Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [43]
In the morning the news comes early, my roommate rushing in from morning coffee, out of breath, shaken, saying someone from town’s died, a woman, a poet, someone in the Program: is it my friend Lynda? An accident, in Plymouth. I call the police in town who tell me to call the police there and I do, and they’re hesitant to tell me anything until I tell them Lynda’s name, tell them I’m a friend, tell them I need to know, and they tell me she’s died, in a single-car accident, that she must have died immediately, the tree she’d smashed into pushed through the roof of the old white Saab she’d bought after her last accident, a car she wanted because it would be solid and safe.
In memory, all that morning I’m standing in the kitchen, leaning against the counter because I can’t quite stand up; sometimes I’m sitting at the blue table but all the time I am talking, talking on the phone: to friends and students of Lynda’s and of mine, to her husband David’s answering machine, to her parents, to the people who have to know. I realize that Michael, her roommate, my friend, doesn’t know yet—but he’s at work, serving breakfast in a restaurant down the block, and I don’t want to tell him there. I plan that I’ll meet him at the door of the restaurant, when he gets off, so that he can hear this from me, but I don’t count on the radio playing in the dining room; Lynda’s death is reported on the morning news while Michael’s serving someone a plate of eggs. So I’m standing in the kitchen when he comes racing around the corner of the house to the door, stumbling, weeping, dissolved in terror and in pity.
Michael weeping uncontrollably in my arms: terrible mirror of myself, three months ago but also in the days since. I cry almost every day, still, though it subsides a little faster, though I don’t go back so much to this raw, stricken place of unbearable new grief. And I can’t go there now, not exactly, though Michael can. He’s twenty-five and no one close to him has ever died before; he can’t stop shaking. But it’s not as if I know something more than he does about death, not as if I have some sort of wisdom extracted from experience. I’m stricken and horrified and half-numb, and though I’d like it to be otherwise the truth is that I am full of confusion, because my grief is so inextricable from my fury and my fear, conflicting feelings tumbling together like the slap of wave on wave.
After Lynda died I thought I’d never write about her; I was too full of anger, raw and startled and afraid. Of what? It was fear for myself, I guess; how would I hold on through another death? And how could I face the bitter sense that she’d tossed her own life away, with all her extraordinary gifts, that she’s spun out of control in a long skid she could have prevented?
She’d said to a mutual friend, reflecting on her own self-destructive behavior, Well, at least if I die, think of the beautiful elegies my friends will write for me. I couldn’t bear that; I couldn’t abide that romanticizing of harm, that weird combination of self-aggrandizement and willful disregard of the gift of one’s own life.
And I was afraid too that to try to write about her was to admit chaos, to describe an emotional complexity that would utterly elude and confound me. I knew what I felt about Wally; it might be a great reservoir of pain, an overpowering sense of loss and of awe, but those feelings were clear, as transparent to me as new tide pouring over the marsh grasses. About Lynda’s death I had no such clarity.
The last time I saw her she was drunk. The middle of the day; she’d been to an AA meeting; I was