Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [108]
Wally’s new experience is of being carried through this new part of his life, supported by the home health aides, by me; we find ways to make each task possible. As each daily necessity becomes difficult, in its turn, someone suggests a means to make it easier. We find ways together when it seems there aren’t any ways.
And with each new indignity or limit—increasing incontinence, for instance, since Wally’s more and more frequently missing the opening of his plastic urinal, and winding up with wet sheets—he fusses a little bit, and then seems to accept the new situation with laughter.
Take, for instance, the matter of shit. Inevitably, sometimes Wally just doesn’t make it to the portable commode in time. Other times, being moved for some other purpose—changing his sheets, say, or getting into the wheelchair in order to visit the doctor—sets his bowels to rumbling. Shit is a new fact of life, and one I find myself thinking about; powerful, it interrupts every other interaction—no matter what else is going on, it stops while we clean up the shit. Like death, excrement is the body’s undeniable assertion: you will deal with me before all else, you will have no other priorities before me.
Poor Wally feels, I know, mortified at first. He needs someone to wipe him, someone to clean him up; he has to let go of the privacy of the most personal of bodily functions, the most hidden.
I learn, quick, to use a new set of tools: latex gloves, chucks, plastic washbasin, baby wipes. The first time I clean up a huge, particularly odorous mess I feel an involuntary, physical sense of revulsion. I think I’m going to be sick, though I don’t want to show how I feel. And then the feeling passes as quickly as it came. It’s just Wally here in front of me, needing cleaning up, and he’s easy to help.
Still, for him this is a deep admission of incapacity. But only for a little while, since Darren, when it comes to shit, is a wonderful influence. Darren’s genius is to make the whole situation funny—making a joke out of whether or not Wally needs a bedpan, about the size of his bowel movements, about the noises he makes. Whenever Wally looks the least uncomfortable, Darren transforms his vexation to laughter. Patient, earthy, he eases Wally (and me) toward acceptance.
(Even now, writing this, I’m helped by thinking of his practicality, his wise focus on what-do-we-do-next. Whereas my tendency is to spin off into some airy interiority, to focus on grief and upon spirit, he brings me back to the plain facts of cleaning up, the daily work of making things better, cleaner, brighter. We’re sustained by the daily, held in the world, and because people who do the work Darren does are accustomed to being with the dying, they’re used to staying in the present, seeing what there is to be done now.)
It’s August, and the start of school is looming. I can’t not work—how else will the mortgage be paid?—but how can I leave for the two days each week I need to spend at the college? Darren’s the solution for that, too. He’s been looking for an apartment, and our second floor is empty now, since I’ve moved my study downstairs to the room next to our bedroom, so I can hear Wally if he calls. After some discussion, it’s agreed: Darren will live upstairs, and in return for taking care of Wally the nights I’m away, we’ll charge him a reduced rent. My impulse is not to charge rent at all, but he insists, saying if we don’t charge him he’ll feel responsible for everything. We try to keep the boundaries clear, and I breathe a huge sigh of relief. It’s still enormously