Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [42]
I tell Bill everything. About the ease of it, the awe and mystery, and Bill listens carefully, closing his eyes sometimes as if to listen more closely, sometimes opening them wide as if to take more of the story into himself. I try not to leave anything out; I can tell what he wants from me is completeness, any sense I can give of actuality, any guesses this eyewitness to last things may have made. I have feelings, experience, intuition more than I have knowledge in any conventional sense—but isn’t that part of what being with dying teaches us, different sorts of knowing?
Then Phil’s lying across Bill’s feet, resting on the soft green chenille, as though he’s fallen asleep there, dreaming. I understand, the way he holds him, what Phil has done. It’s him who’s made this room what it is, who has protected a space for Bill in which he can continue—so fully, and so fully supported—to be himself. My friend Jean, in whose safe blue bedroom I will fall apart, a month from now, wrote a poem that ends
And me,
I got what I wanted.
I died with my life around me.
Isn’t that what any of us would ask for, to be fully in our lives as we leave them, to have been ourselves all the way first? This is the gift that Phil’s love is giving to Bill. In the absolute endangerment of illness, here is safety. In the face of reduction, identity. In the face of indignity, respect. In the face of erasure, here is intimacy, the sustaining of context which preserves the self.
It’s as if Bill floats, sweet boy, talking now about his plans for his funeral—only white flowers, his music, but what color lining for his casket?—and the carefully orchestrated party he intends for Phil to throw afterward. He drifts in the space Phil’s attention has created, easy there, despite it all, an odd and heartbreaking ease.
I know what the price of this is for Phil—the exhaustion, the continuous focus on another, the postponement of one’s own needs, but it’s also clear to me how much he wants to give this to Bill; it doesn’t even seem a choice, exactly, just what there is to be done. Phil can’t see himself the depth and magnitude of the gift; he is so far inside it he has no means of measure.
Bill is having the best time, talking away, and suddenly he’s starving, and eats two turkey-on-white-bread sandwiches and two little packages of salty pretzels, more than he’s put away in weeks. We’ll learn, the next day, that he’ll throw it all up in the night, but it doesn’t matter; he’s hungry and happy in the moment. A vital pulse gleams through all his pleasures, his plans, his careful posthumous hosting of his friends.
What I’m seeing is the kindest and sweetest mirror of the last of my life with Wally, and so rather than returning me to difficulty and pain, the visit is somehow restorative, bracingly genuine, consoling. Where could it be clearer, here in the heart of abandonment, what love achieves?
A Black Beaded Dress
This is how it happens: I’m driving back from Boston with Phil, in that happily intimate space the interior of a car is, at night, with a friend, a chance for extended conversation interrupted only by a stop for gas or coffee. When have we ever had a chance to talk like this, not at a party or a reading or in the hurry of a chance encounter on the street?
I’m talking about what it’s like for me, with Wally three months gone; Phil’s talking about how he imagines it will be for him, how he doesn’t want to imagine it but has to, needs to, in order to have some sense of a tenable future. For each of us there’s so much in what the other says that we recognize, and what an aid and comfort that simple fact is: somebody else feels or has felt like me. We’re entirely encompassed in our conversation when we come upon a detour; the highway’s been closed, south of Plymouth, and just beyond