Heaven's Coast: A Memoir   by Mark Doty

Reviewer: Meg Rating: Impossible   Heaven's Coast is the second best book I have ever read. It comes right after "Moby Dick" for me and is as epic and profound and dense with exquisite language and precise meaning. It was written after the author lost his lover to HIV/AIDS in 1994 and is the story of their last years together from the diagnosis to Wally's death. It is the story of their relationship as it changed with the onset of illness and it leaves nothing out, from the challenges of caring for someone you love over time, the exhaustion, the frustration, the global questions raised by death and dying, to the daily routine of that care, dealing with the health care system, defining good care, and altering the living space.   It is difficult for me to review because my response was so personal that I will never be able to finish it. I have read the last pages a number of times, but the book will never be over for me. I will return to it many times in my life for support, understanding, and a depth of contemplative wisdom that I have really never found elsewhere.   Mr. Doty brings to us a sweeping examination of the most fundamental and earthy issues that we all face regardless of background or sexual preference and shows by example that courage is an element in each of us that we can all count on when the hardest, most complex events enter our lives. The message of the book is that we will cope. We will endure. We will never be the same, but we will continue and that is a promise of hope as we wonder how we will react when the chips are truly down.   The book wrestles on every page with definitions of humanity, compassion, love, patience, sacrifice and plain hard work. Mr. Doty takes us through (one section of the book is entitled "Through") the emotional and physical cost of losing a loved one to lingering disease, the reactions of the people closest to him, the medical community. One conclusion he drew that struck me was that the further down the care system ladder you go, the more compassionate the care becomes. True healing came from the aids and orderlies as opposed to the more removed and distant care of professionals.   It is a personal journey through the course of a debilitating disease as Wally changes and begins to leave this life. He becomes unable to walk the dogs along his beloved beaches in Provincetown, and slowly begins to disappear into the illness. Mark Doty uses the idea of the sea shore with the ebb and flow of the tides and the ever changing scene as a metaphor for Wally's movement into the space between life and death. As the shore is a space between land and water, so is the process of dying, someplace in between, neither living nor deceased.   The amount of strain, grief, and loss endured by Mr. Doty is monumental. The miracle is that we do survive and continue. This book gives me hope that I may be able to endure when the time comes. I keep it near me and open it and read passages over again. No matter where I enter, I discover something new and affecting that I didn't find the last time. It has been an education, a profound kind of primer for coping with tragedy and for enduring, one careful step at a time, the most difficult challenges.