Radiolab - 13: Gone

Episode Date: August 12, 2009

We continue our meditations on death with a reading from poet and writer, Mark Doty. This is an excerpt from Doty's 1996 memoir Heaven's Coast.

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C. See? Yes. And NPR. 13. Gone. This is a reading from Heaven's Coast by Mark Doty, who's one of, in my opinion, anyway, one of the great living poets in America. however is not poetry. This is prose. It's Mark's description of the death of his long-time partner,

Wally. Thursday night, January 20th, Wally's smiling. I get the Polaroid and asked him to show me that smile once again, and he does, the last time he'll be able to. Friday, January 21st, the last words I will write for a month. Times, the engine, the decks the world, and its beautiful clothes, and not one, not one, is exempt. while he's breathing changes becomes heavier, regular, breathing's work now, as if it were an audible sign of some transformative process within. He seems turned in on himself, not speaking, I don't think he can speak now. I touch him and talk to him.

We know it's time for the morphine in an eyedropper on his tongue. Perhaps there's no pain, but if there is, he couldn't tell us, and the opiate will ease the work for him. Rina comes and says goodbye, his eyes are closed, and when she comes into the room, but he opens the right one, the still good side of his face, and he takes her in. She tells him she hopes he's not scared, and they spend a long time looking at each other. She says, knowing you has been a great gift in my life, and that she'll always carry him in her heart, and then she's quiet, giving him her love. And then we looked at each other for some time, she told me later, and I kissed him, and I wished him a safe and joyful journey, and I left, and I didn't see him in his body again. I call his mother, who's planning to come on Sunday.

She comes Saturday morning instead, but by then his eyes are closed. She sits alone with him for a while. He opens his right eye just a tiny bit. We can tell that he sees her. All that afternoon he looks out at us through that little space, but I know he sees, and he registers, and I know that he's loving us actively, and I know if nothing else about this man after 13 years, I know that. So into the line of his vision, I bring Thysby and Portia the cats and Arden and Bo, the dogs, and I sit there myself all afternoon. The lamps on, since the house

is circled in snow and early winter darkness, the afternoon is 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 was 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 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 individuals, into the great rushing whirlwind of currents, God moving on the face of the waters. Suddenly I'm so tired, I think I can't stay awake another minute. Darren comes in, he's been in and out all day, spelling me, seeing where things are, and says he'll sit with Wally a while. I say, I'll sleep on the couch for an hour. I don't think I've been lying down ten minutes when I sit up wide awake.

Darren is in fact on the way to fetch me, but I've come on on my own. I know it's time. I say to Wally, while the breath comes more shallowly, all the love in the world goes with you. Each breath he draws in, goes a little less further into his body, so easily. He never struggles. There's no sense of difficulty, no sense of holding on. Arden, the dog stands up suddenly,

move by what imperative I don't know, and falls out of the bed. Darren says, That's just Arden, he's okay. Not wanting anything to steal Wally's attention from where he is now. I say, you go easy, babe. Go free. The world seemed in absolute suspension, nothing moving anywhere, everything centered.

Go easy. But you go. Radio Lab is funded in part by the Sloan Foundation, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and the National Science Foundation.