Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [123]
That’s a strange part, that I couldn’t have imagined before—how much real joy there is commingled with all this awfulness. I don’t know if I can explain it. Partly it has to do with the experience of having been with Wally all through the end of his life, of feeling incredibly close to him, involved in his dying, and how peaceful it was for him, how ready he was to get out of his body and its attendant limitations that he’d put up with (with both grace and frustration) over the last couple of years. The last year especially. I never felt so completely inside my life—no, inside of life—as I did in those last days when despite the fact that he couldn’t talk there was such a sense of connection between us. The day before he died all the life in him seemed to move into his face and eyes, just burning there, and he was staring at me and our dogs and everything with such intensity, taking us all in. When he seemed to sail away, or really to leap and somersault away, I felt—I knew—this tremendous sense of liberation, of freedom, and almost immediately, in the devastation of being there with Wally’s body, I started to experience this duality. Here was the body I’d loved, the only vehicle through which I’d ever known him, but it so plainly wasn’t him—a very good part of him, yes, but not him. And while I felt absolutely stuck in the world where he wasn’t, I also felt this terrific sort of secret sense of intimacy with him, so connected. I felt like I had a seat on both sides of the veil, you know—part of me with him, looking back at this world which seemed so radiant and lovely and peculiar, and part of me squarely here and miserable in a place without him, bereft and totally helpless. Ay.
Well, I’m more firmly on earth now, which sometimes in the last few weeks has been the last place I want to be. I found myself walking down the street in town on a weekend when we had tourists here again and thinking, “How much longer do I have to be here?” Not in Provincetown, I mean. And then I’ve remembered work, which I love. The work of writing. And I’ve felt restored by all the people who’ve been around to help me through, and by walking the dogs in the woods and on the shore. And most especially by my sense of having been in ways I can’t yet articulate re-educated, about living, by having been through Wally’s dying. I keep thinking of Whitman: “to die is different than anyone had supposed…”
I’ve been very grateful, too, for having this time off. I thought I was going to be using it to take care of Wally. Selfishly, I wish that is what I were doing—though I also know that he left the world at exactly the time when he couldn’t enjoy this life any more. I have a picture of him, Phil, a Polaroid I took on Thursday night, grinning away—and he died on Saturday!
He—and I—were so lucky that he didn’t have one of those awful kinds of opportunistic infections that would have just hurt and hurt him. Lucky, perversely, that he had something that the doctors didn’t know the first thing about. They didn’t know what to do, so they didn’t do anything—no poisonous “therapy” that would have just made the last part of his life more miserable. They left him alone, and we took care of him right here at home, and ushered him out of the world. He never had to go to the hospital once.
Anyway, I was talking about time off—it feels so right to have no obligations except to my own feelings. Which really do constitute a full-time job right now. Some people have said I’d be better off working or something, but I think they just don’t get it. I have a feeling your good words and wishes had to do with the good fortune that’s come to me. Thank you for that…Literary life helps me to have a future right now, a sense of more to do, a world to connect with.
I hope coming back to Fresno’s been good for you both—at least you’re missing (I am pretty sure) the snow upon snow that’s tumbled