Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [49]
I hear things are starting to turn, beginning to change: she’s going to meetings, has a sponsor, is admitting that she’s been in bad shape, owning up that things have been out of control.
So I think about what I want to say, and build up courage to say it. I want to meet and talk, I want to say, I love you and I can’t stand it when you do this to yourself, I have to keep my distance from you now because I don’t have the strength to bear it. Please, go home, go where your support is. I’ll be here for you later, I’ll be connected with you again as soon as I can. So I call and leave a message on her machine that I want to talk. It’s Sunday; I tell her I’ll be home that night and then away for a couple of days; if we don’t talk tonight, let’s talk on Wednesday. She doesn’t return my call that night (later I’ll hear she was out drinking). Monday I’m going to Boston. Tuesday she goes to Boston, too, to see her shrink, and on the way home drives her car—doing what, eighty? eighty-five?—into a tree just past Exit 4.
Wild arrogance, to imagine there won’t be more to feel because you won’t be able to feel it. To think no more loss can happen because you can’t hold it.
But the dreadful rears up, enormous, uncontainable, too large to apprehend and yet stubbornly insistent upon being real. I say, I can’t, I won’t, how can I even begin, but the fact towers, dominates the world.
A single car accident, at high speed on a wet road. A suicide? I don’t think so, not in the sense of a deliberate choice made to end her life, not in the sense of Lynda deciding to die, then and there, or planning it. And yet all her last months seemed a careening out of control, as if the steering wheel had started racing in her hand months before, as if she’d turned then into some skid she couldn’t pull herself out of. How much did it matter, exactly, what she’d intended just then? Her family said she was sober, at the time of the crash, but did that matter exactly either, since that moment was part of a plummeting fall from sobriety—a condition more brittle and precarious for her than I’d ever known? Suddenly everything about the way she’d been living seemed a kind of flirtation with death, a courting of death. Even the poems, beautifully wrought, full of engagement with life, seemed in retrospect full of negotiations with mortality, as if everything she ever wrote was a rehearsal for a suicide note. But she was going to meetings, she was thinking of going home, she was raising the bright flag of some will to live, even if it was wavering, while she stared into the face of her rat.
But didn’t we feel, everyone who knew her, as if she’d killed herself? Everyone said to me something beginning with If only…
If only I’d been there, reached out in some way. A suicide spreads responsibility everywhere; everyone tries to respond, somehow, to the brutal gesture. In stunned anger, in horror and grief, the wind knocked out of us, we’re all reacting all day and evening on the phone. Just when I had stopped this, just when I wasn’t telling the story of Wally’s death over and over again, I’m back in that electronic network of friends, students, everyone who knew her in some way wanting to connect with everyone else, touch base, tell a story, speculate (If only…). The phone had become a kind of drug for me in the weeks after Wally died: a source of contact, something to do besides weeping, besides lying in that empty bed, besides walking in the frozen