Heaven's Coast by Mark Doty

 

 

In 1989 Mark Doty is a successful poet and college professor and he is deeply in love with his long term partner, Wally Roberts. Their harmonious existence, however, is shattered when Wally tests positive for HIV. 

 

This memoir is an unflinching look at the process of grief and how to come to terms with it.Doty writes movingly about grief, religious attitudes to death and bereavement, and how he comes to terms with losing his partner so early in life. 

Roberts and Doty find solace in their pets (two dogs and two cats) and in nature. Roberts spends much of his last few months in bed surrounded by the pets, looking happily out of the window, seeming most of the time to be peacefully accepting of his impending death. 

 

Doty particularly likes seals as they somehow remind him of Roberts 'something about playfulness and a freedom of spirit'. There is a lovely scene, after Roberts' ashes have been scattered to become one with the life of the marsh, in which Doty's dog Beau plays with a group of seals 'swimming for half an hour with a tribe he recognises, though it tumbles in an alien medium.'

The book ends with a meeting between Doty and his dogs and a coyote that stops in front of them briefly, prompting Doty to meditate on the meaning of seeming random events and the possibility that the coyote is in some way a message from Roberts. 

This is a beautifully written, moving book which meditates on loss and grief, while shining a light on the things that make it well worth living in the world after the death of a loved one. 

Heaven's Coast by Mark Doty, published (1997) by Vintage. 

 

**

At around the same time as writing this memoir, Doty wrote the beautiful  poetry collection My Alexandria, which I reviewed here.