I recently finished reading Mark Doty's Heaven's Coast. This is a
memoir of his relationship with his partner Wally, primarily focusing on Wally’s
decline and death from AIDS. Doty, who is an award-winning poet, writes with
love and devotion toward Wally, and how connected their lives are before,
during, and after the illness. It’s a story from grief.
I have presumed that my great-grandmother Leta’s behavior was triggered
by her own grief, that the death of her beloved second husband Albert Mohr
launched her into a lifestyle that was built around searching for an ideal
mate, partially settling with one or another for a variety of reasons, and then
breaking that off when the marriage or the husband failed to meet her
unmeetable expectations. I also think that was pulled in a variety of ways by
social convention—being a woman, having children, and that one should stay
married to the same person for life. But grief has been a key.
Albert Mohr was murdered on their front porch on a summer
evening in 1927. He was abruptly taken from her when she was happy and
settled—home, children, a good life. She had divorced her first husband to
marry him. Her mother had recently died. And then the tragedy struck.
While Doty gets time to journey with Wally from diagnosis,
through the deterioration of Wally’s body and mind from the disease (and the
connected illnesses), Leta had a life that was demolished by one terrible
incident. Doty gets to prepare, gets to journey, gets support and frustration
(not everyone is helpful) throughout—and, in the book, he is reminiscing, for
by his own admission he didn’t start writing it until after Wally’s death. My
great-grandmother is wrenched from one trajectory to another. She doesn’t get
to get immersed in her beloved’s own journey. She has him and then she doesn’t.
Even with all the time of Wally’s decline, he is wracked with
grief after Wally’s death. It manifests itself in back strain, in a broken leg,
in months of taking long walks with his dogs and only writing here and there.
(He seems to have financial resources to keep himself in his house and
lifestyle.) Whereas, Leta’s situation is very different. I don’t think that she
gets much time to grieve. She has two children to feed. She has no source of
income, and she has the swirl of innuendo surrounding her husband’s death. She
is also a woman. There are other expectations of her.
What Doty has written is incredibly moving. He truly takes his
reader with him on his journey, and how much his connection with his beloved
affects his life during the illness and after, how so much reminds him of Wally,
and how much death has betrayed the couple—stolen from them more time to love
and be with each other.
For my great-grandmother, she also experiences the grief of
having her beloved taken from her, but in her situation, he is torn from her,
unexpectedly and brutally removed. And in the aftermath—after the funeral, the
arrest and investigation of the murderer—Leta has to survive. She doesn’t
necessarily get to heal. She gets to present herself as the mother taking care
of her children and her family. She also has societal rules to be married, and
whatever Albert fulfilled in her life, she still needs, even more desperately.
Whether her marriage to Albert would have lasted for the rest
of their lives is something that no one will know. They were only married for
4½ years. She was married to Ralph Chetister, her first husband and the father
of her two children, for eight years. Would she and Albert have eventually
divorced? It’s hard to say. She probably would not have been able to answer
that question if I put it to her. However, her behavior following his murder
indicates very strongly to me that her grief (and shock) was palpable, that her
emotions did influence her behavior. She married and divorced two men in a
three-year period immediately after. (I have considered that she may have been
seeing her third husband, Ora Freeman, during her marriage to Albert; they did
marry very quickly after Albert’s death. There is no evidence of this, and
other information indicates that she was dedicated to Albert, including the
fact that she is buried with him.) During the second post-Albert marriage, she
ran out on her husband, she gave up her children to their father, she became a “scandalous”
woman, running with a variety of different men for 10 years before she married
Robert Fields, who was also taken from her abruptly—by a heart attack.
This brings me back to grief, and how such tremendous loss can
affect a person’s behavior, can draw out emotions and actions that have been
skirting around the edges of our personality. Leta was seeking a certain kind
of life. She didn’t always pursue it. Sometimes burning needs wrenched control
for a time. However, it seems to me that she always pursued a relationship in
which she could be the person she was.
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