I couldn’t be in the house when they took his body away, when the workers from the funeral home came, late, in the bitter cold, whiskey warm on one’s breath, their coats alive with the chill they wore in from outside. I could hardly be there when Paolo came, to write the death certificate and sit by the bed looking at Wally, filling out a form, saying something bland and consoling to me. I couldn’t be in the room when they folded his hands and lifted him onto the gurney and carried him out, so I stumbled down to the harbor with the dogs, so that we might be out of the way of what I could not bear to see because I didn’t think I could stand to remember it. Though I remember it anyway as if I were there, as I’d watched the strangers bear the wrapped red weight of him away.
The stars over the beach were enormous, dazzling, the night so cold it seemed it might crack wide open to reveal—what?—more of that chill and impossible glitter turning over us, heaven’s endless spill of ice? I was shivering and crying out loud and lost in the beginning of raw grief—strange that one can seem numb and in endless pain at once, as if there was so much grieving that I could only feel a little edge of it, though that edge was enough to keep me immobile there on the black shore in front of the empty beachfront houses. The kind of grief that would begin when his body was gone, the helpless stumbling in which I’d live. The machinery of care would move in, tomorrow, the friends who’d make sure someone was with me all those first days, who’d help me plan the service and scrub and order the house for the gathering after the service, the hundred ritual things the bereaved do in order to mark the hours of passage. The friends who’d see me through when I could, myself, hardly see the new world I had fallen into.
His wife Camille on her deathbed, Monet writes, “I found myself, without being able to help it, in a study of my beloved wife’s face, systematically noting the colors.”
What does a writer do, when the world collapses, but write?
The first thing I wrote in my journal, a month after Wally died, was something I’d heard on the radio: Ninety per cent of the matter in the universe is invisible, unaccounted for.
February. How can I begin, how can I not begin?
I’m not allowed to refuse the task, says a voice in my head. But then I don’t really want to refuse it. It’s just finding the strength. I will be swept off my feet, I will be unable to stand up any longer in these great knock-me-over waves of feeling, my legs won’t hold me.
Then I remember being with Wally, at Herring Cove, some July or August evening, one of those late hours at the beach when the light is long and golden, the air warm, hardly anyone around, so that the two of us, naked, were playing in the surf, Arden swimming out to rescue us, barking, the waves breaking over his head so that he became our sleek seal-eyed companion. The knock and tumble of waves was something we could ride, a rhythm of swell which freed us from earth, our feet lifted up, bodies carried a little of the distance toward heaven by the water’s unpredictable undulance. May feeling be like that—may it carry these pages, carry me, and lift me and set me back down again on earth.
(I never used to save copies of my own letters, in the days of typewriters, but with computers, it’s nearly automatic. This one was written to a poet whose work and spirit I love, not the Phil of “Phil and Bill” but another Philip.)
February 26, 1994
Dear Phil,
I’m just getting to the point where sentences start to fit together again, but I’ve been wanting to write for a while to thank you for your letter, and to tell you how glad I was to spend time with you and Fran at Jane’s back in November—that seems like years ago now—and say hello. I’ve felt you around in the atmosphere here, actually, since I’ve been reading The Bread of Time and loving bearing that unmistakable voice—passion and good humor, rage at injustice, plain human wonder at the weirdness and beauty of things. I am about halfway through, but that’s because I want the book to last—as well as because these days I can read for short bursts of time and then find I fall right to sleep. There’s a lot of sleeping to be done, as well as a whole lot of other stuff, two-thirds of which I swear I don’t understand at all—all this work going on inside me, necessary, and characterized by these waves of feeling that come out of nowhere, unpredictably, and either immobilize me or fill me with joy.
That’s a strange part, that I couldn’t have imagined before—how much real joy there is commingled with all this awfulness. I don’t know if I can explain it. Partly it has to do with the experience of having been with Wally all through the end of his life, of feeling incredibly close to him, involved in his dying, and how peaceful it was for him, how ready he was to get out of his body and its attendant limitations that he’d put up with (with both grace and frustration) over the last couple of years. The last year especially. I never felt so completely inside my life—no, inside of life—as I did in those last days when despite the fact that he couldn’t talk there was such a sense of connection between us. The day before he died all the life in him seemed to move into his face and eyes, just burning there, and he was staring at me and our dogs and everything with such intensity, taking us all in. When he seemed to sail away, or really to leap and somersault away, I felt—I knew—this tremendous sense of liberation, of freedom, and almost immediately, in the devastation of being there with Wally’s body, I started to experience this duality. Here was the body I’d loved, the only vehicle through which I’d ever known him, but it so plainly wasn’t him—a very good part of him, yes, but not him. And while I felt absolutely stuck in the world where he wasn’t, I also felt this terrific sort of secret sense of intimacy with him, so connected. I felt like I had a seat on both sides of the veil, you know—part of me with him, looking back at this world which seemed so radiant and lovely and peculiar, and part of me squarely here and miserable in a place without him, bereft and totally helpless. Ay.
Well, I’m more firmly on earth now, which sometimes in the last few weeks has been the last place I want to be. I found myself walking down the street in town on a weekend when we had tourists here again and thinking, “How much longer do I have to be here?” Not in Provincetown, I mean. And then I’ve remembered work, which I love. The work of writing. And I’ve felt restored by all the people who’ve been around to help me through, and by walking the dogs in the woods and on the shore. And most especially by my sense of having been in ways I can’t yet articulate re-educated, about living, by having been through Wally’s dying. I keep thinking of Whitman: “to die is different than anyone had supposed…”
I’ve been very grateful, too, for having this time off. I thought I was going to be using it to take care of Wally. Selfishly, I wish that is what I were doing—though I also know that he left the world at exactly the time when he couldn’t enjoy this life any more. I have a picture of him, Phil, a Polaroid I took on Thursday night, grinning away—and he died on Saturday!
He—and I—were so lucky that he didn’t have one of those awful kinds of opportunistic infections that would have just hurt and hurt him. Lucky, perversely, that he had something that the doctors didn’t know the first thing about. They didn’t know what to do, so they didn’t do anything—no poisonous “therapy” that would have just made the last part of his life more miserable. They left him alone, and we took care of him right here at home, and ushered him out of the world. He never had to go to the hospital once.
Anyway, I was talking about time off—it feels so right to have no obligations except to my own feelings. Which really do constitute a full-time job right now. Some people have said I’d be better off working or something, but I think they just don’t get it. I have a feeling your good words and wishes had to do with the good fortune that’s come to me. Thank you for that…Literary life helps me to have a future right now, a sense of more to do, a world to connect with.
I hope coming back to Fresno’s been good for you both—at least you’re missing (I am pretty sure) the snow upon snow that’s tumbled over the east. I’ve pretty much liked it, really. All I want to do right now is stay in anyway, and catch my breath, and take time. And three feet of snow is just right for that.
Love to you both,
Mark
Wally had joined the invisible majority, leaping from the bed of which he was so weary. Out of the top of his head, I felt, into the empyrean. Billy enlarged the photo I’d found of him leaping from the swimming pool years before—grinning, arms flung above his head, the droplets of water like rushing lines of energy; the image came to stand, for me, for the way he’d leapt from earth. The photo sat on the table beside the brass box containing his ashes, at the memorial.
He and I both, I thought, were learning to negotiate a new element. I was learning to breathe, to walk, to eat, to remember to do those things without him.
February 17, 1994
Dear Diane,
Thank you—you’ve been a welcome and steady presence in the mail, and I know you understand that I’d have answered sooner if I could. I’m at a point of getting my feet more on the ground, feeling back on earth, where I am sometimes glad to be and sometimes, of course, not. When someone that close to you dies it’s like having some kind of double vision, part of me being so clearly with him or near him, seeing the world from the other side. For the first week or two things were so lovely to me—fruit in the grocery store, the sky, the big cloth jellyfish-thing in the automatic car wash that sudses up your windshield. Wally was looking out at the world through me. And there was then the other part of me which was just plain bereft, missing him terribly. I’m living much more in that latter part now, which I guess is what happens—we have to come back here where we, after all, live. Oh. It’s wildly difficult and at the same time something I seem to be able to do. Everything about this is violent contradiction—my life at its most real and at its most terrible at once, Wally dead but somehow a profound sense of mercy and peace, even joy, around him. I lost him and feel like I’ve fallen in love with him all over again. Things were never so complicated in my life, yet all I have to do is just feel my way through the day. Days…
February 17, 1994
Dear Herb,
…I think there are more lessons in the last month of my experience than the rest of my life will allow me to articulate; I’ve been shown so much that I can’t begin to understand, that I am only starting to say. And out of all that I could enter into here—more time for that, so much time now—I’ll say only that Wally’s death taught me that, as in anything else, nothing is conclusive. There’s no time there, where he is. And one of the many contradictions in this period of intensely lived dualities is that I have felt so close to him, in love with him again in another way, at the same time that I’ve lost him. Presence and absence tumble together the way time is all atumble now; I’m awash in it. I wonder if dying doesn’t make a kind of spasm in time, as if some radiance leaks out of the opening the dying make—at least the opening this dying man made—between worlds, enough of a shine to turn time inside out for a while. Everything poured toward that moment, a watershed, and since then the waters of these hours and days, of years really, have seemed all commingling, and I am not sure if and don’t care whether I am in now or then…
In some way I had joined the invisible, too. I think that when people die they make those around them feel something like they felt; that may be the dying’s first legacy to us. I’ve had friends who died in confusion or rage or terror, and the living who knew them felt, then, confusion or rage or terror. Acceptance breeds acceptance, as Wally’s attitude during his illness had shown; it’d been easy, somehow, for the people who took care of him to do so. He seemed, to those who carried him, to have made himself light.
I don’t know what it might have been like for me had I not been present at the moment when Wally died, if I hadn’t been there to know that enormous intimacy, that sense of brightness in the depths of the dark, the atmosphere so charged it seemed almost to sing. What if I hadn’t felt the movement of energy, the leap of spirit lifting from him?
I couldn’t have understood what a grace there is around dying, that sort of awe of which beauty is, as Rilke understood, the edge: “For beauty is nothing but the beginning,” he writes near the opening of the Duino Elegies, “of terror, which we are still just able to endure.”
The price we pay for keeping death at such a distance from ourselves is a great one; holding it so far from us, we cannot see its shine.
I wonder now if Rilke’s terms might just as easily be reversed: is terror only the edge of a beauty we can hardly bear?
The shine around Wally’s dying, the grace of it, was what would carry me through those first months, what would sustain me. Not that I didn’t veer crazily, every day dissolving, at some point, into tears and exhaustion, dizzying grief. But it felt possible, out of a kind of connection to him carried through death, out of the spirit’s sheer shock of recognition at the naked beauty of his dying, to go on.
And what a long season I was given, a time to reflect and to reel, submerged in my own grief.
Time to mark every anniversary; each week, at first, I can hardly bear Saturday night. Each month, the twenty-second looms on the calendar, its pair of two’s like black bent-necked swans. I think, Can it be a month? How can it be two?
Time to revisit our old cities, to walk hours every day in the dunes, to begin the work of telling which this book is.
Time to stumble awkwardly back toward the world—into mistakes, failed stabs at single life. Which is not to say there was not respite, in other bodies, the refuge and affirmation of skin and touch, what could give comfort and pleasure, in a world where bodies gave such grief, where bodies disappeared.
Time to fall, as whatever it was that had carried me slowly faded, and I found myself firmly on earth, in my body, in my own singular life, into my own illness—of the spine or of the soul. Were they one and the same? Chiropractic, yoga, exercise, rest, acupuncture, massage—everything seemed to help a little, nothing to help enough. A ruptured disk, a rupture of reality? I wouldn’t need to draw a distinction, I guess, except that I had to do something; and there were days I could barely walk.
Early one summer morning, taking Arden and Beau on the footpath around the forest pond, I hurt so badly, so sharply and insistently, that I can’t stand up any longer. Pain shoots down my left leg with a wild, fierce insistence. I lie down on the sandy path, and find myself saying aloud, to no one, Wally’s old line: “Now what?”
Patience, slow and careful movements, days of lying in bed and reading, venturing out for treatments. I buy a secondhand laptop computer so I can write in bed, and by August I’m stirring again. I’m a bit delicate but, dosed on anti-inflammatories and visiting a physical therapist two or three times a week, I’m functioning.
I go to New Hampshire to give a poetry reading at a beautiful old meetinghouse in the country. I read a poem there about a neighbor of mine who used to take his elderly springer spaniel for walks in a sort of rope harness he’d made, since the poor old creature used to lie down for a rest and then be unable to lift himself again on his wobbly legs. My neighbor would hoist Charley, by means of the harness, and eventually the walk was more a human endeavor than a canine one, though it seemed to make both parties happy.
An old friend, Nancy, has come to the reading, and we talk about all that’s been happening for both of us, and of course she notices how stiff and careful I am in my movements, and asks about my back. Later, she sends this letter:
Dear Mark,
It was such a joy to see you and hear you read again. Your poems do me good, as though each color, fin and animal pelt had been ground into a homeopathic mash and spooned into my system. Please feel welcome to stay with David and me any time you’re in this area—it’s quiet.
As I was falling asleep last night, the image of your neighbor lifting his dog in the harness gave me a crazy idea.
You’ve carried Wally for so long, your back may not realize that earth and sky now carry the weight. I visualized Wally on the floor beside his bed, and you bending over him, buckling on a harness and leash. You stand, and slowly lift him on his hands and knees and then higher, until he’s dangling like a little dog. At first you think he’ll be much too heavy to lift from this awkward angle, and he’s worried, too, but it turns out you can manage just using the muscles in your arms. He’s light, so light that his bones must be hollow, his flesh consecrated bread. You practice raising and lowering him (the harness might need a little adjusting) and then you’re ready for some fun. Wally loves the feeling of swinging in the air; he stretches out his arms and legs like a child playing Superman. You go outside and swing him in circles, until his eyes are parallel with yours again, his weight counterbalancing yours, making you both weightless. Effortless play, your back straight—you’re both encouraged to try some yo-yo tricks, swirling and arcing—somehow Wally’s soaring body has freed you from gravity so that you’re flying too, the leash connecting you. If you feel frightened, you know you can always climb on Wally’s back; this is his element. He can hold you.
Love,
Nancy
And I do feel, really, that the part of me that resides in the world Wally inhabits now, outside the boundaries of time and space, can soar. It’s here on earth I’m having trouble.
And it is time, increasingly, to be on earth. I return to teaching, at the beginning of September, at the end of what seems a long period of inwardness. Driving to school, the first day, I almost turn in the other direction. It’s been so long since I turned outward, directing the activities of others, putting my energy into meeting people, leading a group. I’m not sure I still can; have my resources been drained away, every ounce of me taxed?
Work turns out to be, in fact, fine, and welcome. There are times I feel I’m translating, in my head, from one language to another; I’ve become a citizen of grief’s country, and now I find I don’t always easily speak the old tongue I used to know so well. Some days I don’t feel I have the strength or attention to be a good teacher, and sometimes I think I’m just going through the motions, though if the students notice this, bless them, they don’t say so. The best days are affirming, energetic; I like climbing to something outside myself. Teaching poetry feels interior and external at once, personal and yet outer-directed, social yet real.
Working again means I have health insurance, so I go for a CAT scan to give my doctor a better look at my back. The radiologist, who’d usually just write a report, calls in some alarm, saying if ever he’s seen the scans of a patient who needs a neurosurgeon, I’m him. It’s the first time the diagnosis is firmly pronounced: ruptured disk.
But I am, strangely, feeling better, despite the grim picture and the definite terms; the sciatica that left me prone on the path a month or two before seems to be receding, gradually, though I dimly recognize that I’ve also gotten used to a draining level of pain. I make an appointment for a consultation with a neurosurgeon, though I feel relieved that it takes a couple of months to even get to see him. Meanwhile, more acupuncture, more massage.
And I turn myself, for the first time since Wally’s death, resolutely outward: teaching, readings, travel, a schedule so full that I hardly know where I am, or when, and somewhere along the way I realize I’ve done it on purpose, that what I wanted was a break from my inner life.
Of course we carry ourselves with us everywhere, no matter what, but working and travel and busyness can make for a very effective drug, a temporary screen. All through the fall, I keep myself swirling, staying on the road.
Whenever I stay in hotel rooms on upper floors, I keep my distance from the windows.
Before I know it I am driving to the clinic outside of Boston where the neurosurgeon will make a pronouncement about my future. I sit in the waiting room, my palms sweating, gripping the envelope containing the mysterious black-and-white films of my CAT-scanned sacrum. I’ve looked at them in the car on the way, holding up to the light big sheets of negatives, each one bearing groups of circular images of vertebrae, like inscrutable old magic lantern slides.
I am trying very hard not to be terrified. When the doctor taps my knee with his rubber-tipped hammer, there’s real and immediate reflex, where three months before my lifeless leg had merely remained still, the reactive nerve pinched off by the rupture in my spine. And looking at the CAT scan and at me, the doctor pronounces me a terrible candidate for surgery, since I am obviously healing myself.
Ironing a shirt, I find myself thinking of Lynda, of a late winter day—how many, three, four years ago? She’s staying in a little waterfront apartment in the West End where she’s come to write, and visits us every day. Wally is tired, already, his long days of resting on the folding couch begun, and Lynda and I’ve gone to town for an afternoon walk, and to see what stores are open. Not many, but the reliable oriental imports store is lit and occupied, as it almost always is, and inside we find that the owner’s just received a shipment of kimonos, bales of old ones bought in bulk in Japan. They’ve been dry cleaned but neither pressed nor sorted, and they lie in great heaps of wrinkled, richly textured silk. Here are sleeves of oyster and pearl and smoke, linings patterned with flurries of chrysanthemums or undulations of watery swirls. Laughing at the bounty, overcome by the crumpled luxury, we’re trying on robe after robe, playing with things we never would (or could) wear: gossamer sleeves like white moths or frail ghosts, costumes for a Japanese Midsummer Night’s Dream, tousled fields of sheen the color of hayfields. The owner—who seems himself to enjoy our pleasure in his tumble of wares—gives us a deal, and eventually we settle on three: a short deep blue for Lynda, lined with a secretive orange splendor of flowers; a long scholarly gray for me, severe, slightly pearly, meditative; a rough raw silk for Wally, its thickly textured green weave the color of day-old clippings clinging to lawn mower blades.
Our afternoon, home in the kitchen, is a festival of ironing, of steam and surprise as wrinkles fall away and the drape and soft shine of the fabric reveal themselves. It’s raining out and the windows steam up, the room warmed by our work and the heat of our coffee. All three of us are chatting and ironing and happy, wrapping ourselves in our new old robes, thinking of the mulberry leaves spun by silkworms to this unlikely filament, of the endless labor of unwinding the cocoons, of the subtlety and strength of the colors the densely woven stuff is dyed, of our own collaboration, as ironers, in the restoration of beauty. The steam and the rain on the kitchen’s new french doors make us feel safe, domestic, inside some familiar childhood place of warmth and good company.
This memory has about it an aura of intimacy, of an achieved, common warmth—something like what Michael Anania has called, describing the process of reading, “a calm exchange of privacies.” It has the time-out-of-time sheen of happiness to it, subtle but unmistakable as the surface of those silks.
So much about Lynda is coming back to me now, as if my subsiding anger made room for the larger sense of who she was to reassert itself. How richly my friend made a life for herself; how much I enjoyed her company. She’d manage to be intimate and vulnerable, jazzy and alive, trashy and fun and then achingly and sharply smart, a more incisive thinker than anyone I knew. She was like the elegant, complicated surfaces of her poems: wrought to vibrant life, almost jeweled, no matter how difficult the experiences they described.
That tension between form and content was Lynda, in a way—all her glamour’s sly or gorgeous gestures lovely because we could see through them to the difficulty and pain they managed both to conceal and to acknowledge.
Ruined armor.
One more memory: Wally and I have just moved to Provincetown, and Lynda’s come to visit. We’ve planned to take her to a drag show, knowing she’ll love the illusionists’ repertoire of sequins and sentiment, glitz and irony. And since we’ve decided to sport her out on the town, we both dress in black leather, our hair slicked back, and each of us takes one of her arms, so that she—a deconstructed flapper, in fringe and toque, jet beads and crystal earrings—has a man on either arm like some Broadway ingenue.
The drag show’s wonderful; because it’s a late autumn night, few people in town, it’s been moved to a small room in the front of the hotel/bar where it’s held, and we’re right beside the stage where Tish de Williams does her signature lip-synch of “You’ve Come a Long Way from St. Louis.” We’re greeted, dished, and flirted with by a succession of drags, including a tall black man in a sparkling gown and big Diahann Carroll wig who winds up in my lap (how hard those muscles, what an unexpected weight). The performer asks me what I do for work, and when I say, simplifying things, that I’m an English teacher, the whole place goes up with laughter, the tension between my faux-manly surface and my bookish self revealed.
Lynda is greeted with great regard by the “hostess,” who asks, “How are you tonight, sister? Where you from?” It takes me a minute to get it that the reason my friend’s getting this extra attention is because the queen on stage thinks she’s a man. I’m not sure at first Lynda knows this, or how she’ll feel about it—will she be hurt, insulted, to have her gender called into question? I hope not; it’s the drag queen’s perennial message, after all: we’re all self-made here.
And then I realize Lynda’s utterly delighted, in a sort of heaven: between the two of us, also in disguise as butch men, she is being seen as “in drag” too. And, of course, she is: my unforgettable friend is utterly happy, in her finery, wearing her vocabulary of style and gesture, wearing herself.
I’ve come to New York to teach a writing workshop for HIV-positive men. Around the seminar table, these eager faces, men leaning forward because they have so much to say. I find myself wanting to sit with each one alone, to hear each story, to find a way to help the narrative of each of these lives make it onto the page.
The next day, in a midtown restaurant, I’m having lunch with R., a new friend. Our professional relationship’s almost immediately become a friendship. He’s telling me about his boyfriend, how L.’s T-cells have just slipped below the signifying two-hundred mark, into the zone of greater risk. He says this almost casually, as if placing the information on the table beside everything else we’ve been talking about. And it occurs to me that this is how we deal with terror now; it’s so much a part of the daily fabric that we treat it as such, one more fact in a jostling crowd of actualities. R. and I don’t even have the conversation about how little the numbers mean, so familiar has that exchange become. We talk instead about our ways of being sick: how tough-minded R. goes on no matter what, smoking and drinking black coffee through whatever, how L., who whines and takes to his bed for days with a sore throat, is not a good candidate for illness. We talk about the way some people make good use of disability benefits, while others find the weight of an AIDS diagnosis crushing, paralyzed by the acronym’s bitter weight. I say I think Wally was wounded by the term, by all it seemed to spell for him. I say I don’t know that this makes any difference at all in terms of how long one lives, or the course of the illness. But I am sure that how one responds to the “word” AIDS—the numbing blow to the head that diagnosis is, its awful feel of finality—has a great deal to do with the quality of one’s life.
And that’s when R. casually tells me that, despite his bad habits, his T-cell count remains high anyway; he hasn’t seemed to drink or smoke himself out of a single one. The mysterious little things have, in fact, multiplied fruitfully since he abandoned a brief self-punishing bout of macrobiotics.
I feel like the floor of the restaurant has just slid open. But I don’t show it, or at least I don’t think I do. R.’s placed his disclosure on the table beside what he’s said about L., beside the gossip and business of our lunch. To express sorrow or surprise would somehow seem impolite, would seem to underline the gravity of their situation in a way that won’t do. This dangerous field of contingency, shiny with threat, is where we live now. It’s 1994; of course we’re in this condition.
It’s later, after we’ve parted, after my walk through the park, sun gilding the benches and those who rest or sleep there, kids practicing violent or accomplished descents of the slopes on skates, the sparking narrative of casual cruising going on all around, story of possibility and of flirtation I love—it’s after all that, back in my hotel room, that it hits me.
Maybe, yes, R. and L. will be fine, maybe the men in the workshop will be all right; the old optimistic line, San Francisco, 1989, plays in my head, HIV is not a death sentence, and who knows how any individual will fare, who can predict it. But I’ve seen too much, I’ve lived the long corrosive descent, and now I want to moan or cry it out, from the depth of my stomach, I want to double over and push the grief out of me, for R. and L. and the circle of radiant or uncertain faces around that table last night, hopeful, disenchanted, sorrowing, exhausted, still quick with potential. The epidemic opens out and out, endlessly consuming my generation and the one before and the one after me, immense bitter wave, the floor beneath us pulling back, pulling away, a huge gap opening beneath whatever seemed momentarily solid, downward pull, dizzying absence: multiply, endlessly, these human faces.
I can’t stop thinking of a line of graffiti in Chicago, spray-painted on a lakeshore wall at the end of Lynda’s block:
“Does a snowflake in an avalanche feel responsible?”
Of course it doesn’t; of course I do. Not responsible for the avalanche, but to it, responsible in its wake.
My neighbor’s abusing his dog. Not an outright beating, but a kind of nattering, relentless cruelty that must be making the little spotted beagle crazy. It’s making me crazy just to listen. Every time the dog makes a yip or bark, the man yells at her.
Soon she’s out in the yard, tied to a post, but when she lets out a woof at a passing car or dog he’s at the door chastising her. She doesn’t seem to be able to stop herself, even though she seems to know what’s coming and modulates her barks to little yips I can barely hear.
But her master can hear them, and he comes running out of the house, grabs hold of her collar, and leads her into the back of his four-wheel drive, where her wire cage is waiting. It’s a hot day, and it must be steamy inside that black vehicle, but he locks her in the crate. From my front windows I see her fur gleaming in the shady interior, her pink tongue hanging long and loose.
I’m trying not to look, trying to stay away, but I keep going to the window to check on the dog, who still feels like yipping when something interesting passes by. Then the owner comes flying out of the house, the screen door slamming behind him, and he goes to the back of the car and starts to shake the cage.
Something in me snaps then; I don’t even think about what I’m doing as I run out of the house and out to the garden, and shout across the fence, “I’m not going to stand by and watch you treat that dog that way! You ought to be ashamed of yourself!”
I don’t even know what else I say; it’s an outpouring of defense for the animal and condemnation of the man, who stands there and sputters and says something lame like “She’s fine.”
Which only sets me off again. She’s not fine, this is not fine, I will not accept this. Wally, who lay nine months looking out these windows, would not have accepted this, would not have been able to bear it, would have spoken. Or would have wanted to, would have been desperate to and perhaps also unsure he had the right to, the nerve; but now he’s free, beyond any issues of self-confidence or self-doubt, and that spirit, were it here, would insist on speaking. And does, pouring out through my mouth, passionate and unstoppable—and maybe totally inappropriately, but I don’t care, I’m speaking with my love’s tongue, I’m speaking for the dead I carry in me, and I will make sure they’re heard.
The day of Wally’s memorial service, his youngest brother Mark carried the brass box containing his ashes home down Commercial Street, a kind of ritual gesture. Sometime during the next few days I put the box into the nightstand beside my bed, with another box in which I’d collect the letters and sympathy cards people sent, copies of the newspaper obituaries. I needed time to come to terms with the ashes. I imagined that in time I’d know where they should go, whether I should scatter or keep them; Wally had been clear that he’d wanted to be cremated, but the conversation had never really gone further than that. His silence made it evident that the nature of the memorial service and the fate of his ashes were up to me.
In a while I knew that I wanted to spread his ashes in the marsh I love, the wild and open place I walk through, winters, out to the point where the seals are. A part of me wanted to hold onto them, too. But when I meditated about the ashes I imagined pristine urns, sealed off from the world—and then, alternately, the play of light on water, the inward and outward rush of tide, the complex symphonic spectrum of life that the marsh is. What, there, is not part of life? That, I knew, was what Wally would want.
Talking to Wally’s mother, I planned to scatter the ashes in the spring, when it would be warm enough for us and whoever else in his family wanted to come to walk out along the dike into the wind-swept field of the marsh. But I could tell she was reluctant, uncertain, even though she agreed. And when the time we’d considered drew close, in May, I offered her an out, saying there really wasn’t any hurry, that we should do this when we’re really ready. Relieved, she said she’d like to wait, and I didn’t know until that moment that I’d be relieved, too. I wasn’t ready to relinquish the evidence of his body.
In a while, I began to forget the ashes were there. And then I’d remember them, and wonder if I was avoiding being aware of their presence.
In the fall, Betty and I talked again, and settled on the anniversary of Wally’s death. It would be a cold walk in January, but something about the turning of a year felt right. Rather like that Jewish ceremony in which the headstone’s unveiled, after the first year, for the family, marker of a year survived, of the actuality of loss.
I’d been tempted, at St. John the Divine, by the walls of little containers bearing the names of the dead, some of them with their small vases, their tokens of remembrance. Wouldn’t it be good to have a place in which Wally was remembered, an inscription of his name?
But those chapels felt, unmistakably, for the living, even the Christmas cards and flowers and love-tokens there. What these ashes wanted, I felt sure, was not containment but participation. Not an enclosure of memory, but the world.
I brought the ashes out of my bedside cabinet, polished the box, set it on the mantel where I could study it. I still held a fear, a doubt about letting the remainder of Wally’s body go. In another box, one I can hardly bear to open, I’ve saved the little personal things that were around his bed: his glasses, the wooden angel from Indonesia, a toy wooden clown he liked, whose tongue popped out when you pressed on his hat. His silver ring’s on my left hand now, pushed against mine. But those accessories, however personal and full of the psychic scent of a man, are not his body. Once I let these ashes go, into their commingling with the world, there was no getting them back.
Relieved to know my back was mending—through whatever agency, Eastern or Western, physiological or medicine of the soul—I experienced a sense of physical freedom which lasted almost exactly a week.
On the last day of November, I stepped out of a shower in Boston, where I was visiting friends, and onto a slick tile floor; I’d neglected to move the mat nearer the shower. I flew to the floor, breaking the fall with my right wrist. My friends came running to see what the terrible noise was, and the first real indication I had that something was wrong was that, when they asked me if I was all right, I found I couldn’t make a sentence. Not that I seemed to be feeling so much pain, exactly, but that pain had short-circuited my capacity to make language.
I’d broken more than my capacity for syntax; the tip of my radius, one of two long bones in my right arm, was cracked clean through. Soon I was immobilized from knuckles to elbow in a white plaster cast.
January 29, 1995
Dear friend Jean,
I was so glad to have your letter this week and your sweet message about the anniversary of Wally’s death, too—your thinking of me and of us means so much. This whole month, a year from that last passage in Wally’s life, has been something for me, a deep and difficult passage in its own right. I guess Maggie told you I had to have surgery on my wrist; the broken bit of bone was healing in the wrong place and if left alone (they said—who knows whether to believe doctors?) the movement of my hand would have been seriously impaired. So, just after Christmas I went in the hospital and had a bone graft, from my left hip into my wrist, and a titanium plate put in to hold the bone together.
Darren and Michael took good care of me at home, but I struggled—I don’t do well with anesthetics and painkillers, I hate that muffled, submerged feeling. And the breaking of a part of my body became aligned for me with the breaking of Wally’s body, with his bone being fragmented. I was going back through, in memory, those last days when he was moving into the very heart of things, the depths of last winter when we were more and more deeply inside the house, inside our lives together, approaching that mystery.
As my wrist healed and I got out of cast and splint and stitches I started to do better, as if I’d descended and was climbing up out of the cave again. By the time the anniversary day came I think I had done so much work inside about it that it was okay, sort of odd and numb, like a holiday when you are supposed to feel more than you do but you can’t really do anything. I burned the beautiful beeswax candle you gave me that day.
We didn’t scatter the ashes—because snow was forecast and his mother didn’t want to travel—but waited until yesterday instead, which was a year to the day from Wally’s service, so that felt right. His mom and one brother and sister and their partners and I went way out into the marsh, and we read the Whitman poem about the grass from “Song of Myself.” I’d forgotten that I would come to the line, “What do you think has become of the young and old men?” And then George and Susan and I threw the ashes into the wind and water in handfuls.
The tide was pouring out of the marsh, out to sea. The lightest dust swirled off in the wind, and the rest made clouds like nebula in the water, and the heaviest parts, the chips of bone, sank to the bottom and looked like pieces of clam shell, like the gulls had been eating there. And of course we had ashes on our hands and skin and clothes. Arden sat and watched. Wally’s mom couldn’t handle throwing the ashes, so she threw a rose, which Beau decided to fetch—he leapt into the cold water and brought it back about four times, till it finally fell apart. He’s the world’s court jester. I felt utterly overwhelmed and as if I could hardly bear it but I also felt like I could hear or feel Wally breathing this sigh of relief—as though what he really wanted was for his body to be part of the world, part of the sparkle of all that water. I used to imagine, when I’d walk the dogs before Wally died, that the shining path the sun makes across the sea was the way the dead went, the way home. But now Wally is the path.
So it felt very right. Meditating about it today I felt this great sense of serenity and light. We did what he wanted and I feel different now—full of grief but less anxious somehow, more—aligned? Certainly my bones are aligned again, in wrist and in back—maybe I needed the physical descent of this break in order to accomplish the emotional descent?
Things have shifted, with the passage of the whole year; and though sorrow isn’t lessened I’m in a different relationship to it somehow. Last week in NYC, at St. John the Divine, I was at that wonderful altar for PWA’s. I lit a candle, and I was crying for a while, and then I heard Wally’s voice in the back of my head say, Okay, now let’s go to Bloomingdale’s…
I saved a bit of ash for myself, in a little cherrybark tea canister from Japan I got in New York. I was afraid that there wouldn’t be enough intimacy in the family ceremony, although it turned out to be fine. But I am still glad to have this bit of his body with me, though I am not sure what I’ll do with it. Maybe take it also out to the marsh, alone—or maybe take a bit to Venice next month—or maybe just wait…
What I’d soon feel, about that little canister of ash, was that it was fine to have it with me. There seemed no imperative to take it out to the marsh, and it didn’t feel right for it to go to some unfamiliar place. Nor do I feel any need to put it away, to avoid it or forget what it contains. It’s a comfortable presence. It represents, perhaps, the way that a part of Wally’s with me always, but it’s not like I thought—I thought I’d need to hold on to this symbol, this proof of his having been.
I understand, differently, the longing of Antigone to bury her brother properly. Something shifts, with the body where it belongs; Wally’s body belongs in the huge sun-burnished field of the salt marsh beside our tiny airport, the first and last of home I see, by the way, when I fly in and out of town. And that smaller part belongs also with me, is, already, part of me.
I didn’t know it would make me happy, when Wally’s ashes blew into my face and hair. When, after I scattered them, a fine grit of him was left on my hands, so that I could rub it against my cheeks.
I went back, the next day, and the chips of bone were still gleaming there under the water. If you didn’t know what they were, you wouldn’t know.
The next day Michael and I walked the dogs at Herring Cove, so I didn’t see what had happened.
On the third day, there was an enormously high tide, the whole marsh gone under, and I couldn’t see anything beneath that wide, steely expanse.