ON TAKING CARE OF AIDS DYING FRIENDS AND MARK DOTY

In Mark Doty’s Heaven's Coast : A Memoir the poet is impelled to describe the decline processes of Wally -his partner dying of Aids-; and to express his love, in a prose that radiates so strongly that, even when he is dealing with the most graphic details of incontinence, the effect is poignant rather than sordid. Doty does not go for writing about the flesh but rather reaches to a deeper truth: Wally's bodily decline serves to make him more himself. This transfiguring experience is most manifest at the moment of death, when he feels "a shift in the quality of being from the ordinary life of the room." At the time, I was dealing with three close friends, dying of Aids, one was at my home, another was the partner of my best friend who lived nearby, and the third, in Germany. To make matters worse, my friend taking care of his lover was so much in shock that he became a cocaine addict and alcoholic, leading him to commit suicide a few decades later. 

I had neither time (working at the College full time, my brother also was very sick with lung cancer and when my mother found out, she went into a chronic depression and rather than having to bury her son, decided to stop eating and died a few months before he did, the first one on a chain of deaths that surrounded me from 1990 thru 1993), nor I had Doty’s poetic awareness or talent, to be able to reflect on the experience at the time. It was not after the last one of the friend’s deaths in Germany, that a few of us decided to explore Doty’s writings on Wally, and we  did not talk; simply cried as we read to each other some of the authors poems and passages.