Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [50]
Do I feel anything besides stunned, a numb disbelief that I’m going to another funeral, in a few days, in Newark, that Lynda’s vanished?
I feel this rush of compassion for David, who couldn’t have known what was coming, at least not the way I knew what was coming for Wally. David is my age exactly but a few days younger; we are both forty and our lives have broken in half, ground to wrack and powder. Compassion that he had no time to prepare, when I had this long time to look at what was coming. Was it slow? Did it race by me? Is there any way to even approach getting ready? I made the arrangements, found the help, discovered what could allow Wally and me to live as best we could, but what preparation could I make in my heart? Is it good, the knowledge I had? What’s the difference in our grief, our rages, our bouts of numbness (relief, sometimes, from howling pain)?
I feel this dread of the world, of the impossible processes of loss: my lover and then my best friend gone in the space of two months? The world’s a maw, a grinding machine. Who or what’s to be eaten next? I go to Rena’s, a town away, for dinner, and I become completely obsessed with the candles I’ve left burning on the mantel, those glass-encased prayer candles Catholics light at altars, the sort that burn for days, supposedly seven, though the exact number always seems to vary. One’s been flaming continuously for Wally since he died, some outward token of the flame inside me directed toward him. The dead can see light, my friend Mekeel says. I’ve lit another for Lynda. During dinner I become certain they’re going to get too hot, the glass will crack, the hot wax will pour out, perhaps the wick will not be drowned by the liquid wax and keep burning, so that the hot wax will all catch flame, the mantel and the wood floor beginning to burn. I am sure my house must be burning; I find I don’t care so much about anything in it except the photographs of Wally and the dogs; the fire is going to take my dogs and they are all I have; there is nothing else for me in the world. I call home and discover that the answering machine works, so it can’t have melted, but I still can’t rest until I call my neighbors and have them check the house.
I am standing in death’s floodplain, I am in the way of a tidal rush of loss. What is reality but a system for carrying people and things away?
But mostly I feel anger, inadmissible anger which is so big that it almost obscures grief, a dark body between me and the edges of the sorrow I can see but not fully feel. I struggle because I don’t want to admit it, but I am full of rage. Wally did not have a choice, could not through any powers he might muster have changed a stroke of his history, could not rewrite a word of that last nine months’ text of erasure and of disappearance. But Lynda could.
Couldn’t she? I know addiction’s itself an illness, I know she lived in one long struggle to gain control, to hold herself intact, but how can I help but feel she had a choice? Perhaps not to control the steering wheel, that single night, but to alter the course of the nights and days that led her there, to confront and examine her circumstances in order to live. How vain and self-indulgent self-destructiveness looks in the face of AIDS! The virus in its predatory destruction seems to underline the responsibility of the living; life’s an unlikely miracle, an occasion of strangeness and surprise, and isn’t it appalling to dismiss it, to discard the gift? Isn’t it horrifying, to choose not to live when you can choose?
Which is not to say that her pain wasn’t real, her struggles the result of deep faultlines that shook her to the very core. My friend must have wrestled so terribly, and who am I to say that her disease was any less relentless than Wally’s? Partly my rage is just anger that she’s left me, too. And partly my rage is at the world, at God, at the blind bone-breaking ugly design of things.
And somewhere underneath all that is the