This book was written in the flux of change; I wrote it not from a single still point but in the forward momentum of a current of grief. I wanted to allow for shifts in my perspective as time moved forward, as what we think of as healing began. What is healing, but a shift in perspective?
Almost eighteen months after Wally died, I know a little differently. I see a little more broadly than the man who wrote these pages, adrift in the sea-swirl of shock and loss. But something’s gained by allowing the voice of those hours, the long days of new mourning, to have its say. In a way I know less now, too. The Lakota Sioux say that when nature gives one a burden, one’s also given a gift. Loss brought with it a species of vision, an inwardness which was the gift of a terrible time—nearly unbearable, but bracingly real. I felt I was breathing some strange new air, the dizzy-making oxygen of an unfamiliar altitude. The long days of Wally’s illness were a period of increasing tension, everything in the world closing down to one little point of dread, a fear assuaged only by the lightness and acceptance of his spirit. When he died, all that tension began to uncoil in me. My perception opened again, but where was I then? Some vague lunar place, a winter shore lit only by starlight, an icy marsh. In memory, what I did most of that year was tramp and tramp, in freezing salt places, cold expanses of beach over which the clouds moved in great luminous shrouds. I am glad I do not have to live, now, in quite the porous state these pages try to capture, but I am lucky to have been there, and to have been able to make some record, however halting, of those days.
A host of people helped to carry Wally and me through the last part of his life; they enabled us to live well, and their assistance helped us to face those days together with dignity. I am especially grateful to Darren Otto, a host of loving and strong home health aides, the Provincetown AIDS Support Group, and the Family Care Program of Cape Cod Hospital.
I could not have written this book, nor indeed made it through the days described here, without the help of real and invaluable friends. Michael Carter and Rena Blauner have been essential to me, irreplaceable spirits and close readers; my friend and editor Robert Jones trusted me, believed in this book, and read it with enormous responsiveness and acuity. Rudy Kikel, Marie Howe, and Brian Bouldrey helped me to get started. Amy Bloom, Martha Christina, Richard McCann, and Maggie Valentine read closely and deeply, and offered wise suggestions. Alfred Corn, Kathryn Davis, Margaret Erhart, and Nancy Lagomarsino generously allowed me to incorporate portions of their letters here. Finally, Paul Lisicky not only helped with the book, but helped me remember just how good it is to live.
I am grateful for extraordinary support from the Ingram Merrill Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, and the Mrs. Giles R. Whiting Foundation. My gratitude, as well, to the Rockefeller Foundation’s Bellagio Center, for a residency in Italy which enabled me to finish the volume.
This book is for every man and woman living with AIDS, for every man and woman gone, for anyone who’s loved them.