Love is forever…One woman’s journey with grief

Among the vacation reading I brought to Mexico with me was a collection of poems by Mark Doty.  I started and finished it in the Cozumel airport, waiting for my inevitably delayed flight to board.  Doty is a widower, having lost his partner to AIDS some years ago.  He wrote a memoir of that struggle, of his partner’s declining health and eventual death.  It’s been sitting on my bookshelf for maybe 9 months.  At the time I bought it, shortly before the 1-year-milestone of A’s passing, I really wanted to read it.  I’ve found that the greatest comfort I received in my grief was from reading the memoirs of others who’d suffered a similar loss.

But it seemed that when I was really, really down, I didn’t have the heart to read it.  And when I was feeling better, I didn’t read it because I was afraid of sabotaging myself.  That fear remains.  There comes a point in the grief journey (at least in my experience) when you have more choice, more control over yourself and whether you give in to your emotions and see how deeply you can wallow in them, or you acknowledge them, but try to keep busy so that the vague sadness that is permeating your day does not become a meltdown, the hangover of which lingers for weeks. 

I felt like I was on the cusp of a meltdown prior to my trip, but I put it off.  I didn’t need to go there, and figured I’d have myself a good cry on the plane or at night when everyone else was asleep and I was alone.  It didn’t happen that way, though.  The melancholy hung on, just barely beneath the surface, occasionally flaring into moments that pierced my heart so familiarly now that I couldn’t call it pain; just an intensity of feeling, as if the volume of the sad song that plays continuously, quietly, in the background of my thoughts was cranked to 11.  This is how it is now.

Anyway, the collection of poems I was reading in the airport, Sweet Machine, touched frequently upon the themes of love and loss and the fragile, ephemeral beauty of this world.  There was one poem in particular, the second in a triad of connected pieces, that touched me.  I often feel that if A were really and truly ended, I would feel an emptiness, a muffled and unyielding blankness, where he should be.  And I don’t.  Despite my loneliness for him, he is as much a part of my thoughts, my memories, my life, (insofar as my life happens in my head), as ever.  He is not dead to me.  He is everywhere.  My life and world, as Doty says in the poem below, are imbued with him.  I hope that always feels true.  Because it is what has allowed me to make it this far.

Where You Are—Mark Doty 

2.  Everywhere

I thought I’d lost you.  But you said I’m imbued

in the fabric of things, the way
that wax lost from batik shapes
the pattern where the dye won’t take.
I make the space around you,

that close, where I am:  between
where breath ends, air starts.