by Mark Doty
It is strange now to write this—after eight weeks—with the kind of odd detachment that language can lend us. It’s as if I am watching myself—not in the plain light of film or the factual journalistic one of videotape, but as if through some kind of antique instrument, one which preserves the luster of the moment, the beauty of its peculiar light. Which seems to me now like the light of Dutch still life: rainy, northern, gentle, interior light that has itself a kind of resonance and presence. The instrument through which I look at that night (curious now that it seems instead like a deep winter afternoon, a snow-locked day at the very heart of winter, far inside the body of time) holds me at enough of a distance that I can describe what I see, that I can bear to look and to render, and yet it preserves the intimacy of those hours. That quality, their intimacy, is perhaps more firmly unassailable than any feeling I’ve ever known. I have never felt so far inside my life, and Wally’s.
A week after he died, a book displayed in a shop window stopped me in my tracks on the sidewalk. It was a volume of reproductions of Michelangelo, and on the cover was a nude man, a figure from the Sistine ceiling, his eyes closed, his fine malleable flesh a kind of ash gray, the gray-white of porcelain clay. Looming behind the surface of his skin, especially in his face, were other colors; a blue like the hinge of a mussel shell, a coppery green. I felt as if I were seeing Wally there, the dead body held up for us to contemplate. The body dead is, in a way, our world’s great secret. We see always flesh in motion, animated, disguised beneath its clothing and uniforms, its signals and armatures, its armor of codes and purposes. When do we look at the plain nude fact of the lifeless figure? Pure purposelessness—and thus, in the absence of the spirit, strangely and completely present. Never having a chance to see it, to assimilate our horror of it and go on to actually look, how would we know that the lifeless body is beautiful?
And empty. As empty as these spaces where a seal’s eyes were, which contain now a little March sunlight, and wind off the surface of the marshy harbor, and the fluid music of shifting bird-cries counterpointing the regular exhalation of the foghorn. Which seems to be warning us, this clear day, for no earthly reason.
Wally’s body was the vehicle through which I knew him. All other knowledges proceed through the body, after it, as it were. His was a wonderful vehicle, a beloved one, but it was not him. This fact seems so strange to me, so heavily laden, a deep vein of the incomprehensible. I find myself repeating it, trying to formulate it: we are not our bodies. The body is not me. I am my body, but I extend beyond it; just as my attention laps out, as my identity can pour out into the day. I have learned more about this, living beside water; as if the very fluidity of the landscape gets inside us, and encourages our own ability to slip our fixed bounds and feel ourselves as extended, multiple, various. Walking the shore, a warm day in March, toward that huge headland of cloud hung above and ahead, one pure white cliff above the dunelands, I become, momentarily, cloud, running dog, the raddled sonics of gull and wind and breaking wave. The wave seems a separate thing, yet it’s a product, an effect, of that which is waving; gone into my elements, I am equally fluid.
The plainness of the poor abandoned body became more plain to me when I encountered Wally’s ashes. The week after his death, while I anticipated receiving them, I imagined the relationship I might have to them. It had been terrible, to let the body be taken; had I not been so certain that it was not him I couldn’t have done it at all, I could never have allowed it. But even though it was only his body (only! as if that were some minor thing) I couldn’t allow him to go naked, without something of home, so I sent with him a quilt I’d made for him, years ago, a red and white geometry splashed with starlike red leaves. I am not much of a quilt-maker; my clumsy stitches were done in honor of my quilting grandmother. First I’d thought it would be a November birthday gift, then Christmas—and then eventually the thing spread across my lap and legs kept me warm all winter and into a Vermont spring while I worked on it. The stitches were rough but they were mine, every one of them. His body left wrapped in it. I didn’t watch. I took the dogs down to the harbor, beneath a great wheeling starry void, the air so cold and sharp and still it seemed it might crack.
The next day I had to sign papers at the funeral home, and I began to look at different sorts of urns and vessels (everything made for this purpose seemed obscene, or banal, or at least achingly and inappropriately bland). And I began to think what it would be like to receive the ashes, the commingled evidence of body and of fabric. Which did not come and did not come; the day before the service, a week from the night of his death, the funeral director told me the ashes might not arrive, that they were “somewhere between Brockton and the post office.” I wasn’t very understanding; I told him I wanted him to know how much it meant to me for the ashes to be at the ceremony. I told him I expected that, and after a hesitation he said he’d have them there. “You understand,” I said, “how much it means to me.” I wasn’t sure he did; my statement was an imperative, as though if I ordered him to recognize the magnitude of my need, he would.
In fact, the package arrived at the post office on Saturday morning, and the man from the funeral home arrived in my kitchen at ten-thirty, where a host of friends were getting ready for the day. I went by myself into the bedroom, the room where Wally died, with the plastic box and a kitchen knife to break the sealing tape. I sat with the thing on my lap, cut the binding, and slid the brown polymer coffer—coffin?—open. Sealed there in a plastic bag, strangely cold from its journey through the mails, were the remains of my darling: little pearled bits of gravel, almost like ground clay. There was a moment of piercing, utterly abject grief—this is what is left—and I swear it was followed, in less than a minute, by the clearest sense that what I held was inert, only a material, not even alive in the way that clay or soil is. If it was clear that Wally’s body wasn’t him, then it was even more clear that this sack of—what to call it? stone?—was even less so. The funeral directors have a word for this stuff, one of those deeply debased late twentieth-century words which do disservice to what they name, or rather what they avoid. “Cremains,” they call it. It makes me shudder, aesthetically, still, but I admit I understand better the impulse. They may want language to serve to distance us (or them) from the fact of the body’s burned residue, but the plain fact is that there is about the material itself a kind of distance, a lack of relation to what it was.
In the ancient epic of Gilgamesh, the oldest poem in the world, there is a heartbreaking declaration of a beloved’s death: “The companion Enkidu is clay.” A beautiful and bitter irony, since the poem which preserves the love of Gilgamesh and Enkidu is itself inscribed on tablets of clay. But clay has so much more soul and presence, such a quality of heaviness and sorrow to it, such a definite scent and taste. In that same poem, clay is described as the food of the unmourned dead; its heaviness and moisture perfectly evoke the humor of grief. But ashes have a kind of anonymity, a quality of no-life which feels, at last, vacant, without essence.
So I wrapped the stuff in a silk Japanese kerchief and placed it in the brass box I’d bought. Which I carried, that afternoon, to the service, and which I think only a few people noticed anyway, in the rush and swell of the speaking and the music, the spinning intensity of the day.
I had thought that the ashes would somehow be the service’s center of gravity; the place where everything deepened, opening into the darkness of grief. But it wasn’t like that; they seemed a sort of afterthought, an extra. When people asked, before that day, what I was going to do with them, I said I’d let them go eventually, scattering them, but in truth I couldn’t really imagine it, couldn’t think I’d ever really be ready. But once I encountered the lifeless sack of what once carried his life, I could think of dispersing them—thought, in fact, that perhaps then they’d be more alive, mingled again with water, soil, and stone, the rising yeasts of the world. They are going, this spring, out to Hatch’s Harbor, where my seal lies, a body resolving even
as I write into thousands of things which are not the body—entering into gull and tide and the unseeable tiny lives inside the sand.
I lay my hand on the seal’s back. The spring sun has warmed the fur, which catches the light. I want to caress it; I want to lie down beside it. I am stopped by some nagging sense of what is clean and sanitary (voices from elementary school in my head, I guess, about touching dead animals), and perhaps more by some sense of propriety, of the dignity and unapproachability of the dead. It would not be right to pretend we could approach their bodies, that we could hold them. I held Wally’s body for a long time, and I could feel as I did, as I let my hands know him for the last time, that the body was moving away from me, sinking into itself. Perhaps that is one thing the soul is: our outward attention, the energy and force in us that leaps out of the self, almost literally, into the life of the world. The spirit is that in us which participates. It moves alone, like air or fire, and it moves with the body, lifting the body’s earth and water into gesture and connection, into love.
Without spirit, the body closes back into itself like an old piece of furniture, an armoire whose ancient wood is still fragrant, resinous, whose whorled grains and steady sleep refer back to the living tree. The cabinet is an elegy to the tree from which it arose, the body a brief unkeepable elegy to the quick and shining self.
Is the body a shell?
A few days ago, on the dogs’ morning walk along the harbor—when I am mostly not awake—I picked up a green crab’s shell. Or a portion of one; the legs were gone. The body contained within the central carapace had become a sweetmeat for a gull. What was left was this patinated green husk about the size of a soda cracker, a tiny breastplate. It resembled, in fact, something retrieved from a sunken Greek or Roman ship, lost armor pulled from preservative Mediterranean brine.
The reason I put the shell in my pocket was the color of the interior, a startling Giotto blue, a sky from heaven or Arizona rinsed and shining. At home I left the fragment on top of the refrigerator; by afternoon the blue had faded to a kind of milky lacquer, a faintly skyey mother-of-pearl. By the next day it was a pale, iridescent opal. A lovely color, but far in power and register from that initial cerulean. Imagine living surrounded by that blue, bearing in one’s own body the most brilliant wash of the summer firmament.
What color is the underside of our skin?
The fragment made me think of Rilke’s archaic torso of Apollo, whose head “we cannot know” since it’s long since gone; in the power and presence of the fragment a whole sense of spiritual life arises. Broken, the god speaks to us more clearly.
This morning I picked up a second crab. I do not know why this one died; there is no visible sign of damage. It is about the same size as the first. But this one’s intact, centered on a white saucer on my desk. Are crabs subject to rigor mortis? If so, this one has only left the world just a little while ago. Move him in any way and the legs shift into a pleasing, vaguely Chinese pattern, the weight of the—torso, is it?—balanced by the two larger claws which reiterate, even in death, their message of menace and power.
It smells of seaweed and ruin.
I will not open this shell; I am less squeamish now about the tumbled mess of the flesh, but I’m no scientist. Yet there is something I love about placing this body next to the fragment of shell whose dry lavender interior reminds me of what was there: even in the smallest chamber, a sky.
Seal Coda
I’d made the seals into metaphor, made them my seals. Somehow I thought that because I had given form to my experience and thus, in a way, let go of it, I wouldn’t be confronted with the lifeless body again. Arrogance! Writers try to make the world into themselves, and then when they return to the outer life they expect to have changed it.
But there, half-covered by sand, lay another seal, also already eyeless. Make all the meaning you want, Death says, shape it how you will. Open the limits of your thinking or feeling, make room for me, accommodate how you will, nothing touches the plain truth of me.
Hold your grief, release it, come to terms or don’t—nothing touches the fact of the lifeless body.
A week later, walking the same stretch of marsh and harbor, I began to imagine what it would be like to scatter Wally’s ashes there, in that shining expanse, or in the higher wind-harried space of dunes around the gleaming lighthouse. I cried harder than I had for weeks, thinking of letting go this portion of the evidence of him. Whatever I think ashes are, the notion of flinging them into the blue and white emptiness of that place made me weep all the way from the depths of myself, sobbing from the bottom of my lungs, from some place inside the body light never reaches.
And out on the shore that day, the seals were swimming—the first I’d seen alive and unthreatened for weeks, and the last I would see that season. They were watching me and the dogs, floating there in their untouchable pack, beautiful faces looking back at me from the other world, which I was not allowed to reach.
115 Beacon Street
Being in grief, it turns out, is not unlike being in love.
In both states, the imagination’s entirely occupied with one person. The beloved dwells at the heart of the world, and becomes a Rome: the roads of feeling all lead to him, all proceed from him. Everything that touches us seems to relate back to that center; there is no other emotional life, no place outside the universe of feeling centered on its pivotal figure.
And in grief, as in love, we’re porous, permeable. There is something contagious about this openness. Other people sense it and respond to us differently, since our unguardedness seems to invite them in.
I went back to Boston for a day, a few weeks after Wally died. The reasons for this trip weren’t entirely clear to me when I decided to go. I knew I wanted to walk around the old neighborhood, where we first lived together, and I thought perhaps I’d take some pictures.
In grief and in love—so allied, perhaps, as to be severe gradations of one state?—the places and things associated with the beloved take on a shine, a numinosity which radiates out all the energy, the depth of emotion and meaning with which they have been invested.
It wasn’t as if we hadn’t been back often, since the years in the early eighties when we lived together and apart in a neighborhood of brownstones and brick rowhouses, iron fences, and lampposts and April’s splendid flowering trees. After we moved to the suburbs south of Boston together we’d gone into the city constantly, for real life; after we moved to Vermont we’d come back often for a badly needed dose of urbanity, acceptance, and style. But in those days it wasn’t as if we were returning for our past; our visits had more to do with the present, with dipping into the city we could enjoy now, then hurrying home, glad we didn’t live there anymore, in the speed and abrasion of it.
Our trips back to the city, the last few years, had been trips to the hospital, for appointments with the doctor who was supposed to be more knowledgeable than anyone in Provincetown; the medical care in Boston had a reputation for being cutting-edge, and all the technical arsenal of the industry—MRIs, CAT scans, electronic and nuclear wonders—were located in the city’s cluster of hospitals. These regular visits were maddening, in their blandness and lack of news or insight or even good human commiseration. Each time was the same: we reported symptoms, the doctor wrote them down, said something equivocal. We’d combine these unsatisfying episodes with some shopping, with dinner and a walk. But it seemed, quickly, too tiring to do anything but drive into the hospital parking garage, get to the appointment, and get home again so Wally could go back to his couch, or, later, to bed. And then there were months we no longer bothered to go, since the travel seemed a needless undertaking, an investment of energy Wally didn’t have, pain and aggravation caused for no good reason. We’d see our local doctor, and he could talk to the high-powered experts on the phone.
So it had been a long time since I had walked through the original neighborhood of our union. Perhaps, before Wally died, it wouldn’t have been possible to return in
quite this way. Coming to the end of a novel pushes our attention back to the earliest chapters. We think back through where our characters have been, reexamine their experience in order to see its shape. As a life continues, we can’t know what turns and surprises its narrative will take; we can’t know what we’ll be able to see in the new lights the future will provide.
Death requires a new negotiation with memory. Because the story of Wally’s life came to a conclusion, at least those parts of the story in which he would take an active role, the experiences of our past needed to be re-seen, re-viewed. Not exactly for his story to be finished, but in service of the way his life would continue in me, braided with the story of mine. Which is going on, at this moment, on the Red Line, intermingling with the unreadable narratives of my fellow travelers passing through neighborhoods of dull-colored three-deckers into the city center. This is the train, I remember en route, Wally used to take home from work, when we were first together and he worked doing displays for a department store in Quincy, on the South Shore. And then I know where I’m going first, to the Charles Street Station, which is where I used to come to meet him, sometimes, in our first months together.
After the deep tunnels of downtown, the train rumbles up into daylight as it approaches the river, the elevated track passing a strange, narrow brownstone apartment I used to love to daydream about whenever I passed it. What it would be like to live there, days and nights threaded by trains? I think Wally told me he’d looked at an apartment once in that skinny Victorian tower, and considered taking it until—luckily—the train came thundering along just outside the windows, a scheduled thunder to drive any resident mad. Then the doors open on the platform and I’m out and onto the concrete footbridge, and there are the metal stairs down to Charles, the handsome and gentrified street along the foot of Beacon Hill. Suddenly I am feeling Wally’s body descending them, maybe a bit weary after the long day, the crowded train ride home, but glad to see me anyway. I’m in him, a dozen years ago, and I am in myself, on an almost forgotten day when I am leaning against the fence by the sidewalk, dressed up to meet him in—what? overalls, I think, and a scarf and a black umbrella, something a bit too self-conscious, done-up to meet my new lover as he comes home. And I’m in my body, not my twenty-eight-year-old body but my forty-year-old self, watching us both. Fluidity doesn’t seem quite the right word for what time does; if experience were a film, it would be one that doubles back on itself, looping, superimposing, one moment coming to stand beside another, layered over it, though they’re years apart.
