by Mark Doty
Beau arrives the day before the planned party, a fireball of energy. The pads of his feet are soft and pink; this dog’s been penned indoors, as underexercised as he’s been underfed. You can see every one of his ribs; his chest is sharp and narrow. He’s wild for play, food, attention. Dealing with him, the startled and intrigued Arden, the bemused home health aides who’re trying to keep Beau from devouring Wally’s breakfast, and Wally himself, I think, What have I done?
Even Rena, with her great capacity for acceptance, will later tell me she thinks I may have lost my mind; it isn’t, rationally, a good time to adopt a dog.
It’s true, Beau’s a handful, but there’s something about his brightness and eagerness that’s welcome, fresh—golden. And the problems he presents are ones I can deal with, too; confused and undertrained as he is, he’ll learn, he’ll begin to understand. Most of what’s troubling in my life right now I can’t do a thing about.
And when he’s tired, Beau heads right for the open space in the middle of the bed, and before falling asleep (he seems afraid he’ll miss something, holding his tobacco-colored eyes open absolutely as long as he can stand to) he licks Wally’s face with a long purple-spotted tongue, source of laughter and delight.
But other changes aren’t happy ones. Wally hasn’t been wanting to get out of bed. The morning of the party, he’d like to take a shower. I’m skeptical, but the home health aide who’s there is stronger than I am, and he cheerfully decides to try it.
The results are disastrous; placed on the toilet, Wally can’t remain sitting up. The room’s so narrow that the aide can’t really get the wheelchair close to the toilet, and it winds up taking both of us to lift Wally back into the chair, and then back to bed, and by then he’s exhausted and in pain, saying his waist hurts—pulled muscles, I’d guess, or aching ones, jarred by movement.
Getting up even for a few minutes for the party is impossible. People come into the room to see him, but Wally can’t really connect with anyone today, and wants to sleep. In the living room, one eye on him and one on the guests, I have the odd sensation of entertaining while, in the next room, Wally’s barely there. A strained, difficult afternoon, and I can’t wait for people to leave.
Incontinent all the time now, Wally’s hooked to a catheter. It looks really unpleasant, when Paolo inserts the tube, but it doesn’t seem to hurt. I have to pee, he says every fifteen minutes. You are peeing, I say. He’s used to it in no time, though it causes an infection which he must take more antibiotics to treat.
Strain and more strain, but his humor sparkles out of nowhere, just when I least expect it. Darren, getting ready to go out, walks into the bedroom one day, rubbing moisturizer into his face. Wally looks at the tube, looks at him, and says, “It’s going to take more than that.”
Another time, I stand by the side of the bed while two eager retrievers leap up from the comforter where they’ve been sleeping until I said the word walk. Excited, bumping into each other and me, they practically knock me over. Wally, entirely deadpan, says, “I don’t know, they’re a lot of work for an old lady.”
“You bitch,” I say, but he is too weak to answer.
Someone in the nursing community complains about Darren living with us—a violation, he thinks, of professional boundaries, even though we’d asked for approval first from the powers-that-be, even though we’d agreed that Darren wouldn’t be scheduled as Wally’s home health aide anymore, he’d just be involved with us as roommate and friend. After meetings and phone calls galore, Darren’s fired for his “lack of boundaries.” This seems to mean he has too much compassion.
But what’s a difficult circumstance for him becomes, for us, a gift. He gets a part-time job selling lottery tickets in a convenience store, to earn a living, but there never even seems to be a question as to what he’ll do next, which is to help Wally and me through. And so I have a place to turn with questions, someone to talk to, someone who’s seen all this before.
December. That face. If it were possible for a face to shrug, it would look like this. A “that’s-just-me-what-can-I-do” face, one I’ve seen W make for years, but which has fallen away. I don’t even realize he’s stopped making that face till suddenly it’s back. Now it means here I am, helpless, immobile, my mind slipping, but what can I do, what can any of us do about it?
I tell Lynda that I’m starting to feel I can’t remember what Wally was like before he was sick; it seems so long now that I can’t visualize the old face, hear the old voice. So she gives me a beautiful Italian photograph album, bound in marbleized paper, and I begin to go through our old pictures and make an album, reaching all the way back to right after we met. With a Polaroid someone gave us ages ago which we’ve hardly ever used I start making new pictures, too, putting the best of them into the elegant book with those old-fashioned photo corners. The book’s a record and testament; I don’t realize, then, how important it will be in a month, how people coming to the house the week before Wally’s service will focus on it, use it as a departure point for stories, memories.
Wally begins to have trouble finding the words he wants. We’re lying in bed talking about something and he says, “Oh, I’m going to mush my mouse.” Then he looks puzzled. “Mush my mouse? Oh, what’s happening to me!” Though it’s said more in amusement than in frustration, more in wonder than in fear.
More and more, he seems to me like someone who’s had a stroke—the trouble with language, his head leaning, one side of his mouth turning downward.
Our friends Michael and Thelma, from Vermont, send a Christmas package, its best gift a big bag of mulling spices for cider. I make mugs of warm spiced cider for Wally all day, and feed him with a spoon. He says, “This is so good.” It feels to me as if he doesn’t just mean the cider; he means the whole experience, the fact of comfort and of pleasure. When did this happen, that he can’t control his own hands enough to eat? And suddenly he seems unable to manipulate the buttons on his remote control; he’s always saying it doesn’t work, the channels won’t change. Of course it’s his fingers that won’t function, though soon he’s tired of TV anyway, and prefers silence.
Michael and Thelma have sent, too, a little wooden angel, from Indonesia, designed so that she’s looking down onto whatever she floats above. I hang it from the chrome trapeze which dangles above Wally’s bed; Paolo had thought it would be good for him, to practice pulling himself up, but by the time it’s arrived Wally’s not likely to do chin-ups. He adores the wooden angel, and tells me how he loves how she watches him.
That face. The pure self which looks out to the world, essence of Wally drinking it in, being here, with me and with Arden and Beau and Thisbe. Self-consciousness, doubt, circumstances, even history stripped away, he’s that awareness, that quality which is most essentially Wally. Its characteristics are wonder and humor, delight in things, a tender regard.
More and more, Wally doesn’t want anyone else around, just Darren or me. Where I used to need to get away, and so take advantage of the time the home health aides would come to do errands, to swim or ride my bike or walk, I don’t seem to need that now; Wally and I are drawing together into something enormous and quiet, spacious but almost unexplainably intimate.
Christmas, Darren goes home to see his family. The other home health aides are off, and it’s just Wally and me at home. It’s wonderful to be alone together. I play music, cook and feed him, sit by the bed and read. We talk a little, until he’s tired from finding words. I go into the next room and write, working on poems I can’t finish but somehow need to be making. Usually I’d only be able to do my work when I’m uninterrupted, but these days are completely different. Every few minutes Wally calls me for water or cider, to change the channel or move the cat or find his Hot Tamales, but it’s fine, welcome even. We’ve arrived at some deep, half-dreaming balance. Outside it snows and snows.
Christmas Eve, I give him packages which I open for him, since the bows and paper represent more labor than he could manage: music videos
by the Nashville singers he thinks particularly sexy, fleece-lined slippers decorated with images of bacon and eggs, and a book about breeds of dogs. He says he wishes he had something for me to open, but I don’t want anything except to have him here. There’s nothing more he could give me than his life, right now, his being with me.
I’m thinking I can’t possibly go back to work. What can I do? I’m praying for a grant, which is actually possible, since I’ve applied for money from the National Endowment for the Arts, that lottery in which every American poet buys a regular ticket. A former student calls to tell me he’s gotten word that he’s received an NEA fellowship, and he wants to be the first to tell me and to thank me for the help I’ve given him with his poems. I’m congratulating him and dying on the inside, since I know that this also means I’ve been rejected, else I would have heard by now. Troubled, afraid, I do what I do when I can’t handle things; I take the dogs for a walk. It’s snowed till I can’t get the car out, so we go down to the bay and clamber over the bluish icebergs that have piled up along the shore. We walk for an hour, during which I renegotiate my relationship with fortune. I think, all right, there must be a reason for this, maybe I’m just supposed to work. I think, This isn’t what I’d choose, but we’ll get through it, we’ll find a way.
And in fact, by the end of the walk, I can’t say I’m pleased with the situation but I have arrived at a kind of acceptance; I’ll turn my attention to what I need to do today, and something will work out. When I get home the mail’s come, and there’s a letter from the Ingram Merrill Foundation; they’ve chosen my work to honor with a cash award. “All you need to do,” the letter concludes, “is accept.”
Because Paolo’s on vacation, just after New Year’s, a substitute nurse comes, one we’ve seen a couple of times before. She takes a look at Wally and acts panicked, horrified.
In the kitchen, she tells me she wants him on morphine. It doesn’t matter that he’s not in pain, she says it’s time, and suggests we start with two cc’s. I’m confused. Not that I’m denying that Wally’s somewhere late in his life, but can it be time for such a drug? Would I know, would I be able to sense if it were time for such measures?
Putting on her wool gloves, opening the kitchen door, she says, “Have you made the funeral arrangements yet?”
I feel as I’ve been slugged in the stomach. I’m not naive about what’s happening, but I barely know this woman, she has almost no relationship to Wally or to me, and yet she’s comfortable being this brusque. Does she think she’s helping?
I’m incredibly lucky to have Darren, back from the holidays, to advise me; he’s been through this enough times to have a feel for it, to know the territory. Since Wally’s losing the ability to communicate, I’m terrified that we won’t know how he feels. Will we know if he hurts, if he needs to be eased? Even knowing that face as well as I do, will I be able to read it?
Of course, Darren says, you will. We’ll know. He points out to me that one of the things morphine does is make it easier for people to die, to relinquish their hold. Sometimes it seems that pain is one of the few things that doctors and nurses can do something about, and therefore they’re very ready to act; here, at last, is something controllable. And he fears, too, that sometimes the administration of morphine is about the comfort of the caregiver, about getting the difficult, dying patient out of the way.
Right now, Wally doesn’t need morphine. And two cc’s, administered all at once, with no gradual introduction of the drug to his system, might have been enough to kill him. What if I’d listened, what if I’d panicked and followed the nurse’s advice?
We fill the prescription, so that we’ll have the stuff on hand. The substitute nurse returns on Monday, and this time she wants to talk with me first; she’s decided to counsel me about death.
Of all the things that have annoyed and troubled me about the medical people Wally and I dealt with, perhaps what I hated most was the seemingly endemic practice of assuming that patients needed counseling, and that whoever happened to be around was the one to do it. As people get closer to death, many around them seem to suddenly want to become important, to become experts. And so it doesn’t matter if the patient has a lover, a therapist, friends, family, a whole network of support—an expert’s here. This expert thinks my resistance to her is about denial; I’m not in denial, I’m just hanging on doing the best I can. In fact what I want to do is protect Wally from her attempts at counseling; already, in her previous visit, she seemed to be hinting around to get him to talk about “letting go.”
Doesn’t it make sense that we might wish to have these conversations, if we wish to have them, with people we love?
She seems to think what Wally’s experiencing is denial, rather the way Dr. Magnus, on his sole house call, seemed to think Wally more interested in watching TV than in talking about his symptoms. Can these people tell the difference between brain dysfunction and denial? Or are they so hungry for a convenient explanation they’ll settle for psychological cliché, because it either gives them something to do or lets them off the hook?
I give Substitute Nurse very firm instructions that she’s not to try to counsel Wally, but I decide to hang around and observe her visit with him anyway. Halfway through it, after the requisite vital signs and palpations, she says, “Wally, is there anything you want to do that you haven’t done yet?”
At this point, you might as well ask my lover a question in Swahili. Furious, I shake my head at her, mouth “No.” She packs up her stethoscope. In the kitchen, she says, “I meant, like, have an ice cream soda.”
And so it’s clear that I have another job these next few weeks, which is protecting Wally from people who want to help.
Two friends, Ellen and Margie, come to visit for the afternoon, and Margie writes each of us a letter.
1/10/94
Dear Mark,
Halfway home I remembered the Italian sunflower seeds. Ellen said, never mind. Next time. Okay. Your house felt familiar. It felt just right. Ours is barer, which we like sometimes but in the winter doesn’t feel cozy enough. We need more winter clutter…
I liked so much to see you in your home. That staircase has been in my mind all day, steep and beautiful, and from the bottom unresolved. The resolution’s all in the top with those old staircases. There are many more questions in an old house than a new one, many more in-breaths. New ones have to say everything, spell everything out. There’s a rigid feeling the minute you walk in the door. Old ones have pulses.
January is sometimes a hard month for me, the month I was born in. Usually the complaint is that things don’t move. This winter I have just given up, and it’s much richer, much more enjoyable that way. Sitting in the bedroom with you and Wally felt like the heart of my January. Nothing moving fast, but everything moving. Time and room for my heart to really open there on the bed. Wally’s looks, his grin. Your big lovingness towards him. All the animals. The garden. The sun pouring in. I felt sort of stunned after that for the rest of the day. Good stunned. The way they would put it in the zendo is: I bow to both of you. There feels like a lot of happiness in your house. I don’t know why I didn’t expect that, but when I felt it it just made me want to cry.
Love,
Margie
1/10/94
Dear Wally,
After our visit I said to Ellen, “I feel like I just met Wally for the first time.” There in the sun with all your wildlife on and around you, in that friendly friendly house, I felt this great big spirit pouring out of you, even as you went to sleep. I didn’t want to go. I just wanted to stay and look at you and take you in. You and your plaid covers. The dogs, Thisbe, Mark. Now I can think of you somewhere, now that I know where your bed is. Thank you, Wally. Things move so fast out here. To sit in someone’s slow room and drink tea and look out at the rose hips and imagine the garden, what a good moment.
Love to you,
Margie
January 14. W’s really shifting now—every day I think he�
��s a little less with us—yesterday looking and looking at me, as if he wanted to fix my face—looking and looking at the dogs. His voice small, trailing away, such effort to speak. Yesterday I washed and rubbed his feet and he said, “I wonder how many people have had their feet rubbed in this house.” It felt as if he was in a different kind of sense of time, entering somehow into the house’s whole history. So many people must have died there, perhaps in that room—
Yesterday I cried in the pool, imagining his obituary and—worse—imagining the bed being taken away. I called his mother and told her she should come down soon, to see him while he’s responsive—we don’t know how long that will last. Snow out, more snow…
Back from vacation, Paolo gives me a handout titled “Preparing for Approaching Death.” A Xerox of a Xerox, it seems to have originated in a hospice program in Florida; it’s a description of what death is like, what we should expect, and how to respond appropriately. I hate it. I hate its presumption, its pretense to lay some claim of understanding on a mystery, but curiously what I hate most of all is that it’s a sloppy, copied and copied again text, offered to me as if I could use it, as if here the unthinkable’s explained, wisdom Xeroxed.
As if any of them knew.
I read a few sentences, flip through the pages, file the paper away, a kind of grim curiosity I think I’ll read sometime. I haven’t read it yet.
But we have, if not our own understanding, our own experience, and it feels to me sealed, inviolable, ours. We have a last, deep week together, because Wally is not on morphine yet, because he has just enough awareness, just enough ability to communicate with me. I’m with him almost all day and night—little breaks, for swimming, for walking the dogs. Outside it snows and snows, deeper and deeper; we seem to live in a circle of lamplight. I rub his feet, make him hot cider. All week I feel we’re taking one another in, looking and looking. I tell him I love him and he says I love you, babe, and then when it’s too hard for him to speak he smiles back at me with the little crooked smile he can manage now, and I know what it means. I play music for him, the most encompassing and quiet I can find: Couperin, Vivaldi, the British soprano Lesley Garrett singing arias he loves, especially the duet from Lakmé: music of freedom, diving, floating. The last picture I paste into my album is an old Polaroid of Wally leaping out of a swimming pool, in a blur of brilliant water, flinging himself into the daylight.
