Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [17]
And out on the shore that day, the seals were swimming—the first I’d seen alive and unthreatened for weeks, and the last I would see that season. They were watching me and the dogs, floating there in their untouchable pack, beautiful faces looking back at me from the other world, which I was not allowed to reach.
115 Beacon Street
Being in grief, it turns out, is not unlike being in love.
In both states, the imagination’s entirely occupied with one person. The beloved dwells at the heart of the world, and becomes a Rome: the roads of feeling all lead to him, all proceed from him. Everything that touches us seems to relate back to that center; there is no other emotional life, no place outside the universe of feeling centered on its pivotal figure.
And in grief, as in love, we’re porous, permeable. There is something contagious about this openness. Other people sense it and respond to us differently, since our unguardedness seems to invite them in.
I went back to Boston for a day, a few weeks after Wally died. The reasons for this trip weren’t entirely clear to me when I decided to go. I knew I wanted to walk around the old neighborhood, where we first lived together, and I thought perhaps I’d take some pictures.
In grief and in love—so allied, perhaps, as to be severe gradations of one state?—the places and things associated with the beloved take on a shine, a numinosity which radiates out all the energy, the depth of emotion and meaning with which they have been invested.
It wasn’t as if we hadn’t been back often, since the years in the early eighties when we lived together and apart in a neighborhood of brownstones and brick rowhouses, iron fences, and lampposts and April’s splendid flowering trees. After we moved to the suburbs south of Boston together we’d gone into the city constantly, for real life; after we moved to Vermont we’d come back often for a badly needed dose of urbanity, acceptance, and style. But in those days it wasn’t as if we were returning for our past; our visits had more to do with the present, with dipping into the city we could enjoy now, then hurrying home, glad we didn’t live there anymore, in the speed and abrasion of it.
Our trips back to the city, the last few years, had been trips to the hospital, for appointments with the doctor who was supposed to be more knowledgeable than anyone in Provincetown; the medical care in Boston had a reputation for being cutting-edge, and all the technical arsenal of the industry—MRIs, CAT scans, electronic and nuclear wonders—were located in the city’s cluster of hospitals. These regular visits were maddening, in their blandness and lack of news or insight or even good human commiseration. Each time was the same: we reported symptoms, the doctor wrote them down, said something equivocal. We’d combine these unsatisfying episodes with some shopping, with dinner and a walk. But it seemed, quickly, too tiring to do anything but drive into the hospital parking garage, get to the appointment, and get home again so Wally could go back to his couch, or, later, to bed. And then there were months we no longer bothered to go, since the travel seemed a needless undertaking, an investment of energy Wally didn’t have, pain and aggravation caused for no good reason. We’d see our local doctor, and he could talk to the high-powered experts on the phone.
So it had been a long time since I had walked through the original neighborhood of our union. Perhaps, before Wally died, it wouldn’t have been possible to return in quite this way. Coming to the end of