“But we have, if not our understanding, our own experience, and it feels to me sealed, inviolable, ours. We have a last, deep week together, because Wally is not on morphine yet, because he has just enough awareness, just enough ability to communicate with me. I’m with him almost all day and night- little breaks, for swimming, for walking the dogs. Outside it snows and snows, deeper and deeper; we seem to live in a circle of lamplight. I rub his feet, make him hot cider. All week I feel like we’re taking one another in, looking and looking. I tell him I love him and he says I love you, babe, and then when it’s too hard for him to speak he smiles back at me with the little crooked smile he can manage now, and I know what it means. I play music for him, the most encompassing and quiet I can find: Couperin, Vivaldi, the British soprano Lesley Garret singing arias he loved, especially the duet from Lakme: music of freedom, diving, floating. How can this be written? Shouldn’t these sentences simply be smithereened apart, broken in a hurricane? All that afternoon he looks out at us though a little space in his eyes, but I know he sees and registers: I know that he’s loving us, actively; if I know nothing else about this man, after nearly thirteen years, I know that. I bring all the animals, and then I sit there myself, all afternoon, the lamps on. The afternoon’s so quiet and deep it seems almost to ring, like chimes, a cold, struck bell. I sit into the evening, when he closes his eyes. There is an inaudible roaring, a rush beneath the surface of things, beneath the surface of Wally, who has now almost no surface- as if I could see into him, into the great hurrying current, that energy, that forward motion which is life going on. I was never this close to anyone in my life. His living’s so deep and absolute that it pulls me close to that interior current, so far inside his life. And my own. I know I am going to be more afraid than I have ever been, but right now I am not afraid. I am face to face with the deepest movement in the world, the point of my love’s deepest reality- where he is most himself, even if that self empties out into no one, swift river hurrying into the tumble of rivers, out of individuality, into the great rushing whirlwind of currents. All the love in the world goes with you.” LoveWisdomInspirationDeathSpiritSufferingHopePrayerLossGriefCompassionDyingComfortMindfulnessAidsHolinessHivCaretakingBeauty And Sadness Book:Heaven's Coast: A Memoir Source: Heaven's Coast: A Memoir
“However much grief I carried, I liked the way my life was tending, these bright new directions. It's only human, to mourn and to reach toward forwardness at once.” LifeLossGriefHuman NatureMoving Forward Book:Dog Years Source: Dog Years
“I am not, anymore, a Christian, but I am lifted and opened by any space with prayer inside it. I didn’t know why I was going, today, to stand in the long cool darkness of St. John of the Divine, but my body knew, as bodies do, what it wanted. I entered the oddly small door of the huge space, and walked without hesitating to the altar I hadn’t consciously remembered, a national memorial for those who died of AIDS, marked by banners and placards. My heart melted, all at once, and I understood why I was there. Because the black current the masseuse had touched wanted, needed, to keep flowing. I’d needed to know I could go on, but I’d also been needing to collapse. Which is what I did, some timeless tear span of minutes sitting on the naked gray stone. A woman gave me the kind of paper napkins you get with an ice cream cone. It seemed to me the most genuine of gifts, made to a stranger: the recognition of how grief moves in the body, leaving us unable to breathe, helpless, except for each other.” LoveSpiritPrayerLossGriefKindnessSadnessAidsGrievingMourningHiv Book:Heaven's Coast: A Memoir Source: Heaven's Coast: A Memoir
“And my work in this life? None of this will go unrecorded. I will see and say all of it, as clearly and deeply as I can, re-entering, lifting experience in the direction of another dimension of time, where everything I have loved can be known again, more fully, that my joy in it might increase as I take the measure of what I have lost. And my grief may increase as well; Alex and I loved each other, and held together through a troubled and volatile relation as best we could, and in a while we ended it. I truly wish him every good in this life. Sweet hell? Maybe, but so be it.” LoveLossGriefLetting GoEnding Book:What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life Source: What Is the Grass: Walt Whitman in My Life
“It's unsettling, to lose the safety of the familiar, even when what's disrupted is an ordinary routine. When I began this poem, I was grieving for the loss of my old barbershop in Manhattan, and wondering at the strangeness of my new one. I didn't have any idea the poem would break into the underworld, opening a deeper subject: the continuing force of the old griefs routine helps to mediate, and my strange, sheer wonder at my own survival. Where's home now? In the contingent present, in which anything can disappear, and where we're sometimes granted some form of grace.” IdeasSometimesHelpingHomeFormForceLosesMy OwnLossGriefWonderBreakGraceSubjectsStrangeSurvivalOrdinarySafetyDeeperDisappearFamiliarOpeningGrantedGrievingRoutineContinuingSheerManhattanStrangenessUnderworldBarbershop Author:Mark Doty
“Sentimental assertions are always a form of detachment; they confront the acute, terrible awareness of individual pain, the sharp particularity of loss or the fierce individuality of passion with the dulling universal certainty of platitude.” InspirationalPainFormPassionIndividualLossAwarenessTerribleUniversalIndividualityCertaintyFierceSentimentalDetachmentAssertionPlatitudes Author:Mark Doty
