Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [120]
Love,
Margie
1/10/94
Dear Wally,
After our visit I said to Ellen, “I feel like I just met Wally for the first time.” There in the sun with all your wildlife on and around you, in that friendly friendly house, I felt this great big spirit pouring out of you, even as you went to sleep. I didn’t want to go. I just wanted to stay and look at you and take you in. You and your plaid covers. The dogs, Thisbe, Mark. Now I can think of you somewhere, now that I know where your bed is. Thank you, Wally. Things move so fast out here. To sit in someone’s slow room and drink tea and look out at the rose hips and imagine the garden, what a good moment.
Love to you,
Margie
January 14. W’s really shifting now—every day I think he’s a little less with us—yesterday looking and looking at me, as if he wanted to fix my face—looking and looking at the dogs. His voice small, trailing away, such effort to speak. Yesterday I washed and rubbed his feet and he said, “I wonder how many people have had their feet rubbed in this house.” It felt as if he was in a different kind of sense of time, entering somehow into the house’s whole history. So many people must have died there, perhaps in that room—
Yesterday I cried in the pool, imagining his obituary and—worse—imagining the bed being taken away. I called his mother and told her she should come down soon, to see him while he’s responsive—we don’t know how long that will last. Snow out, more snow…
Back from vacation, Paolo gives me a handout titled “Preparing for Approaching Death.” A Xerox of a Xerox, it seems to have originated in a hospice program in Florida; it’s a description of what death is like, what we should expect, and how to respond appropriately. I hate it. I hate its presumption, its pretense to lay some claim of understanding on a mystery, but curiously what I hate most of all is that it’s a sloppy, copied and copied again text, offered to me as if I could use it, as if here the unthinkable’s explained, wisdom Xeroxed.
As if any of them knew.
I read a few sentences, flip through the pages, file the paper away, a kind of grim curiosity I think I’ll read sometime. I haven’t read it yet.
But we have, if not our own understanding, our own experience, and it feels to me sealed, inviolable, ours. We have a last, deep week together, because Wally is not on morphine yet, because he has just enough awareness, just enough ability to communicate with me. I’m with him almost all day and night—little breaks, for swimming, for walking the dogs. Outside it snows and snows, deeper and deeper; we seem to live in a circle of lamplight. I rub his feet, make him hot cider. All week I feel we’re taking one another in, looking and looking. I tell him I love him and he says I love you, babe, and then when it’s too hard for him to speak he smiles back at me with the little crooked smile he can manage now, and I know what it means. I play music for him, the most encompassing and quiet I can find: Couperin, Vivaldi, the British soprano Lesley Garrett singing arias he loves, especially the duet from Lakmé: music of freedom, diving, floating. The last picture I paste into my album is an old Polaroid of Wally leaping out of a swimming pool, in a blur of brilliant water, flinging himself into the daylight.
How can this be written? Shouldn’t these sentences simply be smithereened apart, broken in the hurricane?
Thursday night, January 20. Wally’s smiling. I get the Polaroid and ask him to show me that smile again, and