Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [125]
I couldn’t have understood what a grace there is around dying, that sort of awe of which beauty is, as Rilke understood, the edge: “For beauty is nothing but the beginning,” he writes near the opening of the Duino Elegies, “of terror, which we are still just able to endure.”
The price we pay for keeping death at such a distance from ourselves is a great one; holding it so far from us, we cannot see its shine.
I wonder now if Rilke’s terms might just as easily be reversed: is terror only the edge of a beauty we can hardly bear?
The shine around Wally’s dying, the grace of it, was what would carry me through those first months, what would sustain me. Not that I didn’t veer crazily, every day dissolving, at some point, into tears and exhaustion, dizzying grief. But it felt possible, out of a kind of connection to him carried through death, out of the spirit’s sheer shock of recognition at the naked beauty of his dying, to go on.
And what a long season I was given, a time to reflect and to reel, submerged in my own grief.
Time to mark every anniversary; each week, at first, I can hardly bear Saturday night. Each month, the twenty-second looms on the calendar, its pair of two’s like black bent-necked swans. I think, Can it be a month? How can it be two?
Time to revisit our old cities, to walk hours every day in the dunes, to begin the work of telling which this book is.
Time to stumble awkwardly back toward the world—into mistakes, failed stabs at single life. Which is not to say there was not respite, in other bodies, the refuge and affirmation of skin and touch, what could give comfort and pleasure, in a world where bodies gave such grief, where bodies disappeared.
Time to fall, as whatever it was that had carried me slowly faded, and I found myself firmly on earth, in my body, in my own singular life, into my own illness—of the spine or of the soul. Were they one and the same? Chiropractic, yoga, exercise, rest, acupuncture, massage—everything seemed to help a little, nothing to help enough. A ruptured disk, a rupture of reality? I wouldn’t need to draw a distinction, I guess, except that I had to do something; and there were days I could barely walk.
Early one summer morning, taking Arden and Beau on the footpath around the forest pond, I hurt so badly, so sharply and insistently, that I can’t stand up any longer. Pain shoots down my left leg with a wild, fierce insistence. I lie down on the sandy path, and find myself saying aloud, to no one, Wally’s old line: “Now what?”
Patience, slow and careful movements, days of lying in bed and reading, venturing out for treatments. I buy a secondhand laptop computer so I can write in bed, and by August I’m stirring again. I’m a bit delicate but, dosed on anti-inflammatories and visiting a physical therapist two or three times a week, I’m functioning.
I go to New Hampshire to give a poetry reading at a beautiful old meetinghouse in the country. I read a poem there about a neighbor of mine who used to take his elderly springer spaniel for walks in a sort of rope harness he’d made, since the poor old creature used to lie down for a rest and then be unable to lift himself again on his wobbly legs. My neighbor would hoist Charley, by means of the harness, and eventually the walk was more a human endeavor than a canine one, though it seemed to make both parties happy.
An old friend, Nancy, has come to the reading, and we talk about all that’s been happening for both of us, and of course she notices how stiff and careful I am in my movements, and asks about my back. Later, she sends this letter:
Dear Mark,
It was such a joy to see you and hear you read again. Your poems do me good, as though each color, fin and animal pelt had been ground into a homeopathic mash and spooned into my system. Please feel welcome to stay with David and me any time you’re in this area—it’s quiet.
As I was falling asleep last night,