by Mark Doty
How can this be written? Shouldn’t these sentences simply be smithereened apart, broken in the hurricane?
Thursday night, January 20. Wally’s smiling. I get the Polaroid and ask him to show me that smile again, and he does, the last time he’ll be able to.
Friday, January 21, the last words I’ll write for a month:
Time’s the engine that decks
the world in its beautiful clothes.
And not one, not one is exempt.
Wally’s breathing changes, becomes heavier, regular; breathing’s work now, as if it were the audible sign of some transformative process within. He seems turned in on himself, not speaking; I don’t think he can speak now. I touch him and talk to him. We know it’s time for the morphine, in an eye dropper, on his tongue; perhaps there’s no pain, but if there is he couldn’t tell us, and the opiate will ease the work for him. Rena comes and says good-bye; his eyes are closed when she comes into the room, but he opens the right one, the still-good side of his face, and takes her in. She tells him she hopes he’s not scared, and they spend a long time looking at each other. She says, “Knowing you has been a great gift in my life,” and that she’ll always carry him in her heart. Then she’s quiet, giving him her love. “And then we looked at each other some more,” she told me later, “and I kissed him and wished him a safe and joyful journey, and I left, and I didn’t see him in his body again.”
I call his mother, who’s planning to come Sunday. She comes Saturday morning instead, but by then his eyes are closed. She sits alone with him for a while. He opens his right eye just a tiny bit; we can tell that he sees her. All that afternoon he looks out at us through that little space, but I know he sees and registers; I know that he’s loving us, actively; if I know nothing else about this man, after nearly thirteen years, I know that. So into the line of his vision I bring Thisbe and Portia, and Arden, and Beau, and then I sit there myself, all afternoon, the lamps on, since the house is circled in snow and early winter darkness. The afternoon’s so quiet and deep it seems almost to ring, like chimes, a cold, struck bell. I sit into the evening, when he closes his eyes.
There is an inaudible roaring, a rush beneath the surface of things, beneath the surface of Wally, who has now almost no surface—as if I could see into him, into the great hurrying current, that energy, that forward motion which is life going on.
I was never this close to anyone in my life. His living’s so deep and absolute that it pulls me close to that interior current, so far inside his life. And my own. I know I am going to be more afraid than I have ever been, but right now I am not afraid. I am face to face with the deepest movement in the world, the point of my love’s deepest reality—where he is most himself, even if that self empties out into no one, swift river hurrying into the tumble of rivers, out of individuality, into the great rushing whirlwind of currents.
God moving on the face of the waters.
Suddenly I’m so tired I think I can’t stay awake another minute. Darren comes in—he’s been in and out all day, spelling me, seeing where things are—and says he’ll sit with Wally awhile. I say I’ll sleep on the couch for an hour. I don’t think I’ve been lying down ten minutes when I sit up, wide awake. Darren is in fact on the way to fetch me, but I’d have come on my own. I know it’s time.
I say to Wally, while the breath comes more shallowly, All the love in the world goes with you.
Each breath he draws in goes a little less further down into his body, so easily. He never struggles; there’s no sense of difficulty, no sense of holding on.
Arden stands up, suddenly, moved by what imperative I don’t know, and falls out of the bed. Darren says, That’s just Arden, he’s okay, not wanting anything to steal Wally’s attention from where he is now.
I say, You go easy, babe, go free.
The world seems in absolute suspension, nothing moving anywhere, everything centered.
Go easy, but you go.
Twelve Months
I couldn’t be in the house when they took his body away, when the workers from the funeral home came, late, in the bitter cold, whiskey warm on one’s breath, their coats alive with the chill they wore in from outside. I could hardly be there when Paolo came, to write the death certificate and sit by the bed looking at Wally, filling out a form, saying something bland and consoling to me. I couldn’t be in the room when they folded his hands and lifted him onto the gurney and carried him out, so I stumbled down to the harbor with the dogs, so that we might be out of the way of what I could not bear to see because I didn’t think I could stand to remember it. Though I remember it anyway as if I were there, as I’d watched the strangers bear the wrapped red weight of him away.
The stars over the beach were enormous, dazzling, the night so cold it seemed it might crack wide open to reveal—what?—more of that chill and impossible glitter turning over us, heaven’s endless spill of ice? I was shivering and crying out loud and lost in the beginning of raw grief—strange that one can seem numb and in endless pain at once, as if there was so much grieving that I could only feel a little edge of it, though that edge was enough to keep me immobile there on the black shore in front of the empty beachfront houses. The kind of grief that would begin when his body was gone, the helpless stumbling in which I’d live. The machinery of care would move in, tomorrow, the friends who’d make sure someone was with me all those first days, who’d help me plan the service and scrub and order the house for the gathering after the service, the hundred ritual things the bereaved do in order to mark the hours of passage. The friends who’d see me through when I could, myself, hardly see the new world I had fallen into.
His wife Camille on her deathbed, Monet writes, “I found myself, without being able to help it, in a study of my beloved wife’s face, systematically noting the colors.”
What does a writer do, when the world collapses, but write?
The first thing I wrote in my journal, a month after Wally died, was something I’d heard on the radio: Ninety per cent of the matter in the universe is invisible, unaccounted for.
February. How can I begin, how can I not begin?
I’m not allowed to refuse the task, says a voice in my head. But then I don’t really want to refuse it. It’s just finding the strength. I will be swept off my feet, I will be unable to stand up any longer in these great knock-me-over waves of feeling, my legs won’t hold me.
Then I remember being with Wally, at Herring Cove, some July or August evening, one of those late hours at the beach when the light is long and golden, the air warm, hardly anyone around, so that the two of us, naked, were playing in the surf, Arden swimming out to rescue us, barking, the waves breaking over his head so that he became our sleek seal-eyed companion. The knock and tumble of waves was something we could ride, a rhythm of swell which freed us from earth, our feet lifted up, bodies carried a little of the distance toward heaven by the water’s unpredictable undulance. May feeling be like that—may it carry these pages, carry me, and lift me and set me back down again on earth.
(I never used to save copies of my own letters, in the days of typewriters, but with computers, it’s nearly automatic. This one was written to a poet whose work and spirit I love, not the Phil of “Phil and Bill” but another Philip.)
February 26, 1994
Dear Phil,
I’m just getting to the point where sentences start to fit together again, but I’ve been wanting to write for a while to thank you for your letter, and to tell you how glad I was to spend time with you and Fran at Jane’s back in November—that seems like years ago now—and say hello. I’ve felt you around in the atmosphere here, actually, since I’ve been reading The Bread of Time and loving bearing that unmistakable voice—passion and good humor, rage at injustice, plain human wonder at the weirdness and beauty of things. I am about halfway through, but that’s because I want the book to last—as well as because these days I can read for short bursts of time and then find I fall right to sleep. There’s a lot of sleepin
g to be done, as well as a whole lot of other stuff, two-thirds of which I swear I don’t understand at all—all this work going on inside me, necessary, and characterized by these waves of feeling that come out of nowhere, unpredictably, and either immobilize me or fill me with joy.
That’s a strange part, that I couldn’t have imagined before—how much real joy there is commingled with all this awfulness. I don’t know if I can explain it. Partly it has to do with the experience of having been with Wally all through the end of his life, of feeling incredibly close to him, involved in his dying, and how peaceful it was for him, how ready he was to get out of his body and its attendant limitations that he’d put up with (with both grace and frustration) over the last couple of years. The last year especially. I never felt so completely inside my life—no, inside of life—as I did in those last days when despite the fact that he couldn’t talk there was such a sense of connection between us. The day before he died all the life in him seemed to move into his face and eyes, just burning there, and he was staring at me and our dogs and everything with such intensity, taking us all in. When he seemed to sail away, or really to leap and somersault away, I felt—I knew—this tremendous sense of liberation, of freedom, and almost immediately, in the devastation of being there with Wally’s body, I started to experience this duality. Here was the body I’d loved, the only vehicle through which I’d ever known him, but it so plainly wasn’t him—a very good part of him, yes, but not him. And while I felt absolutely stuck in the world where he wasn’t, I also felt this terrific sort of secret sense of intimacy with him, so connected. I felt like I had a seat on both sides of the veil, you know—part of me with him, looking back at this world which seemed so radiant and lovely and peculiar, and part of me squarely here and miserable in a place without him, bereft and totally helpless. Ay.
Well, I’m more firmly on earth now, which sometimes in the last few weeks has been the last place I want to be. I found myself walking down the street in town on a weekend when we had tourists here again and thinking, “How much longer do I have to be here?” Not in Provincetown, I mean. And then I’ve remembered work, which I love. The work of writing. And I’ve felt restored by all the people who’ve been around to help me through, and by walking the dogs in the woods and on the shore. And most especially by my sense of having been in ways I can’t yet articulate re-educated, about living, by having been through Wally’s dying. I keep thinking of Whitman: “to die is different than anyone had supposed…”
I’ve been very grateful, too, for having this time off. I thought I was going to be using it to take care of Wally. Selfishly, I wish that is what I were doing—though I also know that he left the world at exactly the time when he couldn’t enjoy this life any more. I have a picture of him, Phil, a Polaroid I took on Thursday night, grinning away—and he died on Saturday!
He—and I—were so lucky that he didn’t have one of those awful kinds of opportunistic infections that would have just hurt and hurt him. Lucky, perversely, that he had something that the doctors didn’t know the first thing about. They didn’t know what to do, so they didn’t do anything—no poisonous “therapy” that would have just made the last part of his life more miserable. They left him alone, and we took care of him right here at home, and ushered him out of the world. He never had to go to the hospital once.
Anyway, I was talking about time off—it feels so right to have no obligations except to my own feelings. Which really do constitute a full-time job right now. Some people have said I’d be better off working or something, but I think they just don’t get it. I have a feeling your good words and wishes had to do with the good fortune that’s come to me. Thank you for that…Literary life helps me to have a future right now, a sense of more to do, a world to connect with.
I hope coming back to Fresno’s been good for you both—at least you’re missing (I am pretty sure) the snow upon snow that’s tumbled over the east. I’ve pretty much liked it, really. All I want to do right now is stay in anyway, and catch my breath, and take time. And three feet of snow is just right for that.
Love to you both,
Mark
Wally had joined the invisible majority, leaping from the bed of which he was so weary. Out of the top of his head, I felt, into the empyrean. Billy enlarged the photo I’d found of him leaping from the swimming pool years before—grinning, arms flung above his head, the droplets of water like rushing lines of energy; the image came to stand, for me, for the way he’d leapt from earth. The photo sat on the table beside the brass box containing his ashes, at the memorial.
He and I both, I thought, were learning to negotiate a new element. I was learning to breathe, to walk, to eat, to remember to do those things without him.
February 17, 1994
Dear Diane,
Thank you—you’ve been a welcome and steady presence in the mail, and I know you understand that I’d have answered sooner if I could. I’m at a point of getting my feet more on the ground, feeling back on earth, where I am sometimes glad to be and sometimes, of course, not. When someone that close to you dies it’s like having some kind of double vision, part of me being so clearly with him or near him, seeing the world from the other side. For the first week or two things were so lovely to me—fruit in the grocery store, the sky, the big cloth jellyfish-thing in the automatic car wash that sudses up your windshield. Wally was looking out at the world through me. And there was then the other part of me which was just plain bereft, missing him terribly. I’m living much more in that latter part now, which I guess is what happens—we have to come back here where we, after all, live. Oh. It’s wildly difficult and at the same time something I seem to be able to do. Everything about this is violent contradiction—my life at its most real and at its most terrible at once, Wally dead but somehow a profound sense of mercy and peace, even joy, around him. I lost him and feel like I’ve fallen in love with him all over again. Things were never so complicated in my life, yet all I have to do is just feel my way through the day. Days…
February 17, 1994
Dear Herb,
…I think there are more lessons in the last month of my experience than the rest of my life will allow me to articulate; I’ve been shown so much that I can’t begin to understand, that I am only starting to say. And out of all that I could enter into here—more time for that, so much time now—I’ll say only that Wally’s death taught me that, as in anything else, nothing is conclusive. There’s no time there, where he is. And one of the many contradictions in this period of intensely lived dualities is that I have felt so close to him, in love with him again in another way, at the same time that I’ve lost him. Presence and absence tumble together the way time is all atumble now; I’m awash in it. I wonder if dying doesn’t make a kind of spasm in time, as if some radiance leaks out of the opening the dying make—at least the opening this dying man made—between worlds, enough of a shine to turn time inside out for a while. Everything poured toward that moment, a watershed, and since then the waters of these hours and days, of years really, have seemed all commingling, and I am not sure if and don’t care whether I am in now or then…
In some way I had joined the invisible, too. I think that when people die they make those around them feel something like they felt; that may be the dying’s first legacy to us. I’ve had friends who died in confusion or rage or terror, and the living who knew them felt, then, confusion or rage or terror. Acceptance breeds acceptance, as Wally’s attitude during his illness had shown; it’d been easy, somehow, for the people who took care of him to do so. He seemed, to those who carried him, to have made himself light.
I don’t know what it might have been like for me had I not been present at the moment when Wally died, if I hadn’t been there to know that enormous intimacy, that sense of brightness in the depths of the dark, the atmosphere so charged it seemed almost to sing. What if I hadn’t felt the movement of energy, the leap of spirit lifting from him?
I couldn’t have understood what a
grace there is around dying, that sort of awe of which beauty is, as Rilke understood, the edge: “For beauty is nothing but the beginning,” he writes near the opening of the Duino Elegies, “of terror, which we are still just able to endure.”
The price we pay for keeping death at such a distance from ourselves is a great one; holding it so far from us, we cannot see its shine.
I wonder now if Rilke’s terms might just as easily be reversed: is terror only the edge of a beauty we can hardly bear?
The shine around Wally’s dying, the grace of it, was what would carry me through those first months, what would sustain me. Not that I didn’t veer crazily, every day dissolving, at some point, into tears and exhaustion, dizzying grief. But it felt possible, out of a kind of connection to him carried through death, out of the spirit’s sheer shock of recognition at the naked beauty of his dying, to go on.
And what a long season I was given, a time to reflect and to reel, submerged in my own grief.
