Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [104]
There’s one HHA who emerges, right away, as a friend. Darren’s forty-five, a veteran of the AIDS wars, so reassuringly down to earth that Wally takes to him immediately, and he to Wally. It’s only a matter of days before I’m working in the next room, listening with one ear, as usual, to what’s going in the room where Wally is, and they’re both laughing, teasing each other and carrying on. And then I know there’s someone else involved with Wally whom I can trust.
I begin to get used to not knowing what drawer the forks are in, not being sure where someone’s put the folded laundry; of course I feel invaded and confused, but I also begin to feel how long and hard I’ve been pushing, carrying us up a steep slope by myself. I haven’t asked for much help; it’s hard to accept it now, and yet whenever I do it’s welcome, salving, not only in the little practical ways but in a kind of spiritual sense: I feel less alone.
There are endless accommodations to make. Stairs are out of the question now, so I move our bedroom downstairs, working like a man possessed, taking apart the big green bed and reassembling it in what used to be the living room. I’m startled myself at what I do alone; bullish with my will to make things all right, I’m an engine of activity. I am not yet willing to ask for that much help. I lug mattress and box springs, shoulder the furniture from room to room. The new bedroom’s sunny, full of light, and allows Wally to watch the street from bed. It’s tight, between the four-poster and the big blue armoire that holds Wally’s essential TV, but there’s room to move around, and it feels like home, not a sickroom.
Our oak dining table—too big for casual use anyway, made for a party, or dinner for a dozen—is banished into storage, and what was the dining room is cleared out just in time for the arrival of the white seersucker-covered couch we’ve ordered, which seems superfluous now, now that the big green bed has begun to be the circumference of Wally’s world.
April. Wally goes down like a brave horse incapable of standing. All the dread breaking loose, terrible sense that we can’t handle this disruption, that I don’t know what to do. Somehow I must always know what to do.
Then a spring break of accommodation—moving downstairs, having help around in the form of home health aides, visiting nurse, physical therapist—at first it’s all too much, like the world’s cracked, but gradually we put it back together. It seems like that’s the process, our work: we reassemble things, after each collapse, we find a way to make it feel intimate again, whole, after the rupture.
The poems I’m trying to write move very slowly—as if my vision’s out of focus, so hard to make anything clear. Is that depression? Or an inevitability, when AIDS is the subject—the unencompassable subject. Though in truth it’s not “AIDS” I’m writing about, some phenomenon apart from us, but our love, the crack in our lives, and the going on in spite of the rift, beside it—that’s the central thing. All we have.
W seems very brave to me just now. He wants to walk this summer, and so he is doing his exercises. Happy because Darren said a man who’d had a stroke was up and walking independently in three months. It’s been a long time since he expressed an ambition to get better—an ambition, as opposed to just a wish.
Ambition which fades, as the realities get clearer. Soon the physical therapist is giving up, quietly; he needn’t do exercises, she says, but use his strength to get dressed, lift his legs when he’s helped to the bathroom, and so on. Wally says he thinks he’s lost strength in the muscles in his legs, and that’s why he can’t walk, but soon none of us believe his difficulties are about muscles. Something’s going on in his nervous system, somewhere.
The town nurse’s office loans us a chrome and plastic commode, a portable toilet we can fit into the corner of the bedroom. I help Wally to stand, and then he pivots, and sits; at first I’m merely there