Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [124]
Love to you both,
Mark
Wally had joined the invisible majority, leaping from the bed of which he was so weary. Out of the top of his head, I felt, into the empyrean. Billy enlarged the photo I’d found of him leaping from the swimming pool years before—grinning, arms flung above his head, the droplets of water like rushing lines of energy; the image came to stand, for me, for the way he’d leapt from earth. The photo sat on the table beside the brass box containing his ashes, at the memorial.
He and I both, I thought, were learning to negotiate a new element. I was learning to breathe, to walk, to eat, to remember to do those things without him.
February 17, 1994
Dear Diane,
Thank you—you’ve been a welcome and steady presence in the mail, and I know you understand that I’d have answered sooner if I could. I’m at a point of getting my feet more on the ground, feeling back on earth, where I am sometimes glad to be and sometimes, of course, not. When someone that close to you dies it’s like having some kind of double vision, part of me being so clearly with him or near him, seeing the world from the other side. For the first week or two things were so lovely to me—fruit in the grocery store, the sky, the big cloth jellyfish-thing in the automatic car wash that sudses up your windshield. Wally was looking out at the world through me. And there was then the other part of me which was just plain bereft, missing him terribly. I’m living much more in that latter part now, which I guess is what happens—we have to come back here where we, after all, live. Oh. It’s wildly difficult and at the same time something I seem to be able to do. Everything about this is violent contradiction—my life at its most real and at its most terrible at once, Wally dead but somehow a profound sense of mercy and peace, even joy, around him. I lost him and feel like I’ve fallen in love with him all over again. Things were never so complicated in my life, yet all I have to do is just feel my way through the day. Days…
February 17, 1994
Dear Herb,
…I think there are more lessons in the last month of my experience than the rest of my life will allow me to articulate; I’ve been shown so much that I can’t begin to understand, that I am only starting to say. And out of all that I could enter into here—more time for that, so much time now—I’ll say only that Wally’s death taught me that, as in anything else, nothing is conclusive. There’s no time there, where he is. And one of the many contradictions in this period of intensely lived dualities is that I have felt so close to him, in love with him again in another way, at the same time that I’ve lost him. Presence and absence tumble together the way time is all atumble now; I’m awash in it. I wonder if dying doesn’t make a kind of spasm in time, as if some radiance leaks out of the opening the dying make—at least the opening this dying man made—between worlds, enough of a shine to turn time inside out for a while. Everything poured toward that moment, a watershed, and since then the waters of these hours and days, of years really, have seemed all commingling, and I am not sure if and don’t care whether I am in now or then…
In some way I had joined the invisible, too. I think that when people die they make those around them feel something like they felt; that may be the dying’s first legacy to us. I’ve had friends who died in confusion or rage or terror, and the living who knew them felt, then, confusion or rage or terror. Acceptance breeds acceptance, as Wally’s attitude during his illness had shown; it’d been easy, somehow, for the people who took care of him to do so. He seemed, to those who carried him, to have made himself light.
I don’t know what it might have been like for me had I not been present at the moment when Wally died, if I hadn’t been there to know that enormous intimacy, that sense of brightness