Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [133]
What was can’t be restored; I can neither have Wally back in the flesh, nor return to the self I inhabited before his death. The vessel’s not cracked but broken, all the way through, permanently.
The break, from now on, is an inescapable part of who I am, perhaps the inescapable part. Hasn’t it become my essential definition, my central fact: I loved a man who died?
But who can live, day by day, in pieces? Loss shatters us, first, but then what?
Alfred’s metaphor offers a possibility: to honor the part of oneself that’s irreparable. Not to apologize for it, disguise it, not try to mend it in any seamless way. Studying the cup, the viewer might see the rupture first; to fill the crack with gold means to allow the break prominence, to let it shine.
Broken, ongoing, we see at once what it was and what it is. Wearing its history, the old cup with its gilt scars becomes, I imagine, a treasure of another sort, whole in its own fragmentation, more deeply itself, veined with the evidence of time.
A Gift from Bill
Bill died late in the spring, weeks after our visit—at home, amazingly; after the long hospital siege, he’d been allowed some peaceful weeks in his own surroundings, among his own things. And he took care of those things, picking out gifts for people, directing Phil to wrap them.
When Phil came down to Provincetown in the summer, I hadn’t seem him since the wake, which was just the extravaganza of white flowers Bill had ordered. The trunk of his car was full of gifts for various people, wrapped in bright paper and bows.
Phil had an alarming story. During the funeral service—its audience half Bill’s gay friends and half his Catholic family—Phil had told the story of the green chenille robe, and a tale, characteristically Bill, of how once Bill had played a dress-up game with some very young relatives, nephews or nieces, who were expressing confusion about gender. “Are you a man or a woman?” they’d asked.
“I’m a drag queen,” Bill had answered.
Half the congregation had loved this story; half had not been amused. Phil found, suddenly, that the emotional temperature shifted; welcomed by Bill’s family for years, he was suddenly given dozens of cold shoulders. When he confronted Bill’s mother, after days of this, he learned it was the story that had turned the tide.
“Why,” she asked, “did you have to tell people about that?” Meaning, of course, why did you have to tell everyone my son was gay, why did you have to talk about it? Meaning, if my son wasn’t gay he’d still be alive.
Things changed quickly then. Phil had expected to continue living, at least for a while, in the house the two of them had shared, though Bill owned it. But in two weeks time the house was up for sale, and Phil, in the whirlwind of grief, was also separating their possessions, packing up his things, displaced.
A horrifying story, and it made me grateful for Wally’s family, who’ve expressed nothing but gratitude for the way he was taken care of. Even Jimmy, whose disappearance from our lives rankled me so deeply, said to me at the memorial service, “Thank you for taking care of my brother.” And everyone’s understood that I still