Second Glance
Grief, like love
HEAVEN’S COAST
320 pp. Harper Perennial $14.95
(Originally published by HarperCollins, 1996)
Reviewed by Sarah Morgan
When overwhelmed by sorrow many of us tend to become remote or even speechless, but not Mark Doty. A gifted poet who sees the world in metaphors, he eloquently and thoughtfully writes about the pain of loss in such stunning language that his memoir, Heaven’s Coast, becomes a survival tool for anyone losing someone they love. Doty writes:
Being in grief, it turns out, is not unlike being in love.In both states, the imagination’s entirely occupied with one person. The beloved dwells in the heart of the world, and becomes a Rome: the roads of feeling all lead to him, all proceed from him. Everything that touches us seems to relate back to that center; there is no other emotional life, no place outside the universe of feeling centered on its pivotal figure.And in grief, as in love, we’re porous, permeable. There is something contagious about its openness. Other people sense it and respond to us differently, since our unguardedness seems to invite them in.
It is writing like this that draws the reader into his world, allowing us to share with him the holocaust of AIDS in the early years of the epidemic. By the 1990s AIDS had emerged as a major cause of death in the United States, and by the end of 1991 it had killed 3000 people in a single year.
With AIDS still largely concentrated in the gay population, that community was in the embryonic stages of organizing the fight for increased research money and better drugs to combat the disease.
In this setting in 1989, Doty’s long-time partner Wally Roberts was diagnosed with AIDS. This powerful memoir chronicles their times together before the diagnosis, the progression of the disease, and the year of grief and mourning Doty experienced after his death.
Vivian Gornick in her book The Situation and the Story says that a gifted memoir is not merely a recording of events, but allows the reader a sense that the author is fully engaged with those events, showing us how they shape a life. It takes the raw material from life and elevates it to a universal message of growth through the process.
Heaven’s Coast showcases the genius of this type of writing skill. Doty, seemingly without effort, smoothly shifts his narrative back and forth from past to present throughout the book.
Through his reflections he shares his memory of a love that was, pain that is, and eventually the love that will remain. He uses the English language like a gifted painter who not only shows us a scene but also makes us want to enter into it.
Having lost a brother many years before under very different circumstances from Doty’s, I also experienced the kind of debilitating sorrow Doty writes about so passionately and found this book a solace. I was only 18 when a sudden accident took my brother and that death was, as is so often the case with people, a pivotal event in my life. Being so young, I had no words to express my grief and floundered emotionally for years after that event.
With his poet’s heart, Doty took me back to that time and helped me understand my feelings, opening the door for healing forty years after my brother’s death. His words became the words I could not find at the time, his pain mine. And his eventual sense of hope, mine as well. Because of its setting, Heaven’s Coast is more than a book on the universality of grieving.
Through his friend Wally, Doty chronicles a time in American history we would all rather forget but should all remember.
He writes of his emotional state and that of others grappling with the frustrations of hopelessly watching someone die in the face of inadequate care. At a time when the medical community was only beginning to understand the monster, offering experimental medications that often were as detrimental as the disease itself, the author and his friends struggled to understand. As Doty himself puts it: “What we wanted was what no one could offer: clarity, understanding, deliverance.”
Woven through the book are his observations and anger as he watches a close poet friend squander a life while his lover lies dying without apparent reason. But he also celebrates life in small scenes as he walks the beach with his dogs. He embraces nature and is bound to it in his writing.
Chronic back pain sends Doty to a new age practitioner who tells him where he hurts symbolizes his lack of faith. The author acknowledges his disagreements with the church from an early age, writing:
The prohibitions [of the church] were worse than the explanations. They suggested that the divinity had constructed the earth as a kind of spiritual minefield, a Chutes and Ladders game of snares, traps, and seductions, all of them fueled by the engines of our longing; the flames of hell were stoked by human hearts. As if desire were our enemy, instead of the ineradicable force that binds us to the world.
Through the process he comes to understand his connection to the natural world and in turn finds comfort realizing that the body is only the husk, the spirit continues on long afterwards.
I never realized until I read this book that I had stood for years on an emotional threshold; Doty opened the door with his heart and his language so that I might walk through. And so I say that for anyone losing a loved one, or anyone who simply loves the English language, Mark Doty’s Heaven’s Coast is well worth a read.
Sarah Morgan is a
freelance writer living in Punta Uva, Limon on Costa Rica’s Caribbean
coast. Her most recent essay was published in Notre Dame Magazine. She is currently working on a memoir.