Are you right? You're listening to Radio Lab. You're not. John!
From WNYC. And St. NPR. 13.
Gone. This is a reading from Heaven's Coast by Mark Dodie, who's one of them, anyway, living in the poets in America. This 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 got the polaroid now, and he's showing me that smile once again, and he does. The last time he'll be able to.
Friday, January 21st, the last words I would write for a month. Times the engine, the decks of the world in its beautiful clothes, and not one, not one, is exempt. Wally's breathing changes becomes heavier, regular. Readings 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 eye-dropper on his tongue, or perhaps there's no pain, but if there is, he couldn't tell us, and the opi will ease the work for him.
Read in a comment 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, that she'll always carry him in her heart, and then she's quiet giving him her love. And then we look each other for some time, she'll only 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 and said, 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 at at us to have a little space, but I know he sees, and he registers him, I know that he's letting us actively, and I know, he's nothing else about this man after 13 years, I know that.
So, into the line of his vision, I bring this bee and portion of the cats in hardened and bough the dogs, and then I sit there myself all afternoon, the lamps on, since the house is circled in snow, and early-minute darkness. The afternoon is so quiet and deep, it seems almost to ring like chimes, a cold, struck bell. I sit in the evening when he closes his eyes. There is an inaudible roaring, a rush beneath the surface of things beneath the surface of valley, who is 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 disclosed to anyone in my life. He's 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's self-empties out into no one, swift river hurrying into the tumble of rivers out into the individuality, into the great Russian whirlwind of currents, God, moving on the face of the waters. Suddenly I'm so tired, I think I can't say, wait another minute, there comes any's been in and out all day, spelling me, seeing where things are. And says, he'll sit with Wally, wow. I say, I'll sit on the couch for an hour.
I don't think I'm lying down ten minutes when I sit up wide awake. There is in fact, on the way to fetch me, but I come on in 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 one imperative, I don't know.
And falls out of the bed. Aaron says, that's just Arden. He's okay, not wanting anything to steal while he's attention to where he is now. I say, you know easy babe.
Go free. The world's seen an absolute suspension, nothing moving anywhere, everything's centered. Go easy. But you go.
Really, a lab is funded in part by the Sloan Foundation, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the National Science Foundation.