Reader Comment, May 2009
Laura Waterman’s gem, a memoir of her marriage to Guy Waterman, reminds me of the painting of Vermeer. Her exquisite, understated prose conceals as much as it reveals in its simplicity. It’s not a modern tell-all core dump. We don’t hear about the underside of marriage: sex, personal hygiene, quarrels. This is instead a beautiful and heart-felt portrait of a lost love.
The Guy Waterman Laura describes in her biographical sketch was a well-educated and highly accomplished man. He lived with at least four diagnosable psychiatric conditions and had made a mess of his first marriage and fatherhood. Yet he continued on, with the support of Laura’s unconditional love, until he could bear life no longer. After making sure Laura was financially secure, he died on his own schedule and his own fashion.
Disturbed he was, yet what astonishing creativity and productivity along the way! Aside from his writing on the outdoors, which continue to be influential, among many other things he for years played a game of baseball in his head based on “Milton’s Paradise Lost.” This reminds me of the story in Robert Lindner’s “The 50-minute Hour” called “The Rocket-propelled Couch”, in which the patient (rumored to have been Robert Oppenheimer while working on the Manhattan Project) builds an imaginary universe so fascinating in its workings that the analyst takes it over and thereby cures the patient. It’s great tragedy that Waterman’s experience with psychiatry, as described by Laura, was so aversive.
The Watermans attempted to live according to the 19th century romantics. Wordsworth would have approved of their naming the trees at Barra. Their life was simplified, pared to the bare essentials. Every half-hour of every day was scheduled, though Laura describes never feeling rushed. but it was organized to be maximally productive, a necessity if they were to make their mode of living work. And the things scheduled were fine things: reading, writing, music, and the chores of 19th century living: baking, wood-cutting, gardening, syruping. Their amusements were 19th century amusements: reading aloud, writing letters, playing the piano.
The Waterman lived out their dream at Barra of life as they thought it ought to be lived. They might be accused of a lack of seriousness, and indeed much of Guy’s activity – counting blueberries, baseball to Milton, climbing the peaks of the White Mountains from the four points of the compass in all weathers – can only be described as useless activity – in a word, play. Yet it is play of such a high order as to transcend ordinary life and perhaps touch the eternal. Guy is reported to have told someone that the only time he ever felt good was above timberline in a snowstorm. Perhaps in his last frozen moments on Mt. Lafayette he found the peace that had eluded him for so many years.
What about Laura? She had her own burdens to live with, and did better with them than most. About her marriage we learn only that love is its own justification. And that’s all we need to know.
The book Losing the Garden is definitely worth reading. From the first page to the last, two questions emerge. How would Laura let her husband kill himself? What would have happened if Laura had acted differently during the two years she knew her husband was going to commit suicide? Laura could have ruined her marriage, alienated her husband, and he would have killed himself anyway, or she could have saved his life. We don’t judge her, but as a mental health professionals we think we should be able to prevent suicide. Even though we know the ending. Laura makes the story compelling, and we compulsively read a pageturner we can’t put down.
Guy Waterman’s bright, talented man who had been a jazz pianist, a political aide on Capitol Hill, and a corporate speech writer in New York City. He and his second wife, Laura, take up a large successful but extreme form of homesteading in Vermont for 27 years before Guy kills himself. He probably has bipolar disorder. Guy and Laura are bound by their love of climbing and books. Homesteading is a way out. It is the 1970s, “at the height of the back-to-the-land movement.” They have a full, if somewhat unusual, life. But would you want to live without running water and have to go to the outhouse when it is 20 below?
In the beginning, the pain is so unendurable. but as we go on, we get used to it, like Laura does. It’s so compelling because it’s so human. Who hasn’t been down-and-out or hard on themselves? We all have a little craziness inside us. This is what makes our work so interesting.
We read this book with some degree of dissociation, splitting, or doubling. We read it as clinicians but also as human beings. Laura makes the tale so accessible. But we can’t stop being clinicians.
What is unique about this account is the public, shared experience of suicide. Most suicide is lonely and private and shared only by what the dead one leaves behind. For two years Guy and Laura live with this knowledge until the very last moment.
The book has much more. Guy believes that if you could turn your grownup work into the kind of play you enjoy as a child you could make a satisfying life. And to some extent he does. The book is about climbing, humor, invention, creativity, world history, opera, and classical literature-especially 19th century. It’s also a classic case history set against a background of bad experiences with 1950s psychiatry and stigma about mental illness. The story becomes repetitive, but I did not find it boring.
Losing the Garden could be a movie. Though she glamourizes and romanticizes her experiences, Laura generously shares her life at Barra with us so we can get a vicarious thrill, as if we are there. I doubt anyone can read this memoir purely as a clinician.