by Mark Doty
Sorrow feels right, for now. Sorrow seems large and inhabitable, an interior season whose vaulted sky’s a suitable match for the gray and white tumult arched over these headlands. A sorrow is not to be gotten over or moved through in quite the way that sadness is, yet sorrow is also not as frozen and monochromatic, to my mind, as mourning. Sadness exists inside my sorrow, but it’s not as large as sorrow’s realm; it comes and goes without really touching the overarching whole. This sorrow is capacious; there’s room inside it for the everyday, for going about the workaday stuff of life. And for loveliness, for whatever we’re to be given by the daily walk.
And we are always given something, it seems, since these walks provide exactly the balance which the dogs (and I) seem to prefer—enough of the familiar, so we don’t have to think about it too much, and enough of novelty, so that something to occupy our attention is always appearing, something we haven’t thought enough about yet. Sometimes, of course, what satisfies the dogs’ needs is not what engages my attention, but a good deal of the time we seem to agree on what is interesting. Motion, strangeness, novelty of scent, the presence of an unfamiliar creature, open space in which to range freely—to these both our species respond. Beauty, of course, does not appear on the dog’s register of values, as far as I know, though a number of other qualities we could consider abstract, such as affection, loyalty, tenacity, curiosity, cunning, exasperation, patience, and longing certainly do. Dogs have a moral sense, but I am not sure they have an aesthetic one.
Loveliness, even in these months of living in sorrow, compels me. Once Wally and I met an elderly man who had lost his wife to Alzheimer’s; he was not a widower, yet, but the woman that he’d loved was, in essence, gone. She’d studied piano, he told us, with a pupil of—Paderewski, was it?—and taught generations of children herself. She lived now in the town nursing home, adjacent to the cemetery. Her needs were such that he could not care for her. Her sense of memory and meaning, and then of language, had dissolved into a hopelessly confused, continuous present, a nightmare fog of not-knowing. He stayed on, in their ancient house, giving tours, which was how we met him. For a couple of dollars, he’d bring you into his low-slung, chimney-anchored house, a perfect full Cape, circa 1745, its twelve-over-twelve windows opening onto exquisitely plain little rooms. Because he’d grown tired, over the years, of repeating the tour, he’d play a tape he’d made explaining the history of the house. But he’d not lost his love for narration, either, so he’d sit poised beside the reel-to-reel and, after a bit of recorded rap, he’d shut off the machine and tell us about himself, and his wife, and their forty years together inhabiting this comfortable museum. We sat side by side on the sofa, enthralled. The history of the house had become, it seemed, inextricable from his history. When it was time to go, the tape completed, our curiosity about every room satisfied, I complimented him on the beauty of the house, what a rich and evocative surrounding he’d found and made for himself.
“Yes,” he said, “but as the poet said—Rossetti, it was—you know Rossetti?”
“Dante Gabriel?”
He nodded. “He said, ‘Beauty without the beloved is like a sword through the heart.’” I felt then as if he saw into our story, its coming unraveling.
But his experience hasn’t been mine, exactly. There is something about the glories of the world which makes me feel, in some way I’m hard-pressed to articulate, closer to Wally. The heart’s pierced, maybe, but that penetration’s a connection to what is larger than us, more ongoing. Perhaps, in encountering beauty alone, with my two unimpressed companions, I reconnect to what Wally and I used to experience together, which contains something of us still.
So yesterday, when I watched a finback whale feeding off Race Point where the sea-bottom declines steeply from the beach, so that the whales can come near enough to shore for one not only to see them, but sometimes to hear the soft wet puhhh of their exhalations, I was happy not only for myself but somehow also happy for Wally. Because he is in a place without limit now, of a piece with animal energies, capable of swimming to the bottom of the sea and hurtling himself toward air and sunlight again? Do the dead dissolve their individuality back into the world? That does not sound to me like such a bad ending to come to, whether we are conscious of the return of our energies or no. But perhaps it is even better than that, the afterlife; imagine that purest portion of self, the soul which lies beneath the incidental furniture and circumstance of personality, able to participate in all the world.
I don’t know anything different about death than I ever have, but I feel differently. I inhabit this difference in feeling—or does it live in me?—at the same time as I’m sorrowing. The possibility of consolation, of joy even, does not dispel the sorrow. Sorrow is the cathedral, the immense architecture; in its interior there’s room for almost everything: for desire, for flashes of happiness, for making plans for the future. And for watching all those evidences of ongoing life crumble in the flash of remembering, in the recurring wave of fresh grief.
But I do feel differently. What is this difference?
It still makes me draw a sharp breath, still almost stops my heart to think of that precise moment, when I could feel Wally going, not just each breath descending less deeply into his chest, but a kind of aura of transformation, a quality in the energy around him. After the last breath—no struggle, no grasping at life, the easiest of leave-takings—I swear I had the clearest image of Wally leaping free, as if he’d been so ready to go, as if some space had opened in the wall behind his head, and that he’d simply leapt out through that space. Which was not a space at all in the literal sense, but rather a possibility, a shift in the quality of being from the ordinary life of the room. The room—the whole house—took on a different tenor; there was a kind of heat and light to it, a humming intensity. My house held within in it the kind of resonance that a cello or a violin creates, that rich sound that seems to move so deeply into us, and to linger there, though there wasn’t any sound. I could feel that depth, that vibration, and not because I was mad with grief; I wasn’t, not yet. I knew that after that moment, from it, a universe of pain and of loss would open out, but I also knew that this hour was not that time.
This was the hour of passing, and it was clear to me, as certain as I’ve ever been of anything, that Wally had been lifted, transfigured, and freed in that moment, which had a kind of reality above the ordinary terms of sorrow or grief or madness. What I felt or experienced, the fact that I was going to be alone now, the outer trappings of loss (strange as it sounds, even the body seemed a trapping) weren’t of the essence in that hour.
The essence was the holiness of what had taken place in the room. Later that night I wouldn’t be able to go back in there, to his hospital bed and my single iron bed pushed up against it, but in the morning when I walked in I felt the whole space still vibrating, like the aftertone of a struck tuning fork, still resonating. I can return to that tone, even now; I hear it—no, feel it—reverberant somewhere beneath the surface of the world.
In my mind, in the reasoning, arguing, reading part of me which teaches classes and reviews books and conducts daily life, I can doubt this entirely. And in my heart I can sentimentalize Wally’s death, because, of course, I want him to live forever. Of course I want to be with him again in some way other than the way I am with him now, in my meditations and reveries and associations, even though no version of heaven ever presented to me has been very convincing.
And I can attempt to rationalize my perceptions about death away by thinking that it’s just that human beings crave reality, and that going straightforwardly toward Wally’s death together, with only the barest denial those last months to keep us sane, had about it a genuineness which we thirst for, and bears with it a kind of satisfaction. Don’t we long for the genuine, even as we flee it?
But still—there is some firm place in me which knows that what happened to Wally, whatever it was, whatever it is that death is as it transliterates us, moving us out of
this life into what we can’t know, is kind.
I shock myself, writing that. I know that many deaths are anything but gentle. I know people suffer terribly; I know how blessed we were that the particular brand of afflictions which the virus made Wally’s flesh heir to were easy ones, in a way. They killed him without endless prolonged miseries, without blindness or months of delirium. I know many die abandoned, unseen, their stories unheard, their dignity violated, their human worth ignored.
I suspect that the ease of Wally’s death, the rightness of it, the loving recognition which surrounded him, all made it possible for me to see clearly, to witness what other circumstances might obscure. I know, as surely as I know anything, that he’s all right now.
And yet.
And yet he’s gone, an absence so forceful it is itself a daily, hourly presence.
My experience of being with Wally, in the hour of his leaping out of the world, brought me to another sort of perception, but I can’t stay in that place, can’t sustain that way of seeing. The experience of knowing, somehow, that he’s all right, lifted in some kind process that turns at the heart of the world, gives way, as it must, to the plain aching fact that he’s gone.
And doubt. And the fact that we can’t understand, that it’s our condition to not know. Is that our work in the world, to learn to dwell in such not-knowing? You can adopt any belief system you want about ultimate things, the nature of our sojourn here and afterward, but doesn’t doubt always stand at the ready, prepared to undo the articles of faith? Perhaps so that meaning cannot be given to us, defined for us—at least not in any real way.
We need our doubt so as not to settle for easy answers. (Need, I say, as if we had the option to get rid of it!) Not-knowing pushes us to struggle after meaning for ourselves; if earthly existence does have purpose, I would be willing to bet that is part of it. But only part. Doubt’s lesson seems to be that whatever we conclude must be provisional, open to revision, subject to correction by the forces of change. Leave room, doubt says, for the unknowable, for what it will never quite be your share to see. The one thing we can say with great certainty about human perception is that it is partial. And perhaps that is why we are, of necessity, creatures of doubt.
Stanley Kunitz says somewhere that if poetry teaches us anything, it is that we can believe two completely contradictory things at once. And so I can believe that death is utter, unbearable rupture, just as I know that death is kind.
Doubt, the magician, pulls the white tablecloth out from underneath the china, disrupting everything. But once the cloth is pulled away, what has been built atop is still there. I can have the rug pulled out from under me at any time and am still willing to go back to believing.
Just as I will, inevitably, go back to doubt.
Today, when we come down from the undulant dunes to the shore, there’s further evidence to consider. The beach is an arena of mortality, corpses washing in and out, the consequences of predation or pollution or exposure—or just the plain propensity of life to end—everywhere visible.
The dogs relax on the shore, sure of where we’re headed. One likes to stay within a few dozen feet of me, sniffing every fragment of otherness the beach has to offer; the other loves to range, and these wide horizontals give him the double pleasure of being able to run far into the distances and keep an eye on me at the same time. (In this way he’s an emblem of my spirit: he wants to cleave and he wants to fly.) During this time we have little contact with each other, overtly; we are three students of reality involved in our work, each with his own approach to the problems of epistemology.
Neither dog has much interest in what catches me first. A—flotilla? little armada?—of jellyfish have met their destiny along the line of the estuary where bay and marsh meet. They are scattered far and wide, maybe a couple of dozen of them, and they range in diameter from the size of a doll’s saucer to that of a dinner plate. The smallest are simply disks of transparent jelly, gelatinous plasma in which nothing is differentiated. In the ones which are a little larger, something begins to develop in the center, a rayed shading, yellowish or russet, like the petal-ringed faces of the great armload of sunflowers Lynda brought for Wally one day, blossoms that glowed beside his bed with the hot light of an August garden.
A little bigger still, the width now of a dessert plate, and there’s a fringe of red threads around the rim, only a few in the smaller ones and then, as they grow larger, a bloody sci-fi halo of tangled whips.
And here is the prize, a grand—mother? papa? (They seem at once too primeval and too sophisticatedly other to be gendered.) Of all these beached starships, this one’s arrived at the greatest level of complexity. Around the central, yellow sun with its bold rays are ringed smaller suns, out toward the edge, which sports an oxblood fringe like some obscure piece of Victorian bric-a-brac. It’s a glorious and peculiar disk, and I can only imagine how much more complicated and intricate it must have been in the water, animated, pulsing, and distending. A dream flower, blossom of a surrealist garden.
Why have they washed ashore?
Kind death? I can’t even imagine their lives. These are the flattened flowers of otherness; imagine—try—their subjectivity. I try often to pour myself into the dogs’ way of being in the world. I like trying to set myself aside, getting as close as I can (admittedly, not very, but exhilarating anyway) to a world seen through those chestnut eyes, apprehended through the nose, delicate instrument unraveling scent’s histories and narratives. But these jellyfish I can’t get close to at all, though I can trace in the remains all around me the way this aspic organizes itself from next to nothing, a clear little squib, into this complicated, architectonic event: some kind of flattened art glass paperweight, a vaguely unfriendly example of Art Nouveau? Out of their element, they are evaporating, vanishing.
Walking in the marsh, standing on this shore, what do I stand on but the vast accumulated evidence of death? What do I confront, day after day, but death and death?
For weeks now I have been watching the skeleton of a dolphin, beached in the marsh, further out than we’re walking today. I encountered it first when it was a full-fleshed black and white beauty, a small dolphin, recently dead, I think, since the gulls had only just begun to attack. The high contrast of its two colors made it crisp and sleek as a race car. It had come to rest in that arced position of leaping dolphins—the flying forms on Minoan walls. Even in repose it seemed to move.
On each succeeding visit, there was less to see, and more; the flesh gone, the skin becoming leather wrapped around a yard of bone, then gradually the pure configuration of bone itself exposed.
Dolphins have a rib cage not entirely unlike ours, beneath which the long spine narrows and curves into the odd, rubbery fan of the tail, which remained intact while other soft parts of the body vanished. Oddest of all was the skull, something like a bird’s but broad and solid. In the shrinking of the fish’s form its ancestral relationship to flying creatures seemed to become clearer and clearer, as if what I were seeing were simply the remains of a bird who’d lost its wings.
I loved that broad, strange head, and I thought about taking it home with me, to keep in a cabinet where I have shells and seagulls’ skulls, and abandoned nests, and an elaborate whorled fungus from a Vermont birch tree—a sort of Victorian naturalist’s vitrine, though in no scientific order, no pattern except an aesthetic one.
But when I touched it, the skull by this time attached to the spine by only a little bit of the dark leather the skin had become, I had the clearest sense that the bones belonged where they were, intact, or rather that it was not my business to scatter them. There was a dignity and completeness about the skeleton, and about its dissolution; it seemed to want exactly what was becoming of it, a return to the ground of being which the marsh is, rich solution in which old and new life are held in the suspension from which possibility arises. I left the bones together, and make a little pilgrimage to them every week, usually to find them moved a bit, arranged in a n
ew configuration. They are visited, I imagine, by gulls, coyotes, raccoons, foxes, other walkers, but so far they’ve been allowed to dissolve in the sun and wind and rain. At each visit there is a little less of the particularity of the dolphin about them, a little more of the elemental. How firmly and clearly they are coming to resemble the other elements of the marsh.
Kind death? How can we know?
From this walk I bring home one thing: a little lavender bottle—maybe a medicine bottle, something that held once a tincture or essential oil. It’s a mystery; purpled, no doubt, because the lead in the glass has turned in the sun, but completely unscathed by the sand, as transparent as the flesh (does that term apply?) of the jellyfish. Out here Coke and beer bottles suffer a sea change, ground in a week into something lovely, coming to resemble the element they join (and were made of) like my unlucky dolphin. So why has this old bottle survived so clear you can see the bubbles in the glass, the seams where the molten stuff was pressed into a metal mold?
My jellyfish, my dolphin skull, and the one object I can actually keep, my lavender bottle: souvenirs in a cabinet of memory, to be saved, arranged like the contents of a Cornell box. Questions, inside the larger mystery of sorrow, which contains us and our daily transit, and is large enough indeed to contain the whole shifting tidal theater where I make small constructions, my metaphors, my defenses. Against which I play out theories, doubts, certainties bright as high tide in sunlight, which shift just as that brightness does, in fog or rain.
One last mystery: on one of the little ponds, this morning, I saw wind riffling the first of the waterlily leaves. They haven’t all emerged yet, but new circles tattoo the water, here and there, a coppery red. When the wind lifted their edges, each would reveal a little shadowy spot, a dot of black which seemed to flash on the water, and so across the whole surface of the pond there was what could only be described as the inverse of sparkling; a scintillant blackness. Shining blackly, black but rippling, lyrical: the sheen and radiance of death-in-life.
