Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [132]
So it felt very right. Meditating about it today I felt this great sense of serenity and light. We did what he wanted and I feel different now—full of grief but less anxious somehow, more—aligned? Certainly my bones are aligned again, in wrist and in back—maybe I needed the physical descent of this break in order to accomplish the emotional descent?
Things have shifted, with the passage of the whole year; and though sorrow isn’t lessened I’m in a different relationship to it somehow. Last week in NYC, at St. John the Divine, I was at that wonderful altar for PWA’s. I lit a candle, and I was crying for a while, and then I heard Wally’s voice in the back of my head say, Okay, now let’s go to Bloomingdale’s…
I saved a bit of ash for myself, in a little cherrybark tea canister from Japan I got in New York. I was afraid that there wouldn’t be enough intimacy in the family ceremony, although it turned out to be fine. But I am still glad to have this bit of his body with me, though I am not sure what I’ll do with it. Maybe take it also out to the marsh, alone—or maybe take a bit to Venice next month—or maybe just wait…
What I’d soon feel, about that little canister of ash, was that it was fine to have it with me. There seemed no imperative to take it out to the marsh, and it didn’t feel right for it to go to some unfamiliar place. Nor do I feel any need to put it away, to avoid it or forget what it contains. It’s a comfortable presence. It represents, perhaps, the way that a part of Wally’s with me always, but it’s not like I thought—I thought I’d need to hold on to this symbol, this proof of his having been.
I understand, differently, the longing of Antigone to bury her brother properly. Something shifts, with the body where it belongs; Wally’s body belongs in the huge sun-burnished field of the salt marsh beside our tiny airport, the first and last of home I see, by the way, when I fly in and out of town. And that smaller part belongs also with me, is, already, part of me.
I didn’t know it would make me happy, when Wally’s ashes blew into my face and hair. When, after I scattered them, a fine grit of him was left on my hands, so that I could rub it against my cheeks.
I went back, the next day, and the chips of bone were still gleaming there under the water. If you didn’t know what they were, you wouldn’t know.
The next day Michael and I walked the dogs at Herring Cove, so I didn’t see what had happened.
On the third day, there was an enormously high tide, the whole marsh gone under, and I couldn’t see anything beneath that wide, steely expanse.
Epilogue: Consolations
Of course there is no consolation, for the dreadful fact of a death. Nothing makes it right. Nothing can remedy that absence, that break in the continuity of things. Nothing can fill the space Wally occupied in my life; nothing takes his place.
On an absolute level he is gone, utterly, and that absence rings at the core of every one of my days, the aftermath of a struck bell.
And yet. And yet.
There are these gifts, these perceptions or moments or aspects of experience which make it possible, desirable, to continue. Any consolation can and does dissolve, any day, into the lake of grief, that liquid realm where all bright or solid things darken and disappear. One does not lose—one does not want to lose, entirely—grief.
We live, instead, into, toward a different relation to loss, a shifting perspective: the grief not as large and overwhelming, not every day, not erasing, not entirely, what there is to praise.
And what is left, when you’ve lost what you loved most, to praise?
A Metaphor
A portion of a letter, from the poet Alfred Corn:
February 19, 1994
…What I’m working up to is to say how sorry I was to hear about Wally. I didn’t know him, but I’ve heard what a tremendous person he was, and I think I have some idea what you must be feeling. When I call up pictures of friends (none of them lovers) lost, a terrible ache comes over me, so much so that it has to go away on its own, there isn’t much by way of remedy that