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of wine and then looked up to compare notes.
    “What month am I?” he asked.
    “Early May,” I said. “And me?”
    “September,” he replied unequivocally. “You are very September.”
    A little bit of wine went a long way with Richard. We carried on.
    “What kind of fish am I?” he asked.
    “A rainbow trout,” I said.
    He nodded in approval.
    “And me?” I asked. I imagined an exotic reef fish, or a salmon fighting its way upstream.
    “An anchovy,” he said with a smirk.
    “I hate anchovies,” I replied. He knew this.
    “Yes, but I love them.” He smiled sweetly.
    “It’s not fair. I made you a rainbow trout.”
    He laughed and said, “But I am a rainbow trout.”
    And he was, of course.
    Deciding on a tree was easy. He was a weeping cherry: graceful and gentle, complexly branched. I was an aspen, he said: tall, resilient, and “seasonally ablaze.”
    It all made great sense at the time, in the context of dinner and wine and laughter. And I think still, when I can think of it, that Richard was early May, a rainbow trout, and a weeping cherry.

L ILACS AND A R OMAN R ING
    Richard and I got married in the autumn of 1994, midway between our meeting and his dying. After a short but surpassingly happy honeymoon in Venice and Rome, we returned to Washington, Richard to his science and me to revising a book that was to be published in a year’s time. The honeymoon, insofar as it signaled a time away from the concerns of the world, was over. The book I had written, an explicit account of my manic-depressive illness, guaranteed this.
    Richard was unambiguous that I should write about my bipolar illness. Of course there would be consequences, he said. Some would be obvious and others would not. My disclosures would make me an easy target of criticism and would no doubt be of some embarrassment to him. The book might be a critical and financial failure. Still, he said, it was the right thing to do. People who suffered from mental illnesses, and their families, needed every voice they could get. As a scientist who studied schizophrenia, a long-time mental health advocate, and a doctor who treated severely ill patients, he knew, as much as anyone could, the need for public discussion. At a more personal level, he was the husband of someone with manic-depressive illness and had seen its damage firsthand. He also had seen how I and others had been hurt by discriminatory policies and shaken by unkind, if inadvertent, remarks made by our colleagues in private practice and in academic medicine.
    He made it clear that he would do whatever was necessary to provide emotional and financial support. The former was critical, the latter not inconsequential. I had been financially independent since leaving high school and had worked my way through college and graduate school. Later I had worked absurdly long hours to pay off my student loans and medical bills, as well as to retire the colossal debts incurred during my free-spending days of mania. I was used to being independent. I did not want to rely upon Richard financially, but, given the alternative, I was grateful for his offer. He believed, and made me believe, that love would see us through, that we were doing the right thing and doing it together. I would not have written An Unquiet Mind without Richard’s encouragement to tell the truth of my life. To the extent that others may have been helped by that, it is to him that a debt is owed.
    The decision to write about my illness had been difficult. I am a clinical psychologist who holds licenses to practice in California and in the District of Columbia, and I had privileges at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. I am someone who studies and writes about the illness I have, and I knew that as a result of my disclosure my work would be subject to questions of objectivity by my colleagues. The deeply personal nature of my book would require that I give up my clinical practice, at least for the foreseeable future. The professional