Mark died in March of that year, and after visiting with him and his family, I (ok, it sounds weird now) flew off to San Diego for part of a business trip while waiting for the memorial service to happen. I knew I was supposed to read at the service, but the minister took forever to give me my passage.
One night after work, I went to the gay bookstore in San Diego and was wandering around when I saw Last Watch in hardcover. I decided to stop waiting and just buy it. When I returned to my hotel, I learned that a fax was waiting for me. It was my reading, and it was from Last Watch of the Night.
So, yes, I inhaled the third memoir, too. I can't remember if I've read it since, or if I've read excerpts. When my friend Ed died this fall, there was something about the scene at the cemetery that prompted me to pull the book back off the shelf.
It's a series of essays written when Monette had already buried two lovers and countless friends and was himself dying in fits and starts. The essays are full of anger, love, sentimentality, longing, and death. It's one of the best books about grieving I know of, though it's not a How To book, or even a How I Did It book. It does leave a lot of questions unanswered, kind of like my own experience.
This fall, I started in the middle, with the essay that describes visiting various grave sites of famous people, and then switches to the story of picking out the grave site for his first husband, which came with an extra side for him. (The second grave site has another space for a good friend.) In one of my favorite passages, Monette talks about taking his Sunday paper and continuing the tradition of lying in bed next to his partner and reading. He also talks about the hunger to be at the grave site in the beginning, the inability even to travel for fear of leaving the site for too long.
This probably doesn't sound like the most cheerful reading out there, but somehow, I derive great comfort from it, and perhaps feel a little less crazed from the reading and re-reading. I decided to read the whole book again, and as is typical with favorite books, it took on new meaning, or perhaps I took away new lessons.
There was the rage at society for doing nothing about AIDS; the irony of being mildly censored at a speech about censorship for the Library of Congress; the fury at the limitations caused by his own disease; the grief of losing two husbands; the loving relationship with his dogs; the delight in traveling; the love of antiquities; the letting go of physical possessions.
And finally, nearly at the end, the piece that I read at Mark's memorial service:
I see the difference now between mere baggage and what the heart possesses. Not that the latter is any less stolen goods -- the brimming of love and the joy of a comrade -- requiring every bit of a pirate's brazen stealth. And no less snatched in the end by the icy clutch of Death than all the baronies and all their rummage.
But the heart transformed in the process, no longer just a thing that ticks and no longer simply mortal, though half in shadow already. There's a cautionary tale in there as well, perhaps, involving a soul-deep self-delusion -- but not worth the caution anyway. Something lasts, firm as the pen in my hand. Jackals and buzzards cannot get at it. Its price doesn't translate into dollars. Saved as it is in the spending, till nothing's left in the vault. Invisible in the blinding shine of the setting sun, weightless as a mid-ocean breeze. To have greatly loved is to sail without ballast -- with neither chart nor cargo, not bound for the least of kingdoms. Nothing remains, except this being free.
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