Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [29]
I don’t know anything different about death than I ever have, but I feel differently. I inhabit this difference in feeling—or does it live in me?—at the same time as I’m sorrowing. The possibility of consolation, of joy even, does not dispel the sorrow. Sorrow is the cathedral, the immense architecture; in its interior there’s room for almost everything: for desire, for flashes of happiness, for making plans for the future. And for watching all those evidences of ongoing life crumble in the flash of remembering, in the recurring wave of fresh grief.
But I do feel differently. What is this difference?
It still makes me draw a sharp breath, still almost stops my heart to think of that precise moment, when I could feel Wally going, not just each breath descending less deeply into his chest, but a kind of aura of transformation, a quality in the energy around him. After the last breath—no struggle, no grasping at life, the easiest of leave-takings—I swear I had the clearest image of Wally leaping free, as if he’d been so ready to go, as if some space had opened in the wall behind his head, and that he’d simply leapt out through that space. Which was not a space at all in the literal sense, but rather a possibility, a shift in the quality of being from the ordinary life of the room. The room—the whole house—took on a different tenor; there was a kind of heat and light to it, a humming intensity. My house held within in it the kind of resonance that a cello or a violin creates, that rich sound that seems to move so deeply into us, and to linger there, though there wasn’t any sound. I could feel that depth, that vibration, and not because I was mad with grief; I wasn’t, not yet. I knew that after that moment, from it, a universe of pain and of loss would open out, but I also knew that this hour was not that time.
This was the hour of passing, and it was clear to me, as certain as I’ve ever been of anything, that Wally had been lifted, transfigured, and freed in that moment, which had a kind of reality above the ordinary terms of sorrow or grief or madness. What I felt or experienced, the fact that I was going to be alone now, the outer trappings of loss (strange as it sounds, even the body seemed a trapping) weren’t of the essence in that hour.
The essence was the holiness of what had taken place in the room. Later that night I wouldn’t be able to go back in there, to his hospital bed and my single iron bed pushed up against it, but in the morning when I walked in I felt the whole space still vibrating, like the aftertone of a struck tuning fork, still resonating. I can return to that tone, even now; I hear it—no, feel it—reverberant somewhere beneath the surface of the world.
In my mind, in the reasoning, arguing, reading part of me which teaches classes and reviews books and conducts daily life, I can doubt this entirely. And in my heart I can sentimentalize Wally’s death, because, of course, I want him to live forever. Of course I want to be with him again in some way other than the way I am with him now, in my meditations and reveries and associations, even though no version of heaven ever presented to me has been very convincing.
And I can attempt to rationalize my perceptions about death away by thinking that it’s just that human beings crave reality, and that going straightforwardly toward Wally’s death together, with only the barest denial those last months to keep us sane, had about it a genuineness which we thirst for, and bears with it a kind of satisfaction. Don’t we long for the genuine, even as we flee it?
But still—there is some firm place in me which knows that what happened to Wally, whatever it was, whatever it is that death is as it transliterates us, moving us out of this life into what we can’t know, is kind.
I shock myself, writing that. I know that many deaths are anything but gentle. I know people suffer terribly; I know how blessed we were that the particular brand of afflictions