by Mark Doty
Lynda’s funeral, in a suburb of Newark, one of a continuous strip of town which is actually many towns, a funeral parlor viewing room where her body’s displayed in an open casket. She doesn’t look much like herself: an austere black dress, a rosary (would she have been appalled, or like the drama?) in her hand, none of the characteristic jewels. Her chest is much too large. I find myself imagining she’d have been pleased to have been given, at last, breasts. I can’t be reverent here; the huge unreality of it, the disjunction between person and event prevents that. And I’m newly a student of how we attend to the body, of our negotiations with the dead. Looking at her makeup, the sorrow of flesh reconstructed and propped in its housing of satin, I am feeling this sense of elemental rightness in the decisions I made about Wally’s body. I am glad that I could hold him when he died, and in the long time after, and that he could leave our house wrapped in something I’d made, and go to the flames naked except for that wrapping, without makeup or artifice. I have the sense that Lynda would actually like more artifice, just not this kind: she’d like a better outfit, a hat, jewels. Her husband and friends are trying, in this regard: David’s put in the coffin her black beret, a pin; people tuck in scraps of poems, flowers, I don’t know what. These things will be burned with her, along with the flocked lavender coffin, but I believe Lynda would like to meet the flames in her dazzling finest, as she always did. Before the casket’s closed, we place inside it the black beaded dress.
David, of course, hasn’t had time to plan any of this, to even think of it, and he’s grateful to Lynda’s family for taking charge. After a couple of sessions of viewing at the funeral home, there’s a service tomorrow, in an inner-city church in Newark. This, I think, is the one detail of the affair she’d have truly approved of; the gray stone church is located in a particularly atomized segment of downtown, surrounded by the rubble of failed urban renewal. The desolation is practically apocalyptic. The sanctuary has been broken into so many times that they seem to have given up on repairing the damage left by vandals; most peculiarly, the corpus on the big crucifix to the right of the altar hangs by one arm.
I’m a pallbearer, along with another gay friend of Lynda’s, as well as David and a friend of his, and Lynda’s father and brother. At the doorway the priest goes to unfold a white cloth over the casket, and I find myself thinking, at last here’s a ritual she’d have approved of, something in good form. But when it’s unfolded it has a big green appliquéd candle in the middle, an acidy lime green. It’s hideous, and my heart sinks while I am trying not to be a heartless aesthete. Through the whole damn service I’m trying not to be an aesthetic snob; I’m trying to think it matters to her family, to reconcile myself with the fact that it seems to have not much to do with the person I knew. But Michael reads one of her poems, and David another, and her brother delivers a eulogy in which I can almost recognize her; of course the person our families know (or claim to) isn’t the one friends would recall. I can tell the ceremony’s good for David, and the family seems strongly present together, holding each other up and David with them, so I am trying to be generous. But the fact is I hate it: I hate that my friend who is gone is not recognizable in these gestures, is barely reflected here.
I do not say this to criticize Lynda’s family; when it comes to memorial services, I think gay people have a real advantage over their straight counterparts. We don’t have a big tradition looming over us; most of us don’t have much in the way of a church we can feel comfortable with, and for an awful lot of us what the family wishes just isn’t at the center of things. And so ritual occasions, not hidebound by church or tradition, tend to look a lot like the person they celebrate and mourn. And we have a hell of a lot of practice, too, these fifteen years of epidemic.
I wanted Wally’s service to suit him; he’d taken no interest in it whatsoever, specifying only that he wanted to be cremated, so it was up to me. Without a funeral, it seemed essential—both for me and for his family—to have some event soon after his death that seemed real, signifying, grave. We reserved space in the Unitarian church—complain about it I do, but it’s beautiful, and welcoming—and in the space of a week I had cards printed with a photograph of Wally playing with our cat Thisbe on them, and his name and dates, and a bit of a poem of Rilke’s, in Stephen Mitchell’s translation.
But because truly being here is so much; because everything here
apparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange way
keeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.
Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too,
just once. And never again. But to have been
this once, completely, even if only once:
to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing.
I’d opened the book and there the lines were, from an elegy I’d always loved; they insisted upon themselves. Later I’d think, do I believe this? Just once? Certainly just once this way, this unrepeatable constellation of circumstances, the kaleidoscope shifted this one delicate way. Once, in this body, and gone.
During that week there were obituaries to write and publish, and the minister to meet with, and matters of music and flowers and candles, and programs—and what was going to happen, what would the program say? And food for later. In the worst hour of my life, at my most exhausted and terrified and shellshocked, suddenly I am planning a huge gathering for an unknown number of people, and inviting them all to my house afterward for food and talk. The weirdness of it is the wisdom of it: in the darkest hour, give a party.
Some people plan to speak: Wally’s brothers Mark and Jim, Rena, our friends Richard and Kathryn. And then there’ll be a time for anyone who wants to to get up—and a little singing, a little music. It’s a huge project, and it’s astonishing how much is contributed by how many people, how seemingly effortlessly all this work flows together. Effortless to me, perhaps, because I am floating along on the goodwill and work of so many friends who are showing up and cleaning the house, shopping, cooking, taking care of the details. I’m half aware of being grateful that I can make lists, can think about the things I have to do to be ready for Saturday, can worry about the parts of the whole. I can spend an inordinate amount of time buying candles, getting exactly the right shape and color and number. Feeling keeps leaking through, spilling out, washing me away a dozen times a day, two dozen. But I have this to come back to, to grasp onto, this world of tasks.
And when it happens it’s magic. It’s been the snowiest, iciest January in the history of the planet but suddenly the day’s sunny, perfect, like April, benevolent sun on the U.U.’s clapboard and steeple. Later Michael will say what he remembers best is the sunlight cascading into the sanctuary through high windows. Because the ice is gone Wally’s older relatives can come, can negotiate the steps and walks. The church with its soft gray walls painted in trompe l’oeil columns, its pews with their little medallions carved from whale’s teeth, is full of people. As the planned speakers talk—an outpouring for Wally, testament both to him and to us as a couple—I have this extraordinary sense of being seen.
This is what this whole day is for, the whole process has been leading to this: that the man who is gone and not-gone, is being held up to the light by all these people who loved him or me or us. And they are regarding what was known as Mark-and-Wally; it is the day when people come together to circle around and to acknowledge what we were. I have never felt such a sense of a love being validated, held to the light. And in this way, strangely, it is a hugely happy day for me. How could I not be buoyed by this sense of what Wally and I had been, how lucky we were to have made what we made? Even though his ashes were in their brass box on the table at the front of the room, surrounded by the perfect candles and flowers and the army of black-and-white pictures of Wally as a kid, blown-up photos his brother Jim had brought, even though the day was a confrontation with the fact of death, there was something joyous about it, something inescapably bright.
Af
ter the planned speakers, we sang “Amazing Grace,” because everyone knows it, and then the free-for-all speaking started, slowly at first, and then, as such things do, teetering on the edge of anarchy. (Will it be endless? What will this person say next?) When the born-again gay Christian biker who’d gone to elementary school with Wally (before he was driven out of town for offering blow jobs in front of the drugstore) began to sing all the verses of “Precious Lord” a cappella, I began to think that things were seriously out of control. But there was at the same time something wonderful about it, in that it resembled Wally’s life, resembled our lives together: something to be proud of, something lucky and loving, various, capacious, just screwy enough to be alive.
After Lynda’s funeral ended, the coffin was wheeled down the aisle, the hideous green-candled cloth folded again, and we pallbearers lifted the weight of her down the steps, and—a moment which felt like pure horror to me—into the waiting mouth of the hearse. I can see, plainly, David’s hand touching the figured surface of the coffin lid, the rose he laid on top, that last touch. And then the doors were closed, and we moved away.
I caught a ride with some friends to the city, and though I was going to the Upper West Side I had them let me off near Times Square, Lynda territory. Those flashing neon come-ons, the dealers’ bark and hustle, bright and cheap enticements to touch and look and buy: photographs of flesh, signs and banks of rippling lightbulbs that seem somehow both ephemeral and ancient, as if they’d been forever selling that same tawdry dazzle, working that same spell—tattered, but an enchantment still. Lynda wasn’t gone yet; she was walking beside, inside me. The winking, oily world was aflame, everything burnished and troubled by the hurry and harsh loveliness of her transit. People die, but does the slant of light they teach us, their way of looking? It was through Lynda’s eyes that I apprehended all those hopeful pitches and lost chances: her arena of transcendence, that hard-edged and lushly human disaster of a neighborhood. For me, that was my friend’s real funeral, a walk through Times Square inside my head, looking out, at the beloved world—full of harm and trouble, sparkle and ruin—she was leaving.
Crash
My current chiropractor, a literate, charming lesbian who wears tortoiseshell horn-rims and demonstrates a real sophistication about the delicate mysteries of alignment, does her best, then sighs and suggests a massage and rest. The swollen and throbbing muscles of my sacro-lumbar region (I like it being called a region, some part of me as distant and full of mystery as the precincts of the moon) are, clearly, intractable; they are not ready to be adjusted into anything like their proper positions.
And I am miserable. The condition’s chronic, but it’s been in abeyance—perhaps because I’ve had to be strong, able to pick Wally up, in the days when he could still be lifted to wheelchair or commode. Later, when he was immobile, it just wasn’t admissible for me to get sick; on some level I think I ordered my spine to remain in alignment. The vertebrae obeyed so well, in fact, that I seem to have locked them up altogether, in a rigid stance, prepared for disaster, that’s led to a disaster of another sort. Twinges first, which I stupidly ignored and kept on acting as if I had a strength or reserve of energy I didn’t possess. But the spine won’t be ignored. The twinges continued, a little worse, sudden neuro-flares going off at odd moments. Then, in the car, complete mutiny; reaching my left arm out the window to take cash out of the chrome drawer of the drive-up bank machine, I feel something near my lower vertebrae tear.
It all simply goes out of my hands, things going wrong in ways that I feel I have no capacity to do anything about. There’s no strength in my lower back at all, and I feel incapable of supporting myself, as if the muscles just won’t hold things where they belong. I slip, dangerously, into a skewed posture, an Expressionist angularity with potentially devastating consequences. To say the back “goes out” is an odd but apt expression, since one feels that its usually unnoticed capabilities have simply gone someplace, leaving the body helpless, prone, making it painful to do things such as, say, lift a telephone receiver, or bend over the sink to brush one’s teeth. I begin to imagine never being strong or upright again, becoming dependent, compromised. There’s nothing for it but bed, ice pack, ibuprofen, reading: nine days thereof, punctuated by hobbling walks to the chiropractor’s office and a trip to the masseur. Everything helps a little; nothing helps enough. I’m grateful to my friends for bringing me dinner, walking the dogs, and quickly begin to resent them for being ambulatory, just as I can tell they don’t really want to hear one more request from me for, say, the Sunday Times.
The nine days wear on. I read and read; I spend days living in Elizabeth Bishop’s spirited and observant letters even though the book is too heavy for me to hold up and I have to keep shifting around to find different means of supporting it. Elizabeth Bishop has a life of travel and change, Nova Scotia to Brazil; I feel I will never go anywhere again, except, if I am lucky, the kitchen. I start dramatizing things. I read Diane Ackerman’s Natural History of the Senses, a book I am supposed to review, a huge compendium of arresting facts about the pleasures of smell and touch and etc. Diane Ackerman goes all over the world tasting strange and delicious things; she rhapsodizes about vanilla beans; she puts bats in her hair; she kneels in a grove of eucalyptus and tags migrating monarch butterflies. I think if I am very lucky I may be able to drive to the A&P next week. I begin to hate Diane Ackerman; I hate her pert attitude, her perky enjoyment of all the possibilities for pleasure the world holds out. I hate my life. I begin to enjoy the pitch of my self-pity, even though now I think that self-pity’s just a mask for a deeper abjection. I am in pain, up against my limitations. This is the worst my back has ever been.
All spring it’s been coming. Right after Wally died I began going to a yoga class; I’d been ready to forget the idea, but a friend more or less forced me to go, saying he wanted someone with me all the time—Wally’d been gone only a few days then—and he wanted a break from me, so please would I go. The first minutes of the first class we were sitting on our knees on our mats, in the floor-wax and sweeping compound atmosphere of the elementary school cafeteria, with its pink metal tables folded into the walls and its stage masked by a blue velvet curtain. We’d begun doing breathing exercises, listening to our own in- and exhalations, feeling the breath expand in us as we paid attention to it, and the teacher said, “Here you are, in your body. Feel what it’s like to be in your body.” I knew then I was in for it; the tears started to roll down my cheeks. I kept breathing and moving, sometimes calming inside, sometimes crying again. Releasing tension in my arms, especially, which had held and held and held on. Stretching them out above my head, pulling one arm and then the other back behind my neck to feel the muscles opening released another wave of grief.
What had happened to my body—I hadn’t known it before, until my attempts at stretching made it obvious—was that I had been braced from my knees up to my solar plexus, like a football player, I imagined, braced for a body blow. I carried myself like someone who expected something to come hurtling right into his stomach, knocking the wind out of him, someone who didn’t want to fall down.
The class did release tension. Some nights I fell asleep right there on my mat while everyone around me moved into increasingly elongated, birdlike incarnations of graceful flexibility. Some nights I felt relaxation and a sense of relief. The postures began to provide me with another sort of metaphysical vocabulary—the steadfastness of “the Mountain,” for instance, feet firmly anchored on the earth, the spine elongated, pressing up from the crown of the head, body extending from earth to heaven. Sometimes when I wasn’t in class, when I needed to feel it, I could call upon the firmness of “the Mountain,” and recall in my body that stability and sense of scale. And I loved the noise-making: the forceful expelling of air from the gut into a HA, the loud sighs and exhalations which signaled muscles lengthening and letting go.
The class made me realize I had no idea then—maybe I still don’t—what it means
to “let go” of a person. How can we, when someone is bonded to us, welded into the mesh of ourselves? The dead live on in our bodies, in the timeless flux of memory, inseparable from us. You’ve got to let go is the popular prescription for grief, but what does it mean, and how is it to be done? Whatever has been, we can’t undo it; isn’t every gesture we’ve ever made, every one that mattered, part of the stuff of selfhood? Isn’t the past the soul’s deepest possession? If I were to “let go” of Wally and Lynda, would they die to me again?
But I did learn to perceive tension in my body more clearly, to feel how I “hold on,” and to feel a muscle’s welcome lengthening and release.
But not enough. No amount of stretching seemed to defuse, finally, the pressure that was mounting in my back. After that unlucky reach out the car window to the ATM, I couldn’t even stand up straight. I’d hobble, face to the earth, hunched and clenched, unable to even straighten up enough to look at the sky. I feel more profoundly misaligned than I ever have, literally bent out of shape, my parts in a jumble of unhappy connections.
A week of rest and I am at least walking, slowly. Crunching myself into the position required to ride in a car, much less drive one, is out of the question, so I walk carefully to an appointment with my sweet masseur, Glen, whom I’ve seen a few times this spring to try to undo some of the winter’s icy block of tension and stress. I am making my way up my street when I run into a woman I know slightly, a health care administrator who’d known Wally. She notices my snailish pace—I am holding myself like a delicate construction of glass and string—and I explain.
“You know,” she says, “it’s all emotional.”
And I’m furious. It’s a thirty-second diagnosis, completely out of context. How does she know what’s going on in my body? She seems to deny the physical reality of my problem. She’s a representative (off duty, admittedly, but I am in no mood to let her off the hook) of that useless bureaucracy of “providers”—their own bland language, soulless as they sometimes seem to be—who have no call to be claiming expertise with something they don’t understand. I’m taken back to the kind of blanket, casual diagnoses Wally’s doctors used to make; confronting a symptom they clearly didn’t understand, they’d confidently say, “It’s the virus.” Or, in a phrase which became a kind of bitter joke with us, anything they didn’t comprehend and couldn’t treat they’d label “viral activity.” Wally’s life gradually became a stage for larger and larger forms of viral activity, for a kind of terrible possession his “providers” couldn’t do the first thing about.
