Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [110]
Wally, on the other hand, actually gains, and the preparation of his lavish breakfasts becomes a ritual. He wants bacon, sausage, eggs—salt and fat in abundance. Of course no one expects someone with AIDS to have much appetite, so everyone’s delighted and only too happy to make him seconds; sometimes he’ll finish all his bacon and ask for more. Various home health aides become his favorites for the breakfasts they make, Beau’s poached eggs, Nancy’s extra-crisp bacon, one week’s favored skill giving way to another’s. An elderly client of Darren’s provides constant gifts of sausage and cheese, mail-order presents which Darren brings home—more salt, more fat. Wally’s eating and eating, though in fact Arden is getting a good share of the bacon, too, growing wider and lazier as the weeks go by.
September. How little I’ve written here—how full these days, or how I’ve filled them, so hard to be still and let myself think, let myself feel. Of course there is this pressing and demanding reality, but I also keep myself hopping, speeding along, since to slow down is to hurt. And what is writing but sinking into oneself, into the actuality of these waters, these days?
If I could have anything now, besides W’s health, I’d ask for a period of rest and quiet and reflection. I’d write and read and let myself, a little at a time, step down into myself—like a stairway down into a dark, intimate kiva—where the work of vigil is taking place, the necessary attending. I imagine there’s a little fire burning there, a few steadily glowing embers, and a quiet chant going on, from me, from some singer in me, honoring and accompanying W’s soul, which is with him as he is making his passage. It’s true, I can see his passage out of the world, or away from it. Not right now, I mean not that he’s dying now, but rather that there’s a leavetaking in process, a movement toward increasing simplicity, away from complexity, activity, expectation. Almost away from personality? The bout of paranoia, with a childlike quality of being threatened, seems part of that—like a day or two when he couldn’t just let go and float on the energies of other people, which are bearing him up—but had to doubt them, struggle. So much better when he can trust and float. There’s enough love around him to carry him now—I want to keep telling him that. And I want to maintain a kind of good spirit for him—he doesn’t need my grief or anger, too. But how to do that without bottling up, putting it away someplace, so that it will manifest in disconnection or depression?
Attention—the work of paying attention.
Wally has bouts of diarrhea of a particular intensity and virulence—not painful, luckily, but persistent and messy, four times a day, six times a day. A good thing, now, we’ve developed this easygoing attitude about excrement. Dr. Magnus diagnoses cryptosporidiosis, an intestinal parasite which can be devastating, since there’s no cure for it. The hazard is dehydration, and malnutrition from the inability to absorb food. We’re grateful Wally has this cushion of extra weight, and an appetite. He starts a new antibiotic, one that might at least control the parasite if not kill it.
Wally develops new food cravings. He’s dying for pretzels, the little thin-stick kind, and I’m always buying him another bag, and sweeping up spilled ones like pickup sticks. And he longs for salt bagels, which I bring home from a bakery in Connecticut on my way home from school. They’re studded with big crystals of kosher salt, and no one else can abide them, but Wally would eat them all day if we could keep them in the house. Overnight, the sea air turns them into a slick mess of salty dough, so we have one day a week of feasting on salt bagels, then they’re gone till