Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [121]
Friday, January 21, the last words I’ll write for a month:
Time’s the engine that decks
the world in its beautiful clothes.
And not one, not one is exempt.
Wally’s breathing changes, becomes heavier, regular; breathing’s work now, as if it were the audible sign of some transformative process within. He seems turned in on himself, not speaking; I don’t think he can speak now. I touch him and talk to him. We know it’s time for the morphine, in an eye dropper, on his tongue; perhaps there’s no pain, but if there is he couldn’t tell us, and the opiate will ease the work for him. Rena comes and says good-bye; his eyes are closed when she comes into the room, but he opens the right one, the still-good side of his face, and takes her in. She tells him she hopes he’s not scared, and they spend a long time looking at each other. She says, “Knowing you has been a great gift in my life,” and that she’ll always carry him in her heart. Then she’s quiet, giving him her love. “And then we looked at each other some more,” she told me later, “and I kissed him and wished him a safe and joyful journey, and I left, and I didn’t see him in his body again.”
I call his mother, who’s planning to come Sunday. She comes Saturday morning instead, but by then his eyes are closed. She sits alone with him for a while. He opens his right eye just a tiny bit; we can tell that he sees her. All that afternoon he looks out at us through that little space, but I know he sees and registers; I know that he’s loving us, actively; if I know nothing else about this man, after nearly thirteen years, I know that. So into the line of his vision I bring Thisbe and Portia, and Arden, and Beau, and then I sit there myself, all afternoon, the lamps on, since the house is circled in snow and early winter darkness. The afternoon’s so quiet and deep it seems almost to ring, like chimes, a cold, struck bell. I sit into the evening, when he closes his eyes.
There is an inaudible roaring, a rush beneath the surface of things, beneath the surface of Wally, who has now almost no surface—as if I could see into him, into the great hurrying current, that energy, that forward motion which is life going on.
I was never this close to anyone in my life. His living’s so deep and absolute that it pulls me close to that interior current, so far inside his life. And my own. I know I am going to be more afraid than I have ever been, but right now I am not afraid. I am face to face with the deepest movement in the world, the point of my love’s deepest reality—where he is most himself, even if that self empties out into no one, swift river hurrying into the tumble of rivers, out of individuality, into the great rushing whirlwind of currents.
God moving on the face of the waters.
Suddenly I’m so tired I think I can’t stay awake another minute. Darren comes in—he’s been in and out all day, spelling me, seeing where things are—and says he’ll sit with Wally awhile. I say I’ll sleep on the couch for an hour. I don’t think I’ve been lying down ten minutes when I sit up, wide awake. Darren is in fact on the way to fetch me, but I’d have come on my own. I know it’s time.
I say to Wally, while the breath comes more shallowly, All the love in the world goes with you.
Each breath he draws in goes a little less further down into his body, so easily. He never struggles; there’s no sense of difficulty, no sense of holding on.
Arden stands up, suddenly, moved by what imperative I don’t know, and falls out of the bed. Darren says, That’s just Arden, he’s okay, not wanting anything to steal Wally’s attention from where he is now.
I say, You go easy, babe, go free.
The world seems in absolute suspension, nothing moving anywhere, everything centered.
Go easy, but you go.
Twelve Months
I couldn’t be in the house when they took his body away, when the workers from the funeral home came, late, in the bitter cold, whiskey warm on one’s breath, their coats alive with the chill they wore in from outside. I could hardly be there when Paolo came,