Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [75]
And I am intolerant of Jim, of course, because I also long for that sort of control, which illness and death have taught me I cannot have.
A few nights after I wrote those pages, this is what I dreamed: I had to parachute from an airplane in a strange way, sitting in the kind of plastic chair you’d find in a doctor’s waiting room. I was strapped into the chair, pushed out the door, and then fell and fell, it seemed almost endlessly, toward the earth. I can’t remember landing, exactly, but where I arrived was a hospital room, and the man in the bed was alternately Wally and Jim. He—either man—was in the last hours of his life. When he died I wept and wept; the dream was full of the enormity of the weeping. In a while I knew I had to tell Wally’s mother that one of her sons had died, though by then I wasn’t sure which.
I woke then, shaken, not crying now that I was awake but aware of the sobbing that had filled my sleep. I think my dream was about compassion for Jim, about seeing him and Wally in the same bed, the same boat. Just as I think the darker underside of his spirituality is judgment, so my dream points up to me how my own judgment of him has obscured my compassion. If I were him, if I were HIV-positive, what would I have done? It’s easy for me to say I’d never disappear from my brother’s life, but I don’t know that; can any of us know what we’d do under that disfiguring pressure? Judgment is easier than compassion, my dream reminds me; the dream instructs me, falling toward loss, the fall I can’t control, though I survive it, to see the ways in which Wally and Jim are of a piece.
We tried to steer a course between fatalism and an unacceptable optimism—between feeling completely out of control and claiming a sort of complete authority neither of us could believe in. What we wanted, desperately, was some way for things to get back to “normal”—absurd as that sounds, in a way, it is also the necessary condition of ongoingness. Somehow we have to make whatever dreadful knowledge we have part of the fabric of every day; we have to find a way to continue our ordinary transactions with the world in the light of new and extraordinary knowledge. Of course nothing could ever be the same again, but how to integrate that pressure day to day, every hour? The sense of “normalcy” is founded in part on denial, on forgetting. So it’s difficult to remember, to trace the ways in which we moved toward acting as if our lives were normal again. Wally still went to work, spray-painting props and designing displays for shop windows. I tended the garden and wrote, through the summer, and in September went back to teaching. We’d go on as if we were fine, and then crash and go on again. Wally wasn’t sick, not just then; there was time in front of us—who knew how much, but suddenly any amount of time seemed a luxury, a gift. What would we do with it?
Refuge
We bought a cabin in the woods—a camp, in Vermont parlance. It wasn’t something we’d planned