Heaven's Coast - Mark Doty [95]
Emily Dickinson, a poet so encyclopedic she can be consulted like an oracle, helps to explain.
Suspense—is Hostiler than Death—
Death—tho’soever Broad,
Is just Death, and cannot increase—
Suspense—does not conclude—
But perishes—to live anew—
But just anew to die—
Annihilation—plated fresh
With Immortality—
Death is “just death, and cannot increase”; there is no further, no still-to-come. Death puts an end to the multiplication of possibility. This has happened, nothing else. Black as this obliterating balm is, it also has in it, after long illness, an element of relief.
There is no relief in long illness, which suspends us in not-knowing. Every case of AIDS is unique; each person has AIDS in his or her own way. We couldn’t know what was coming, we could only hold our breaths as it began, slowly, it seemed then—though so swift now, in retrospect’s compression—to make itself known.
A season of fear, after Bobby, though not always fear expressed. Fear contained, lived through and with, “Hostiler than Death.” It was the time when Wally was most in pain—psychic distress, the terror of uncertainty, the fear of what opened before him. Physical pains began, too—headaches, especially, gripping sieges that would keep him on the couch for days, dosed on horse-pill-sized ibuprofen, then on codeine. Then he’d feel better suddenly, released from the punishing grip at his temples, but tired, pale, erased.
Perhaps this year’s hardest for me to describe because I could hardly bear to look at what was happening, to let myself see it. There was so little I could do. Later, I could at least attend to the countless little needs of a man who couldn’t walk, but now his difficulties, his growing sense of diminishment, were things neither of us seemed able to do a thing about. We both wavered on the edge of depression. These darkening months, what could I be but his witness? And how could I bear that?
That late winter and spring were the season of Wally’s most powerful dreams, which frightened me, with their seeming rehearsal for death, although he’d report them, mornings, with a tone much more like wonder.
In one, at the end of a long tunnel, a great Being stood in the light. The Being himself didn’t really have a gender, Wally said, though you had to call him something. He was of human size, but his arms were full of people, men and women, and somehow they were of human size, too. The proportions were all just right. The people said to Wally, “Come with us, we’re going dancing.”
“And they seemed so glad to be going,” he said, “and so glad to have me join them. But I said, ‘I’m not ready yet.’”
In another dream, Wally watched his own funeral, which was taking place in a church in Rockland, the town where he grew up. His body was dressed, laid out; from the air above, he watched himself, watched his mother and me, wanting to tell us where he was, but removed from us, still, literally above it all.
Another night he traveled to a distant place where a group of men sat a table playing cards. It was a room between heaven and earth, and when one of the men stood up to greet him, Wally realized it was his father, dead these fifteen years. He was so happy, so reassured to see his father again, but the older man said, “It’s not time yet, son. You’ve got to go back home.”
The tone of awe with which Wally’d tell me these dreams was contagious; I couldn’t help but feel it, the sense of dread turning into something else—that sense of adventure, that eagerness with which he’d always greeted the world? And yet I wanted him, too, not to accept. Shouldn’t he struggle to live?
To write was to court overwhelming feeling. Not to write was to avoid, but to avoid was to survive. Though writing was a way of surviving, too: experience was unbearable, looked at head on, but not to