Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [131]
On the last day of November, I stepped out of a shower in Boston, where I was visiting friends, and onto a slick tile floor; I’d neglected to move the mat nearer the shower. I flew to the floor, breaking the fall with my right wrist. My friends came running to see what the terrible noise was, and the first real indication I had that something was wrong was that, when they asked me if I was all right, I found I couldn’t make a sentence. Not that I seemed to be feeling so much pain, exactly, but that pain had short-circuited my capacity to make language.
I’d broken more than my capacity for syntax; the tip of my radius, one of two long bones in my right arm, was cracked clean through. Soon I was immobilized from knuckles to elbow in a white plaster cast.
January 29, 1995
Dear friend Jean,
I was so glad to have your letter this week and your sweet message about the anniversary of Wally’s death, too—your thinking of me and of us means so much. This whole month, a year from that last passage in Wally’s life, has been something for me, a deep and difficult passage in its own right. I guess Maggie told you I had to have surgery on my wrist; the broken bit of bone was healing in the wrong place and if left alone (they said—who knows whether to believe doctors?) the movement of my hand would have been seriously impaired. So, just after Christmas I went in the hospital and had a bone graft, from my left hip into my wrist, and a titanium plate put in to hold the bone together.
Darren and Michael took good care of me at home, but I struggled—I don’t do well with anesthetics and painkillers, I hate that muffled, submerged feeling. And the breaking of a part of my body became aligned for me with the breaking of Wally’s body, with his bone being fragmented. I was going back through, in memory, those last days when he was moving into the very heart of things, the depths of last winter when we were more and more deeply inside the house, inside our lives together, approaching that mystery.
As my wrist healed and I got out of cast and splint and stitches I started to do better, as if I’d descended and was climbing up out of the cave again. By the time the anniversary day came I think I had done so much work inside about it that it was okay, sort of odd and numb, like a holiday when you are supposed to feel more than you do but you can’t really do anything. I burned the beautiful beeswax candle you gave me that day.
We didn’t scatter the ashes—because snow was forecast and his mother didn’t want to travel—but waited until yesterday instead, which was a year to the day from Wally’s service, so that felt right. His mom and one brother and sister and their partners and I went way out into the marsh, and we read the Whitman poem about the grass from “Song of Myself.” I’d forgotten that I would come to the line, “What do you think has become of the young and old men?” And then George and Susan and I threw the ashes into the wind and water in handfuls.
The tide was pouring out of the marsh, out to sea. The lightest dust swirled off in the wind, and the rest made clouds like nebula in the water, and the heaviest parts, the chips of bone, sank to the bottom and looked like pieces of clam shell, like the gulls had been eating there. And of course we had ashes on our hands and skin and clothes. Arden sat and watched. Wally’s mom couldn’t handle throwing the ashes, so she threw a rose, which Beau decided to fetch—he leapt into the cold water and brought it back about four times, till it finally fell apart. He’s the world’s court jester. I felt utterly overwhelmed and as if I could hardly bear it but I also felt like I could hear or feel Wally breathing this sigh of relief—as though what he really wanted was for his body to be part of the world, part of the sparkle of all that water. I used to imagine, when I’d walk the dogs before Wally died, that the shining path the sun makes across the sea was the way the dead went, the way home. But now Wally