Chapter 2
I have full cause of weeping, but this heart
Shall break into a hundred thousand flaws
Or ere I’ll weep. O Fool! I shall go mad.
William Shakespeare, King Lear
I came back into the house and began to make bread as Guy had suggested. Now I was in tears. He would never eat this loaf with me. But measuring out the flour, mixing, and kneading the familiar dough, the routine of this, calmed me.After I’d wedged the bowl between the rafters above the woodstove so the dough would rise, I sat down at our table and opened the folder of notes Guy had given me that morning at breakfast. “Please don’t look at this until after I’m gone,” he’d said, adding, would I mind seeing that these letters reached their proper destinations among our family and friends?
“Of course,” I answered. He’d finished writing these the night before.
“Here’s the last three pages of ‘Prospero’s Options,’” he said.
“The ending.” I cracked a feeble joke, and he handed me the last pages of the memoir he’d started two winters earlier, all of which I had read except for this.
But first I read his note to me: “So much of my life fell short, but with you together we built something here, didn’t we?”
I sat at the table holding his note in my hands and felt a crushing sadness that Guy felt his life fell short. I knew he lived with regret, but to put it in his last words showed me how this regret had shadowed his life.
The second half of the sentence told me what our homesteading life of the past twenty-seven years had meant to him. As did his final words, “Thanks for showing me the greatest love I’ve ever known.”
Nearly thirty years earlier we had talked about how if our plan of living self-sufficiently on the land did not work, we could move back to the city. We had said this, but we had burned our bridges—we had left our jobs and packed up our belongings—and we both knew we weren’t going back. Just a few months before, Guy had told me that it was not in him to move to another kind of life. By then, I knew that. Here at the place Guy called Barra he had created a world apart.After a while it grew into the only world he could bear.
Before moving to Vermont, Guy Waterman had been a jazz pianist in Washington, D.C.,a political aide on Capitol Hill, and a corporate speechwriter in New York City. Diverse careers—or stabs at careers—that were mostly in his past before we met. On June 8, 1973, he stood in front of the General Electric headquarters at Fifty-second Street and Lexington Avenue with his fellow executives who’d just taken him out to a farewell lunch. “Gentlemen,” Guy announced, as he loosened his tie and stuffed it in his pocket, “I’m never coming back to Manhattan Island again.” He never did. He was forty-one.
From reading what he had left for me, I took the first unsteady steps that would lead me to a new perspective on our life, that is, the role I had played in my life with Guy. This began within hours of his leaving. It grew in me—a kind of awakening—as the days, then the weeks, months, even years went by. Guy’s dissatisfaction with his life filled him with a blackness he didn’t want to talk about. Small things could trigger it. Take building a set of shelves—something tricky that took two people working together. If it began to go awry, Guy would bear down, hammering harder with a set jaw. I could feel him draw into himself, and my “How can I help?” didn’t help. His hammer strokes pelted down like knockout blows crowding me backward as I held the saw, which dangled useless in my hand. As the years moved on, I avoided pushing him into conversations that made him unhappy and placed us at odds. I told myself that the decisions he made, even if they would not have worked for me, worked for him. After all, hadn’t this move to our land been a good idea? I had schooled myself not to question Guy’s choices, even when I did not understand them. So I raised no questions in his final decision to take his own life.
“I could keep going, Laura,” he said. “But I don’t want to let one day slide into another, then another and another, until I can’t climb a mountain anymore.”
“But,” I said, “at the beginning you had said you wanted to grow old with me.”
“I have,” he said.
To me sixty-seven wasn’t old.
Later I found that he had kept going far longer than I had ever imagined.
When I was cleaning out his cupboards in our bedroom about two weeks after he died, I found some pages torn out of a three-by-five-inch spiral-bound notepad. Eight years before, on April 13, 1992, Guy had begun a suicide note to me.
Dearest Laura,
I expect you may take this as a very selfish act. It is. I am getting out of a world which I find increasingly unbearable, but I leave you behind to cope by yourself, in a setting we designed for two. I am very very sorry.
But I don’t think you’ve found me a pleasure to be around lately. I hope that you may create a good life without me and then may look back on earlier, good times, things we created together, or enjoyed together, and maybe a few kindnesses I used to do for you once in a while. I think I’ve been hung up too long on wondering how you could get along without me. . . . I am going on the assumption that I was just getting worse and worse, and becoming a drag on your life. I’m not trying to say I do this for you—of course not, I do it for myself. I guess I’m just trying to justify why it’s probably as well for you once you work out a new life.
You have been wonderful to me, I know no one so constant to her loved ones, but the demons within have taken over. Barra was a wonderful dream, and we pulled it off, we made it work, we created something. Didn’t we? We also stood for something in this world, though others often articulated it better than we.
But, Laura, it’s just too hard. It’s just too sad. Everything fades, everything sours. Barra doesn’t, but I can’t shut out the rest of the world.
Please remember me from when I was kinder to you, in days now long gone, not the poisoned spirit I have become.
Please remember the good and forgive the bad.
This note wasn’t signed. As I stood in the bedroom and turned the pages, I found another note dated a few weeks later, May 2, 1992. This was written the day after Guy’s sixtieth birthday, and it read more like a meditation or stock-taking in a note to himself.
As I turn 60, it seems to me that life holds no further pleasure adequate to offset the disagreeableness. As of now, I would like to see the Spring’93 book projects to completion, because of the income which they will assure to Laura—and, admittedly, in hopes of seeing how they look when done. So it may be that after next sugar season—in late April ’93 —might be a good time to conclude.
The trick probably is to get thoroughly in mind that life holds no further interest; that physical ailments are beginning to accumulate to the point of being a significant determent to enjoying life; and that the pain of unavoidable conflicts and repressed hostilities will persist from now on, so that there is less pain to leaving life than to holding on to it. Oddly enough the chief attraction to remaining on earth for now is curiosity to do more baseball research and writing, and to continue with the elaborate fantasy baseball which has occupied my leisure hours for so many years now.
Otherwise, I’m quite prepared to accept 60 years as a sufficient lifetime; and my intermittent glories as piano player, politician, father, homesteader, and mountain environmental advocate and activist as concluded.
Was Guy trying to talk himself into taking his own life? This note read more like an account of debits and credits, even rationalization. There was so much distance between what he seemed to feel and words like “unavoidable conflicts and repressed hostilities.” I was not even sure what he meant by them.
Next followed a list of seventeen ailments, any one of which struck me as trivial—fallen arches, a nagging bowel complaint—but the accumulation, I knew, was overwhelming to Guy, who had a tendency to project worst-case scenarios.
The note continued with ideas (for me?) to include in the books we were currently working on, and it ended:
Having thought a great deal about setting up a Living Will has prompted an extension of that principle.
The Living Will essentially premises that each individual has a right to conclude life sooner rather than later, in situations where that makes sense.
Having turned 60, I’m at a point of recognizing that the remaining years are limited from now on anyway. So is not each individual entitled to make a decision to conclude life when that makes sense?
Before 60, to end one’s life may be viewed as destructive, or a failure to face and solve problems. But after 60, may a decision to conclude life not simply be a sensible option to take?
Why select the age of sixty? I found this note deeply disturbing. Down in the subbasement of my consciousness, which I was very far from reaching then, I felt the faint stirrings of anger at Guy—that he had had these thoughts and kept them so secret from me.
I was aware that Guy had felt “down” at the time of his sixtieth birthday, but I had no idea that he was looking for a way out of life. Around that time Guy suggested we join the Hemlock Society. We had both drawn up living wills. Guy had read Final Exit, the book the Hemlock Society offers about ways to end one’s life. He had talked then about how disagreeable death by hanging sounded, how messy shooting oneself would be, and how risky and difficult it seemed to acquire the medications needed to do the job properly. We had quite a conversation about this, but I never thought to ask him,“Are you thinking about suicide anytime soon?” I took his interest as an intellectual curiosity that he might think about turning into reality years down the pike. I didn’t read that book, though I had no argument with suicide as a way out if things become bad enough. But what I meant by “bad enough” was evidently very different from what it meant to Guy.
Spring had been Guy’s difficult season ever since he had received word of his son John’s death on Mount McKinley in April 1981.Guy’s birthday was May 1. In the years immediately following Johnny’s death, when Guy was sad on his birthday, I told myself that he was still in grief. But as time passed I began to feel resentment, even flashes of anger, that he could not forget about being sad and enjoy this special day. I myself loved birthdays! I anticipated giving him his presents at breakfast—a pair of mittens I had made, a book on baseball or on his beloved Milton’s Paradise Lost. While he was fetching water from the stream and checking the 7:00 a.m. temperatures, I had just time enough to scurry out and snip daffodils, the first blooms sure to open by May 1. If he walked into the cabin and didn’t look at me, his gifts sitting by his place, or at the vase of daffodils in the middle of the table glowing like little suns, well, I just swallowed my disappointment. Those daffodils had thrilled me. I wanted Guy to feel this too. Instead, he had suddenly sucked away the joy from this day. It made me both mad and sad—full of despair—since there seemed to be nothing I could do.And overriding all my anger was a great welling loving longing for him just to throw off this bad mood and be happy on his birthday.
Sometimes he was fine, taking delight in his presents, admiring the daffodils, and giving me a warm hug and a kiss before we sat down for breakfast. But as our years of married life piled up and Guy kept himself locked in a dark inner room to which I had no key and no hope of admittance, I trained myself to wait outside the door, doing other things, until he came out. I managed to ball all unpleasant feelings toward Guy into a dense and tiny wad that I kept stuffed deep down in a nest I made sure never to touch or even look at. This was how Guy was. To make being with him easier I taught myself to feel little at all, except sadness for what seemed to me to be his own overwhelming sadness.
“Please remember me from when I was kinder to you . . . ,” he had written in his April 13, 1992, note. Immediately I thought, Guy has never been anything but kind to me. I knew his low moods had caused a barrier between us, but I was willing to cut him endless slack because of my desire not to cause him pain. Wasn’t he in enough pain? Whenever I tried to get him to talk he turned away, his face acquiring a woebegone, withdrawn expression that made me sorry I’d said anything at all. He looked both vulnerable and sealed off—and sad in a way that always went right to my heart. His words “poisoned spirit I have become” leapt off the page. Was this how he saw himself? I hadn’t seen him as a “poisoned spirit.” I tried to imagine how he must have felt to turn those words upon himself.
He called his low moods his “demons.” He could have used the word “depression,” but that was the word he never mentioned, and neither did I. In fact, I knew Guy wasn’t depressed. He was always up at 4:15 a.m. and was known by all our friends for being amazingly productive. This didn’t fit my image of a depressed person, who I imagined had trouble getting out of bed and was too incapacitated to get much of anything done.
But his message, penned eight years before, began to crack open for me just how poisonous he felt to himself.As I stood in the bedroom, reading these notes in Guy’s neat ballpoint pen, I felt my own acute blindness. Yet, I told myself, he had kept the shades so firmly pulled and was so resistant to all my entreaties to raise them.
What would have happened to me if he had committed suicide back then? I thought. I would have been taken by complete surprise. I would have felt real anger. Betrayal. His suicide then would have called into question our entire marriage. Did he love me? It would appear that he did not, if he could walk out the door without a hint of good-bye. But though he did not take his life at sixty, this note written in 1992 told me that he had already turned toward death. He never asked for my help to change that. After Johnny’s death, I had asked him if talking to someone—I meant a psychiatrist—could help. No. No! He made it clear that talking to a professional wouldn’t help. In fact, Guy engaged sparingly with the medical world. When a doctor suggested invasive diagnostic tests for that troublesome bowel complaint, Guy decided he wasn’t going to go that route. He had told me many times how much he hated being poked at by doctors. I didn’t think this was cancer; he’d had it far too long. Then there were the sixteen other items, like knee and foot problems, that barely slowed him down. Now I see that even with only these minor physical ailments, Guy saw himself as losing control. And that was something he couldn’t bear—the last thing Guy Waterman was going to let happen.
I was glad he had waited those seven years. By 1999, even though he still chose death-by-suicide as a way out, at least I was prepared. More important, I knew what our marriage had meant to him.
Yet when I read these notes standing there in our bedroom, I was troubled by the contradictions. We did as much work at Barra during those seven years as ever before—we planted the same large garden, collected the same eight cords of firewood a year, made enough maple syrup to take us through the year. In the early nineties we began work on Twin Firs Camp, a log cabin for our guests. We felled and peeled softwoods. We limbed and sawed the trunks. We carried many together to the building site, and since by that time my knees were not in great shape, Guy did the bulk of that heavy lifting alone. Many of these trees came from far down in our woods and made a stiff uphill carry. Guy joked that this was his “workout,” telling me he was “going down to the weight room.” It seemed to me then that Guy made sixty look not half as old as it sounded. Despite the rocky crossing, I felt he had taken this turn into his seventh decade admirably, providing me, at fifty-two, with an excellent example of how to cope with this milestone of aging. It wasn’t until after he was gone that I understood that while he appeared to take sixty well on the outside, he took it harder on the inside than he was willing to show. I did see enough, however, to tell a friend who had expressed concern about Guy’s melancholy—something few picked up on—that I did not think he would make seventy.
After Guy had died, another friend asked why I had not sought help myself. It would have been difficult, I explained, because of the work demands at our homestead. It would have cost money we didn’t have. She looked at me in a way that let me know my reasons sounded like excuses. “I never thought of it,” I said. Why not? she asked. Months later I answered that question.“I was living in Guy’s world,” I finally said.“If he couldn’t ask for help, neither could I .”
When Guy was gone, his friend Tom Simon told me of a baseball game Guy had played in his head using actual teams and players with the action somehow triggered by lines or words from Milton’s Paradise Lost. Tom said that Guy had a game going at all times and kept a box score on an index card he carried in his breast pocket. He had begun with the 1880s and was working his way forward. He told Tom about it on a weekend visit to Barra in early December 1999, when I was away visiting friends in New York.
“Why didn’t Guy tell me about this game?” I asked Tom. Why hadn’t he said a word to me about the thing that was so important to him: Milton! Baseball!!
Tom replied, “Well, he told me he didn’t want you to feel he might be thinking about something else when you were talking to him.”
“What?” I said. “Guy frequently seemed preoccupied when we were talking. I could always tell when his mind moved on to something else, sometimes when I was in midsentence.” It made me feel shut out when that happened, a feeling I learned to just “get over,” like jumping over a branch in the woods and getting your legs whipped. It stings, and the sting fades slowly.
Yet Tom was saying it had been important to Guy that I feel I had his full attention. I felt I would rather have known about his game, even if he had said,“I can’t listen to you right now. I’m playing my game.”
But I never said, “You’re not listening to me.” I thought it, but I never said it.
By the time Tom told me this, I had found Guy’s note written in the spring of 1992, where he’d said he wanted to see how the fantasy baseball he’d played in his head for many years turned out. Now I understood. I asked Tom if he thought Guy had completed his game. Tom said, probably not. He believed Guy had gone through fifty years of games and was up to the 1930s.
I had known for a long time that Guy sought refuge in numbers. His research notes for his baseball articles showed long columns of players’ names written in pen, small and close together, each with a number beside it. “Baseball had been, for me,” he wrote once, “a world apart, a sanctuary where I constantly found excitement and interest unalloyed by petty negatives.” Now it jumped out at me how he used baseball—the statistics—to occupy his mind so as to hold at bay all the dark disturbing thoughts.
We were so much together—the work, the writing, the climbs—that it didn’t surprise me that Guy needed a spot that was wholly his. But I think this game went far beyond that. I believe it had to do with his own pain. The pain he wasn’t talking about. He needed a sunny island, a sanctuary he could sail off to that was as safe as the surrounding ocean was dangerous, chaotic, and tempest-tossed.And he needed to keep it hidden to the same degree he kept hidden the dark painful place.
What I kept hidden from Guy was how much he hurt me by not talking. When Tom told me about Guy’s game, my thought was: He kept that hidden? It seemed so unimportant in comparison to the deeper thing he wouldn’t talk about. I remembered his telling me he tried to drive out bad thoughts by deliberately inserting a pleasant thought. I remembered his humming or whistling through his teeth. I could track him around the garden, even the woods, reassuring myself he must be in a good mood if he was whistling. But once he told me, “Just because I hum or whistle doesn’t mean I’m feeling good.” I couldn’t make myself believe that. How can he feel bad and hum at the same time? I wondered. Well, I guess he could if he was using humming to block out terrible thoughts.
And I remembered the quotation Guy had taken from Melville’s Moby-Dick for the calendar he made for Barra:“For as this appalling ocean surrounds the verdant land, so in the soul of man there lies one insular Tahiti, full of peace and joy, but encompassed by all the horrors of the half-known life. God keep thee! Push not off from that isle, thou cans’t never return.”
Baseball and Milton, humming and whistling, gave Guy his “insular Tahiti.”
What was mine? I didn’t have an “insular Tahiti” in the sense Guy did. I didn’t have to block out terrible thoughts. My down moods were precipitated by Guy’s and at their worst left me feeling angry at Guy because he wouldn’t talk. I handled this by losing (or finding) myself in the work of our homestead, often sawing wood or weeding or doing other garden jobs that were productive and physical. One afternoon as I walked back into the woodshed, where Guy was splitting wood, he said, “I always know when my moods affect you, Laura. I see you working so hard in the garden. It makes me want to work harder too.”
At the time I wondered what Guy meant. As I see it now, he was saying it was through our mutual hard work that we could come together. I needed to be in accord with Guy, and he needed to be in accord with me. It was through the hard physical work at Barra that we found each other in the comfortable spot in the sunlight.
When I decided to write this book I thought it was going to be about my life with Guy, the two of us working side by side as homesteaders on the land. The story would be about the practical aspects of how we lived. From that first summer in 1973, visitors had said,“You should write about this,” even though we had yet to endure our first Vermont winter. We had nothing yet to say. Our house was not built, nor were any of our outbuildings. Our garden was still a hillside clearing grown up to blackberries, juniper, and a few scrubby white pines. We had planted no blueberry bushes, no strawberries, no raspberries, no fruit trees. No asparagus bed, no rhubarb patch. Our woodlot was full of down and dead trees, unharvested. We had not built our sugar shed, and we had yet to tap a single maple.
Over the years we had talked about writing such a book and had always decided against it. Barra was our private life, we told ourselves. Writing a book about it would open us up to hordes of visitors, as had happened to Helen and Scott Nearing, homesteading gurus who welcomed hundreds of visitors a year to their land on the coast of Maine. We weren’t looking to be spokespeople in this way. The mountains—the issues related to them—that was our public life, and that was what we wrote about.
Shortly before Guy died, I mentioned that I might write about how we had lived at Barra.
“I hope you’ll do that, Laura.” The way he said this made me feel he actually wanted me to. But even then I knew I would have to tell the whole story, not just how we planted the beans, but how it ended.
After Guy died and I began working on the manuscript, I began telling friends who asked that I was writing a book about our life at Barra and “how I let Guy go.” In an effort to state the theme, I wrote my friend Alice Tufel: “It’s the story of a woman trying to discover what happened to her.... I think that by understanding what happened to me, I’ll be able to more fully continue on.”
Alice fired back: “Those words interested (and surprised) me because they imply passivity or victimization (for lack of a better word) on your part—and that is so contrary to the way I see you!” Alice let me off the hook by adding, “It just doesn’t seem to me that something ‘happened to you’ so much as it happened to Guy (since he was both victim and perpetrator)—and, as his life partner, you were necessarily there when it did.”
But Alice’s words “passivity or victimization” had hit their mark, and I squirmed, even as I did my best to fend them off.
Finally I showed a draft to my friend Annie Barry, who said, “Laura, you have to pull apart the ‘we.’” What did I think? she asked me. “The way you use ‘we,’ it means Guy,” she pointed out. “Surely your thoughts were not always identical. You’re two different people,” Annie insisted.
True. But I persisted in thinking that my thoughts were identical with Guy’s, and that Annie couldn’t see this because, well, how could even a good friend see into my marriage?
But Annie had proposed a writing problem, and I got interested in this notion of examining the “we.” It seemed to go along with the part about finding out “what happened to me.”
So I went through the manuscript, and every time I came across a “we” —and there were, it seemed, thousands—I asked myself: What was I thinking here? What was my reaction? Picking apart the “we” was surprisingly difficult.
“When I ask you a question, Laura,” Annie had said, “you say, ‘I don’t know.’” Bringing to the surface what I did know—all buried fathoms deep—became my focus. The whole book changed as I began to write myself out of a life enmeshed in the “we” and into a frame of mind that allowed me to go digging for the thoughts I’d kept hidden not just from Guy but from myself. As I rewrote I could finally ask: How could I support my beloved husband in his plan to commit suicide? How did that happen? I could now write the word suicide. Before, I could only express what Guy had done by saying (or writing), “Guy had left,” or, “Guy had walked out the door.” When I reached this point the entire piece began to unravel—faster and faster—and I was left with an ungainly skein of words piled up around my typewriter. When I began to cast on again, I came to see this was the story of my own awakening. The whole process was terrifying, exhilarating, and profoundly liberating.
When I first began writing, I had posted a quotation from Joyce Carol Oates near my desk that read: “All memories are finally about loss. We don’t write of the past except when we’ve been ejected from it. The only way back is through memory, haphazard and unreliable as we know it to be, and the only means by which memory is realized is through language.” As I began the process of digging for my own submerged feelings attached to these memories, Oates’s words took on more and more meaning.
Right from the beginning I fell into a routine of listening to music before I began work. Every morning I put on my old operas, recordings I’d brought with me from New York that had sat unplayed under the piano at Barra for nearly thirty years. So much of my life with Guy had taken place below the surface, at a deep emotional level that I found very hard to tease apart: it was difficult to separate what I instinctively shied away from, because of the pain, from what I had convinced myself was how I should be reacting toward Guy in difficult emotional situations. After I began playing one or two records over and over, I realized I was using the emotion in the voices to get in touch with my own emotions. In particular, I was playing a Maria Callas recording of Bellini’s Norma. Callas was well along in her career. Her voice sounded frayed and was often harsh and wavery. The tenor, Franco Corelli, was young, his animalistic sound blazing and whole. The contrast was heartbreaking to me. But I saw that the impairment of Callas’s voice only drove her deeper. This great singer knew her voice was wearing away, but this only impelled her to plunge into her own rich storehouse of emotion. I was greatly moved by Callas, by her fearlessness. I took to heart that she was more willing than ever to lay bare the core of human emotions by reaching into her own.
And I learned that my story was a love story—an over-the-top love story. In my life with Guy I had loved blindly, plunging wholeheartedly into this irrational, joyous, painful, perplexing territory we call love. I had taken love to extremes.