by Mark Doty
Which only sets me off again. She’s not fine, this is not fine, I will not accept this. Wally, who lay nine months looking out these windows, would not have accepted this, would not have been able to bear it, would have spoken. Or would have wanted to, would have been desperate to and perhaps also unsure he had the right to, the nerve; but now he’s free, beyond any issues of self-confidence or self-doubt, and that spirit, were it here, would insist on speaking. And does, pouring out through my mouth, passionate and unstoppable—and maybe totally inappropriately, but I don’t care, I’m speaking with my love’s tongue, I’m speaking for the dead I carry in me, and I will make sure they’re heard.
The day of Wally’s memorial service, his youngest brother Mark carried the brass box containing his ashes home down Commercial Street, a kind of ritual gesture. Sometime during the next few days I put the box into the nightstand beside my bed, with another box in which I’d collect the letters and sympathy cards people sent, copies of the newspaper obituaries. I needed time to come to terms with the ashes. I imagined that in time I’d know where they should go, whether I should scatter or keep them; Wally had been clear that he’d wanted to be cremated, but the conversation had never really gone further than that. His silence made it evident that the nature of the memorial service and the fate of his ashes were up to me.
In a while I knew that I wanted to spread his ashes in the marsh I love, the wild and open place I walk through, winters, out to the point where the seals are. A part of me wanted to hold onto them, too. But when I meditated about the ashes I imagined pristine urns, sealed off from the world—and then, alternately, the play of light on water, the inward and outward rush of tide, the complex symphonic spectrum of life that the marsh is. What, there, is not part of life? That, I knew, was what Wally would want.
Talking to Wally’s mother, I planned to scatter the ashes in the spring, when it would be warm enough for us and whoever else in his family wanted to come to walk out along the dike into the wind-swept field of the marsh. But I could tell she was reluctant, uncertain, even though she agreed. And when the time we’d considered drew close, in May, I offered her an out, saying there really wasn’t any hurry, that we should do this when we’re really ready. Relieved, she said she’d like to wait, and I didn’t know until that moment that I’d be relieved, too. I wasn’t ready to relinquish the evidence of his body.
In a while, I began to forget the ashes were there. And then I’d remember them, and wonder if I was avoiding being aware of their presence.
In the fall, Betty and I talked again, and settled on the anniversary of Wally’s death. It would be a cold walk in January, but something about the turning of a year felt right. Rather like that Jewish ceremony in which the headstone’s unveiled, after the first year, for the family, marker of a year survived, of the actuality of loss.
I’d been tempted, at St. John the Divine, by the walls of little containers bearing the names of the dead, some of them with their small vases, their tokens of remembrance. Wouldn’t it be good to have a place in which Wally was remembered, an inscription of his name?
But those chapels felt, unmistakably, for the living, even the Christmas cards and flowers and love-tokens there. What these ashes wanted, I felt sure, was not containment but participation. Not an enclosure of memory, but the world.
I brought the ashes out of my bedside cabinet, polished the box, set it on the mantel where I could study it. I still held a fear, a doubt about letting the remainder of Wally’s body go. In another box, one I can hardly bear to open, I’ve saved the little personal things that were around his bed: his glasses, the wooden angel from Indonesia, a toy wooden clown he liked, whose tongue popped out when you pressed on his hat. His silver ring’s on my left hand now, pushed against mine. But those accessories, however personal and full of the psychic scent of a man, are not his body. Once I let these ashes go, into their commingling with the world, there was no getting them back.
Relieved to know my back was mending—through whatever agency, Eastern or Western, physiological or medicine of the soul—I experienced a sense of physical freedom which lasted almost exactly a week.
On the last day of November, I stepped out of a shower in Boston, where I was visiting friends, and onto a slick tile floor; I’d neglected to move the mat nearer the shower. I flew to the floor, breaking the fall with my right wrist. My friends came running to see what the terrible noise was, and the first real indication I had that something was wrong was that, when they asked me if I was all right, I found I couldn’t make a sentence. Not that I seemed to be feeling so much pain, exactly, but that pain had short-circuited my capacity to make language.
I’d broken more than my capacity for syntax; the tip of my radius, one of two long bones in my right arm, was cracked clean through. Soon I was immobilized from knuckles to elbow in a white plaster cast.
January 29, 1995
Dear friend Jean,
I was so glad to have your letter this week and your sweet message about the anniversary of Wally’s death, too—your thinking of me and of us means so much. This whole month, a year from that last passage in Wally’s life, has been something for me, a deep and difficult passage in its own right. I guess Maggie told you I had to have surgery on my wrist; the broken bit of bone was healing in the wrong place and if left alone (they said—who knows whether to believe doctors?) the movement of my hand would have been seriously impaired. So, just after Christmas I went in the hospital and had a bone graft, from my left hip into my wrist, and a titanium plate put in to hold the bone together.
Darren and Michael took good care of me at home, but I struggled—I don’t do well with anesthetics and painkillers, I hate that muffled, submerged feeling. And the breaking of a part of my body became aligned for me with the breaking of Wally’s body, with his bone being fragmented. I was going back through, in memory, those last days when he was moving into the very heart of things, the depths of last winter when we were more and more deeply inside the house, inside our lives together, approaching that mystery.
As my wrist healed and I got out of cast and splint and stitches I started to do better, as if I’d descended and was climbing up out of the cave again. By the time the anniversary day came I think I had done so much work inside about it that it was okay, sort of odd and numb, like a holiday when you are supposed to feel more than you do but you can’t really do anything. I burned the beautiful beeswax candle you gave me that day.
We didn’t scatter the ashes—because snow was forecast and his mother didn’t want to travel—but waited until yesterday instead, which was a year to the day from Wally’s service, so that felt right. His mom and one brother and sister and their partners and I went way out into the marsh, and we read the Whitman poem about the grass from “Song of Myself.” I’d forgotten that I would come to the line, “What do you think has become of the young and old men?” And then George and Susan and I threw the ashes into the wind and water in handfuls.
The tide was pouring out of the marsh, out to sea. The lightest dust swirled off in the wind, and the rest made clouds like nebula in the water, and the heaviest parts, the chips of bone, sank to the bottom and looked like pieces of clam shell, like the gulls had been eating there. And of course we had ashes on our hands and skin and clothes. Arden sat and watched. Wally’s mom couldn’t handle throwing the ashes, so she threw a rose, which Beau decided to fetch—he leapt into the cold water and brought it back about four times, till it finally fell apart. He’s the world’s court jester. I felt utterly overwhelmed and as if I could hardly bear it but I also felt like I could hear or feel Wally breathing this sigh of relief—as though what he really wanted was for his body to be part of the world, part of the sparkle of all that water. I used to imagine, when I’d walk the dogs before Wally died, that the shining path the sun makes across the sea was the way the dead went, the way home. But now Wally is the path.
So it felt very right. Meditating about it today I felt this great sense of serenity
and light. We did what he wanted and I feel different now—full of grief but less anxious somehow, more—aligned? Certainly my bones are aligned again, in wrist and in back—maybe I needed the physical descent of this break in order to accomplish the emotional descent?
Things have shifted, with the passage of the whole year; and though sorrow isn’t lessened I’m in a different relationship to it somehow. Last week in NYC, at St. John the Divine, I was at that wonderful altar for PWA’s. I lit a candle, and I was crying for a while, and then I heard Wally’s voice in the back of my head say, Okay, now let’s go to Bloomingdale’s…
I saved a bit of ash for myself, in a little cherrybark tea canister from Japan I got in New York. I was afraid that there wouldn’t be enough intimacy in the family ceremony, although it turned out to be fine. But I am still glad to have this bit of his body with me, though I am not sure what I’ll do with it. Maybe take it also out to the marsh, alone—or maybe take a bit to Venice next month—or maybe just wait…
What I’d soon feel, about that little canister of ash, was that it was fine to have it with me. There seemed no imperative to take it out to the marsh, and it didn’t feel right for it to go to some unfamiliar place. Nor do I feel any need to put it away, to avoid it or forget what it contains. It’s a comfortable presence. It represents, perhaps, the way that a part of Wally’s with me always, but it’s not like I thought—I thought I’d need to hold on to this symbol, this proof of his having been.
I understand, differently, the longing of Antigone to bury her brother properly. Something shifts, with the body where it belongs; Wally’s body belongs in the huge sun-burnished field of the salt marsh beside our tiny airport, the first and last of home I see, by the way, when I fly in and out of town. And that smaller part belongs also with me, is, already, part of me.
I didn’t know it would make me happy, when Wally’s ashes blew into my face and hair. When, after I scattered them, a fine grit of him was left on my hands, so that I could rub it against my cheeks.
I went back, the next day, and the chips of bone were still gleaming there under the water. If you didn’t know what they were, you wouldn’t know.
The next day Michael and I walked the dogs at Herring Cove, so I didn’t see what had happened.
On the third day, there was an enormously high tide, the whole marsh gone under, and I couldn’t see anything beneath that wide, steely expanse.
Epilogue: Consolations
Of course there is no consolation, for the dreadful fact of a death. Nothing makes it right. Nothing can remedy that absence, that break in the continuity of things. Nothing can fill the space Wally occupied in my life; nothing takes his place.
On an absolute level he is gone, utterly, and that absence rings at the core of every one of my days, the aftermath of a struck bell.
And yet. And yet.
There are these gifts, these perceptions or moments or aspects of experience which make it possible, desirable, to continue. Any consolation can and does dissolve, any day, into the lake of grief, that liquid realm where all bright or solid things darken and disappear. One does not lose—one does not want to lose, entirely—grief.
We live, instead, into, toward a different relation to loss, a shifting perspective: the grief not as large and overwhelming, not every day, not erasing, not entirely, what there is to praise.
And what is left, when you’ve lost what you loved most, to praise?
A Metaphor
A portion of a letter, from the poet Alfred Corn:
February 19, 1994
…What I’m working up to is to say how sorry I was to hear about Wally. I didn’t know him, but I’ve heard what a tremendous person he was, and I think I have some idea what you must be feeling. When I call up pictures of friends (none of them lovers) lost, a terrible ache comes over me, so much so that it has to go away on its own, there isn’t much by way of remedy that I can do. I remember a letter of Henry James where he said that in times of great grief it was important to “go through the motions of life”; and then eventually they would become real again. Our great enemy Time is also on our side in these matters. And then you have a great resource in your art, which is also a friend and inseparable. I’ve been trying to write, myself, a poem about those ancient Japanese ceramic cups, rustic in appearance, the property at some point of a holy monk, one of the few possessions he allowed himself. In a later century, someone dropped and broke the cup, but it was too precious simply to throw away. So it was repaired, not with glue, which never really holds, but with a seam of gold solder. And I think our poems are often like that gold solder, repairing the break in what can never be restored perfectly. The gold repair adds a kind of beauty to the cup, making visible part of its history…
What was can’t be restored; I can neither have Wally back in the flesh, nor return to the self I inhabited before his death. The vessel’s not cracked but broken, all the way through, permanently.
The break, from now on, is an inescapable part of who I am, perhaps the inescapable part. Hasn’t it become my essential definition, my central fact: I loved a man who died?
But who can live, day by day, in pieces? Loss shatters us, first, but then what?
Alfred’s metaphor offers a possibility: to honor the part of oneself that’s irreparable. Not to apologize for it, disguise it, not try to mend it in any seamless way. Studying the cup, the viewer might see the rupture first; to fill the crack with gold means to allow the break prominence, to let it shine.
Broken, ongoing, we see at once what it was and what it is. Wearing its history, the old cup with its gilt scars becomes, I imagine, a treasure of another sort, whole in its own fragmentation, more deeply itself, veined with the evidence of time.
A Gift from Bill
Bill died late in the spring, weeks after our visit—at home, amazingly; after the long hospital siege, he’d been allowed some peaceful weeks in his own surroundings, among his own things. And he took care of those things, picking out gifts for people, directing Phil to wrap them.
When Phil came down to Provincetown in the summer, I hadn’t seem him since the wake, which was just the extravaganza of white flowers Bill had ordered. The trunk of his car was full of gifts for various people, wrapped in bright paper and bows.
Phil had an alarming story. During the funeral service—its audience half Bill’s gay friends and half his Catholic family—Phil had told the story of the green chenille robe, and a tale, characteristically Bill, of how once Bill had played a dress-up game with some very young relatives, nephews or nieces, who were expressing confusion about gender. “Are you a man or a woman?” they’d asked.
“I’m a drag queen,” Bill had answered.
Half the congregation had loved this story; half had not been amused. Phil found, suddenly, that the emotional temperature shifted; welcomed by Bill’s family for years, he was suddenly given dozens of cold shoulders. When he confronted Bill’s mother, after days of this, he learned it was the story that had turned the tide.
“Why,” she asked, “did you have to tell people about that?” Meaning, of course, why did you have to tell everyone my son was gay, why did you have to talk about it? Meaning, if my son wasn’t gay he’d still be alive.
Things changed quickly then. Phil had expected to continue living, at least for a while, in the house the two of them had shared, though Bill owned it. But in two weeks time the house was up for sale, and Phil, in the whirlwind of grief, was also separating their possessions, packing up his things, displaced.
A horrifying story, and it made me grateful for Wally’s family, who’ve expressed nothing but gratitude for the way he was taken care of. Even Jimmy, whose disappearance from our lives rankled me so deeply, said to me at the memorial service, “Thank you for taking care of my brother.” And everyone’s understood that I still don’t feel like cleaning out the attic, sorting out Wally’s collection of souvenirs. There’s so much there, more than I can keep, things I know his family will want to have.
Bill was wise, to make decisions about those things he wanted to give his friends. And there’s something deeply affecting about this gift, across the divide between worlds; here I am, walking back from Phil’s car down Commercial Street, carrying in my arms this cheerful package presented to me across the widest gulf in the world. Unbridgeable gap, and yet it’s bridged all the time, as gifts pour back to us from the dead: objects full of evocative memory, like the contents of this box, Bill’s two-handled blue-and-white Wedgwood cream soup cups, just the thing for serious entertaining, and of course he knew I’d treasure them.
Things fill up with us, they carry across time their human store.
And then gestures. Phrases. Ways of seeing the world. Moments so entirely full of the presence of someone gone; an image, an event, the sudden recognition of a quality essentially, unmistakably theirs.
The china cups, mementos of a time when people actually required something distinct in which to serve cream soups, relic of a sort of gentility, a pleasure in providing a kind of perfection for guests. Bill.
Walking in the evening, along the shore of an Italian lake, under a row of pollarded trees, still bare in the early spring, the line of old iron street lamps curving along the balustrade, glazed in the mist and doubled on the still surface of the water, I think Lynda.
In a shop window, in Milan, the most exquisite food I’ve ever seen, far too beautiful for anyone to eat, a perfection of aspics and gleaming patés, canapés, and little delights resembling not real flowers but glass ones, the gorgeous artifices of Venetian chandeliers: a heaven of display. Wally.
A girl in a blue carnival dress, yards of it, and a snowy mask, with softly luminous, silvery pigeons perching on her shoulders and arms. Wally.
