Heaven's Coast [Paperback]

There are many kinds of ears in this world... it will take every kind of voice to make them listen. In Heaven's Coast, Mark Doty's is a poetic, memorable voice. While writers like Paul Monette and Larry Kramer explore the personal as political, Doty seeks and finds spiritual affirmation in nature, thereby placing him among many of his literary predecessors. For critics who take Doty to task for not writing a book that encompasses all those populations affected by AIDS, this is not a political, medical, or moral treatise, but a memoir. It is an account not so much of AIDS but of love, and how HIV/AIDS impacted that love in life and death. As a writer, a widow, a survivor, Doty eloquently articulates his experience of relationship, illness, and grief. Just as the virus respects no boundaries of race, gender, orientation, income, or age, neither does grief. There may be gleaned from any person's history some meaningful wisdom, emotion, comfort, or inspiration. As a caregiver and survivor of friends lost to AIDS, I found that Doty's words gave me renewed vision and new strength.

Loss is one of the most powerful impacts that engraves a permanent mark of misery and grief on hearts of those who had been inflicted with the misfortune of experiencing such tragedy. Losing someone who appears to be the most important part of our life - perhaps, even the reason that we are living - very often causes a dramatic change in our life's perspective and makes us realize things that had never occurred to us before. Losing the love of our life to AIDS adds a great density to the already intense burden of loss. Mark shares with the readers his experience of taking care and loving the one that meant the world to him - to the end of his counted days. His partner and lover of twelve years became infected with an HIV virus, which later transformed into AIDS, and he passed away after four years of suffering and struggling for his life. It is a fascinating, yet a very sad book, filled with lots of happy as well as painful reminiscences.It is very important to have at least that one person you could definitely count on, to feel needed and safe with. From reading the book, it appears that Mark Doty is exactly that extraordinary person with an immense amount of courage and strength. He had never surrendered to the discouraging spirit of AIDS' dreadful abyss that had suffused the entire surroundings for him and his beloved, and that hung over their heads in a dark, dense mantle. His positive attitude helped his partner to gain strength and to keep going through the most difficult time of his life. Doty's use of language is so beautifully fluid, so boundlessly passionate, so real and down-to-earth, that it takes your breath away, and transfers you into his world of thought, into his life, allowing you to enter his most personal feelings and experiences. Doty talks about how he has always associated Wally with seals. The brown eyes, the playfulness, the freedom of spirit, and the undulance of the coastal creatures, to him, were the mirror objects of those in Wally. It is as if Wally lived between the realm of AIDS' unfathomable chasm and the life on Earth, and was unable to articulate the events of one world to the other. The "two worlds" is also presented here as a metaphor, portraying the body of water and Earth as life with a fatality of AIDS and a life of health. Mark was a tremendous help to Wally in escaping the experience of any acute sensations of the borderline between the two worlds that he inhabited. Even though Wally had the knowledge of his fatal illness, he felt loved and needed, and therefore life was worth living to him: "All the last year of Wally's life, he didn't stop wanting" (p. 18). Mark proves his unconditional love for his partner also by tolerating Wally's ironic attempts to flirt with the male nurse. In his virtually unconscious, dead body, Wally still maintained the usual, human longing, and Mark was only happy to see his beloved striving for his life. Mark's superior and extraordinary abilities to write, to express his feelings in the most visual way is what makes this book even more breathtaking.

I have never lost anyone I love, and I fear that loss immensely. I often concoct possible life threatening scenarios for my loved ones, trying desperately (and in vain) to feel the pain I would be feel if they were really to occur, stupidly thinking I can somehow prepare myself for the worst. Mark Doty's partner, Wally, tested positive for HIV, and for four years Doty lived with the knowledge of "the worst": someone he loved dearly would soon to die. His memoir, Heaven's Coast, was another scenario for me to rehearse, this time with the aid of someone who actually endured it...and survived. It was helpful to read how Doty made it through those four years, trying "not to let the present disappear under the grief of those disappearances, and the anticipatory grief of a future disappearance." He strives to constantly live in the present, and his memoir takes the reader in it with him, written beautifully, with a thoughtful, poetic quality it, suitable for such a reflective piece. It is honest, heartbreaking and, for me, encouraging. Obituaries often contain what I call a "survived by" line, something I fear being associated with some day. For me, Heaven's Coast is an annotated, engrossing, and promising "survived by" line.