Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [118]
More and more, Wally doesn’t want anyone else around, just Darren or me. Where I used to need to get away, and so take advantage of the time the home health aides would come to do errands, to swim or ride my bike or walk, I don’t seem to need that now; Wally and I are drawing together into something enormous and quiet, spacious but almost unexplainably intimate.
Christmas, Darren goes home to see his family. The other home health aides are off, and it’s just Wally and me at home. It’s wonderful to be alone together. I play music, cook and feed him, sit by the bed and read. We talk a little, until he’s tired from finding words. I go into the next room and write, working on poems I can’t finish but somehow need to be making. Usually I’d only be able to do my work when I’m uninterrupted, but these days are completely different. Every few minutes Wally calls me for water or cider, to change the channel or move the cat or find his Hot Tamales, but it’s fine, welcome even. We’ve arrived at some deep, half-dreaming balance. Outside it snows and snows.
Christmas Eve, I give him packages which I open for him, since the bows and paper represent more labor than he could manage: music videos by the Nashville singers he thinks particularly sexy, fleece-lined slippers decorated with images of bacon and eggs, and a book about breeds of dogs. He says he wishes he had something for me to open, but I don’t want anything except to have him here. There’s nothing more he could give me than his life, right now, his being with me.
I’m thinking I can’t possibly go back to work. What can I do? I’m praying for a grant, which is actually possible, since I’ve applied for money from the National Endowment for the Arts, that lottery in which every American poet buys a regular ticket. A former student calls to tell me he’s gotten word that he’s received an NEA fellowship, and he wants to be the first to tell me and to thank me for the help I’ve given him with his poems. I’m congratulating him and dying on the inside, since I know that this also means I’ve been rejected, else I would have heard by now. Troubled, afraid, I do what I do when I can’t handle things; I take the dogs for a walk. It’s snowed till I can’t get the car out, so we go down to the bay and clamber over the bluish icebergs that have piled up along the shore. We walk for an hour, during which I renegotiate my relationship with fortune. I think, all right, there must be a reason for this, maybe I’m just supposed to work. I think, This isn’t what I’d choose, but we’ll get through it, we’ll find a way.
And in fact, by the end of the walk, I can’t say I’m pleased with the situation but I have arrived at a kind of acceptance; I’ll turn my attention to what I need to do today, and something will work out. When I get home the mail’s come, and there’s a letter from the Ingram Merrill Foundation; they’ve chosen my work to honor with a cash award. “All you need to do,” the letter concludes, “is accept.”
Because Paolo’s on vacation, just after New Year’s, a substitute nurse comes, one we’ve seen a couple of times before. She takes a look at Wally and acts panicked, horrified.
In the kitchen, she tells me she wants him on morphine. It doesn’t matter that he’s not in pain, she says it’s time, and suggests we start with two cc’s. I’m confused. Not that I’m denying that Wally’s somewhere late in his life, but can it be time for such a drug? Would I know, would I be able to sense if it were time for such measures?
Putting on her wool gloves, opening the kitchen door, she says, “Have you made the funeral arrangements yet?”
I feel as I’ve been slugged in the stomach. I’m not naive about what’s happening, but I barely know this woman, she has almost no relationship to Wally or to me, and yet she’s comfortable being this brusque. Does she think she’s helping?
I’m incredibly lucky to have Darren, back from the holidays, to advise me; he’s been through this enough times to have a feel for it, to know the territory. Since Wally’s losing the ability to communicate, I’m terrified