Myers thought rather that he would die anyway, and then “return as a cross between an old goat and a guardian angel.”
Privately, James feared that Myers wished to die, was not really fighting his illness, that “his subliminal is, to put it brutally, trying to kill him as well as it can,” as he wrote to friends at the SPR offices in London. In genuine concern, James suggested the SPR hold a seance with the express goal of getting messages to “neutralize the prediction.”
Before January 1901 was half over, though, James thought he knew why Myers found the image of Annie so appealing. The dead lover probably glowed as pure gold in contrast with Myers’s living wife.
Terminal illness in a loved one did not bring out Evie’s best qualities.