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If this memoir is supposed to be about Doty finding his own healing through literature, then why do you think he includes so many letters that his friends have written him in this section?

1. "If you feel frightened, you know you can always climb on Wally's back; this is his element. He can hold you" (271).

2. "'Does a snowflake in an avalanche feel responsible?' Of course it doesn't; of course I do. Not responsible for  the avalanche, but responsible to it, responsible in its wake" (277).

3. "The story's my truest possession and I burnish and hammer it and wrestle it to make it whole. In return it offers me back to myself, it holds what I cannot, its embrace and memory larger than mine, more permanent" (291).

I really enjoyed the epilogue where Doty takes the time to explain some of what readers experienced throughout the memoir. I think that this section made Doty easier to connect with and more real, in a sense. Overall, I found his insights to be quite powerful and enjoyed reading his work!

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"I don't know what it might have been like for me had I not been present at the moment when Wally died" (Doty 268).

"And what a long season I was given, a time to reflect and to reel, submerged in my own grief" (Doty 269).

"And I do feel, really, that the part of me that resides in the world Wally inhabits now, outside the boundaries of time and space, can soar" (Doty 271).

I think that the letters and journals that are written in this section play such an important role in how Doty is dealing with his grief, by writing.

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“But I am sure that how one responds to the ‘word’ AIDS -- the numbing blow to the head that diagnosis is, its awful feel of finality -- has a great deal to do with the quality of one’s life” (Doty 275)

“Our great enemy Time is also on our side in these matter” (Doty 286)

“While this is a source of pain, memory’s double-edge sword at once wounds and offers us company, interior companionship which enriches and deepens the dimensions of every day” (Doty 289)

“Is the way that time ‘heals’ us simply that it encourages us to turn away?” (Doty 291)

The way that Doty speaks of how one responds to their diagnosis of AIDS and the quality of life after diagnosis made me think about how mindsets throughout cancer treatment is just as important as the treatment itself in some cases. I also like the way that Doty speaks of memory about lost loved ones. I think the explanation of memory being a double-edged sword couldn't explain memory any better.

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Doty justifies adopting Beau by saying "most of what's troubling in my life right now I can't do a thing about" (249). Does Beau give Doty a sense of control that he has been missing?
1. "The tone of awe with which Wally'd tell me these dreams was contagious; I couldn't help but feel it, the sense of dread turning into something else--that sense of adventure, that eagerness with which he'd always greeted the world? And yet I wanted him, too, not accept. Shouldn't he struggle to live?" (205).
2. "Weird, to think that people someplace draw the boundaries of disease, define its parameters" (207).
3. "We're sustained by the daily, held in the world, and because people who do the work Darren does are accustomed to being with the dying, they're used to staying in the present, seeing what there is to be done now" (234).

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They overall aspects of perspective seem to have a large role throughout this story. Is it important to understand those who have lost love ones to serious illnesses?

1"Their are aspects of the system of services for people with AIDS that are problematic"(222)
2" Ambition fades as realities get clearer" (225)
3 "He's himself, of course, unmistakable, and yet changed.
(227)

This book seems to focus a lot on the perspective of not only those who suffer from the illness but from the loved ones of those effected. It tends to view the situation from a unique sense as it looks at the author and how he views himself.

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There are several times in this section where Mark comments on the specific meaning of words (as before) in order to find the exact one that he wants. What unique role does language seem to play in Doty's grieving throughout the text?

1. "Illness is anticipation; illness surrounds us with the vertiginous, the branching paths of what could happen" (203).
2. "But maybe that's what hope is, no shining thing but a kind of sustenance, plain as bread, the ordinary thing that feeds us. How could we confuse this with optimism, when it has nothing to do with expecting things to be better" (218).
3. "I haven't asked for much help; it's hard to accept it now, and yet whenever I do it's welcome, salving, not only in the little practical ways but in a kind of spiritual sense: I feel less alone" (224).

As someone who has had to watch a close relative die slowly, I was very apprehensive about this memoir. However, I have found Doty's words to be quite beautiful in a weird sort of way. While some may find it strange that he spends so much time dwelling on the seemingly small changes and aspects of their lives together, I feel a sort of unfamiliar comaraderie with Doty during this section as he discusses the little things that are talked about less regarding grief as I've walked through them myself.

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On page 3, Doty says, “I was raised on apocalypse.” What does this truly mean because he refers back to it two other times in the opening pages.

“Not that things need to be able to die in order for us to love them, but that things need to die in order for us to know what they are” (5).

“The mind doesn’t see, to be whole unless it also occupies the dimension of time, which grants to things their depth and complexity, the inherent dignity and drama of their histories, the tragedy of their possibility” (7)

“Someone will take our places, but then again there will never be anyone like us, no one who will see quite this way” (9).

Doty supports the sense of realism throughout the reading. Such as living in the moment, he claims that the mind must be three-dimensional in order to grow as an individual. I feel that this view will help us broaden our views on death.

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Doty mentions that he never before "felt what I've heard other men I know say, that they don't understand why they're alive, when so many are gone" (57). In Lorde's memoir, she talks briefly about the guilt some people with cancer feel. Will Doty have similar thoughts because he tested negative for HIV?
1. "All my life I've lived with a future which constantly diminishes, but never vanishes" (4).
2. "Desire I think has less to do with possession than with participation, the will to involve oneself in the body of the world, in the principle of things expressing itself in splendid specificity" (20).
3. "The spirit is that in us which participates. It moves alone, like air or fire, and it moves with the body, lifting the body's earth and water into gesture and connection, into love...is the body a shell?" (34).
Doty's memoir gives us another perspective of illness that we have not read about yet. Instead of Doty being the doctor or patient, he is the partner/friend.

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1. "The grief which sweeps over me is the grief of anticipation. It is a grief in expectation of grief, and it carries with it a certain degree of guilt, since one feels that what really should be doing is enjoying the moment" (7).
2. "Now is shaped by the past, backed by it, as it were, the way the glass of a mirror is backed by silver" (8).
3. "At twenty-eight, I was between lives. I'd spent most of my twenties in a heterosexual marriage... Married young, in flight from both my family and a sexual orientation that scared me half to death. (50).

I feel like these passages give a good insight to the tone of the story as well as gets the reader thinking about the depth of the story being told.

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On page 36, Doty talks about how his use of metaphor as a means of grieving was considered "Arrogance!". To what degree do you agree or disagree with his notion that his attempt to make meaning out of death should be seen as arrogance?

1. "Apocalypse is played out now on a personal scale; it is not in the sky above us, but in our bed" (4).
2. "Make all the meaning you want, Death says, shape it how you will. Open the limits of your thinking or feeling, make room for me, accommodate me how you will, nothing touches the plain truth of me" (36).
3. "...We burnished that room with the motions of bodies which no longer exist: every cell of my body replaced nearly twice over now, every cell of Wally's body replaced and then burned to ashes" (55).

So far, I am really enjoying the metaphorical way that the author sees the world. The creative metaphor of the seals and the coast was really striking to me. I'm also very intrigued by the two religions that Doty describes, and I'm interested to see how he develops those further in exploring his identity as well as his grief.

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1. "I think this is what is meant when we speculate that death is what makes love possible. Not that things need to be able to die in order for us to love the, but that things need to die in order for us to know what they are" (5).
2. "Wally's body was the vehicle through which I knew him. All other knowledges proceed through the body, after it, as it were" (31).
3. "I am here today, in 1994, walking a city street indifferent with its own hurrying life, and I am filled with the presence and weight of their stories. What am I to do with them" (57).

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Mark Doty references the different religions that he was exposed to in his childhood, how do those religions and their cultures affect the way we view mortality?

1. "Do they abandon the injured or dying, perhaps to divorce themselves from the smell of blood that marks an animal as prey?" (24).

2. "The body dead is, in a way, our world's great secret" (30).

3. "I no longer think of AIDS as a solvent, but perhaps rather as a kind of intensifier, something which makes things more firmly, deeply themselves" (3).

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AS mentioned previously in this padlet, this is the first time that we are seeing a discussion of actually dealing with the loss of someone close to the narrator. I'd be curious, how does the notion of your partner or a close friend having a fatal illness, and then loosing them, have on the mentality of the partner?

1. Imagine illness as that light: demanding, torturous, punitive it nonetheless reveals more of what things are. A certain glow of being appears (5)
2. It is a grief in expectation of grief, and it carries with it a certain degree of guilt, since one feels that what one really should be doing is enjoying the moment (7)
3.  Wally's body was the vehicle through which I knew him. All other knowledge proceed through the body, after it, as it were (31)

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It is obvious the Mark Doty is looking at death in a different light. He is celebrating the life of his partner, but you can tell he is still hurting. Many other cultures celebrate death,   in America we mourn and don’t celebrate. With how other cultures look at death should we celebrating death or mourn and forget?

1.       “Remembering is the work of the living” (Doty 5)

2.       “A body that is wounded sits stranded, incapacitated” (Doty 25)

3.       “The eyes, Besides life, they are all that is missing from the body, and it is the absence that finally makes the form before me seem not at rest but dead” (Doty 28)

4.       “Death requires a new negotiation with memory” (Doty 40)

I found this reading very interesting and enjoyable. I like how he looks at death and relates it to the world around him. The way I feel the seals connect to his story is him and his partner. All the seals swimming together happily is the two of them enjoying life. Seeing the one injured and in pain is watching his partner suffer at the end of his life. He has a positive, memory filled, lot of love for his passed partner, but he shows how death and watching his partner die impacted him. Death can be dark but it can be beautiful. He did a great job of how people feel about death but puts a different light on it as well.

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Unlike in the the previous books we have read, we are reading about a loved one grieving over a death rather than reading about the illness and death of the person. How does this give us a different perspective?

1. "The virus seemed to me, first, like a kind of solvent which dissolved the future, our future, a little at a time" (2).
2. "Imagine illness as that light: demanding, torturous, punitive, it nonetheless reveals more of what things are" (5).
3. "Writers try to make the world into themselves, and then when they return to the outer life they expect to have changed it" (36).

I enjoy reading from this perspective because it truly allows us to see what not only the ones will the illness go through but also the loved ones. It gives more evidence toward the point I made in the cancer section that one cannot truly understand what goes on unless you are living it first hand.

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What is the connection with the seals while he is walking? I don't quite understand why he kept mentioning them.

“Someone will take our places, but then again there will never be anyone like us, no one who will see quite this way; we are a sudden flowering of seeing, among the millions of such blossoming” (Doty 9)

“He was unable to walk, since some kind of insidious viral infection which his useless doctors didn’t seem to know the first thing about gradually took away his ability to control his body” (Doty 18-19)

“Does that room exist, except in my memory? Well, something does; there is a space there, in the physical world, but that same space has been plucked out of time, become emblem and artifact” (Doty 55)

Overall I think the reading has been pretty interesting so far. I think that this gives good insight to a situation you can't really understand unless you've been there yourself. Everyone takes loved ones deaths differently and I think this reading has done a good job of describing what a lot of people feel but can't put into words.

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In the last sentence of the prologue, Doty says "Our apocalypse is daily" (10). How do we make sense of this?

"We are not our bodies. The body is not me. I am my body, but I extend beyond it; just as my attention laps out, as my identity can pour out into the day" (31).

"The experiences of our past needed to be re-seen, re-viewed. Not exactly for his story to be finished, but in service of the way his life would continue in me, braided with the story of mine" (40).

"If experience were a film, it would be one that doubles back on itself, looping, superimposing, one moment coming to stand beside another, layered over it, though they're years apart" (41).

"It's ironic, since he spent the last nine months of his life in bed or in a wheelchair, that now we walk together, now that he's dead" (42).

"After the fact, we look back at such moments, the thoughtless time before something momentous happens; how odd it seems, not to have known then, when afterward we can hardly imagine ourselves without such knowledge" (52).

I found this reading very heavy. There is a lot of deep reflecting going on by Doty, but it's kind of nice to hear exactly what he's thinking rather than trying to read between the lines and understand what he isn't explicitly saying. Another thing that stuck out to me is the common theme in our readings that we are not our bodies. I also thought of Tweedy's reflections on the stereotypes associated with HIV/AIDS as Doty discussed the impact it's had on his life and friends.

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Heaven's Coast

How would the author directly define religion as he talks a lot about having two different religions growing up yet he doesn't specify what that really means.
1. "I don't think I had any awareness of of the second religion" (14)
2."All the last year of Wally's life he didn't stop wanting" (18)
3 "I had given myself over to love" (54)

Overall, I did enjoy the reading it gave a unique look inside someone who has felt with all different types of adversity in their life. It did seem to go in unusual directions at times such as the multiple times sea lions were mentioned. I failed to see how that tied with the overall message of the book.

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Do the people around you influence the way you face death of others and your own? Or does everyone take their own stance? If taking an individual stance when facing a loved ones death that differs from the one facing death, will it negatively harm their own mental health?

"Ah, terribly! The last, not minutes, but hours, he didn't stop screaming. For three days in a row he screamed incessantly. It was unbearable. I can't understand how I endured it. It could be heard through three doors. Ah! what I've endured!" (45)

"Well, brother Gerasim?" said Pyotr Ivanovich, just to say some thing. "A pity, isn't it?"

"It's God's will. We'll all come to it some day," said Gerasim. (47)

The pain did not diminish; but Ivan Ilyich tried to make himself think that he was better. And he could deceive himself as long as nothing worried him. But as soon as there was some unpleasantness with his wife, a setback at work, or bad cards at vint, he immediately felt the whole force of his illness; he used to endure these setbacks, expecting to quickly right the wrong, to overcome it, to achieve success, a grand slam. But now any setback undercut him and threw him into despair. (63)

Ivan’s struggle with death not only affected himself, but his family around him struggled with accepting death was near. It’s hard to see someones health decrease as you care for them. I also believe that most people death is a pity like Pyotr said, but having faith allows one to understand and accept death a little easier. Lastly, I think when facing death, any negativity that is faced can greatly harm the mindset of the person going through the illness.

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Did Ivan's family not understand mortality or did they choose to use their ignorance as a coping mechanism?
1. "The dreadful, terrible act of his dying, he saw, was reduced by all those around him to a level of accidental unpleasantness, part of an indecency" (75).
2. "The most tormenting thing for Ivan Ilyich was that no one pitied him as he wanted to be pitied" (76).
3. "Apart from the reflections this death called up in each of them about the transfers and possible changes at work that might result from it, the very fact of the death of a close acquaintance called up in all those who heard of it, as always, a feeling of joy that it was he who was dead and not I" (40).
Although Ivan did not accept the idea of death, it seems like he understood he was dying early on (61).

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Question: How could Ivan taking some type of immediate action have changed the direction of the of the story? Would the outcome be any different?

"Having moved to a new town in the post of examining magistrate, Ivan Ilyich made new acquaintances, connections, behaved in a new way, and adopted a somewhat different tone." (51).

"But it so happened that this discomfort began to increase, and turn not into pain yet, but into the consciousness of a contrast heaviness in his side and into ill humor." (61).

"Another two weeks went by. Ivan Ilyich no longer got up from the sofa. He did not want to lie in bed and so lay on the sofa. And, lying almost always face to the wall, he suffered all alone the same insoluble thought. What is this? Can it be true that it is death?" (85).

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Question: Do you think Ivan would have reflected on his life and his regrets the same if he wasn't sick and heading towards his death.

1. "At first Ivan Ilyich hoped to free himself from the unpleasantness of this situation by that same easy and decent attitude towards life which had rescued him before"  (51).
2. "The main torment of Ivan Ilyich was the lie, the lie that for some reason acknowledged by everyone, that he was merely ill and not dying, and that he only needed to keep calm and be treated, and then something good would come of it" (75).
3. "Three days of terrible suffering and then death. Why, that could come for me, too" (45).

Reflection: I felt the reading allowed me to reflect on some of my own personal regrets and see a new way of approaching life.

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Ivan's illness is worsened as he continues to live his life as he did before the diagnosis. How could he have changed his lifestyle to rectify his past life before coming to realization on his death bed?

1. "Close acquaintances, Ivan Ilyich's so-called friends, involuntarily thought as well that it would now be necessary for them to fulfill the very boring obligations of decency and go to the funeral service and to the widow on a visit of condolence" (40.

2. "And he became
angry at the misfortune or at the people who had caused him the unpleasantness and were killing him; and he felt how this anger was killing him,
but he could not repress it" (63).

3. "Just then Ivan Ilyich fell through, saw light, and it was revealed to
him that his life had not been what it ought, but that it could still be recti-
fied. He asked himself what was "Fight," and grew still, listening" (90).

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Question:  How did Ivan's life events affect his mood as death became closer and closer?

1. "Ivan Ilyich's life came together very pleasantly in this new town as
well: the society that cast aspersions at the governor was close-knit and
agreeable; his salary was higher" (50).
2. "From the doctor's summing up, Ivan Ilyich drew the conclusion that
things were bad, and that for him, the doctor, and for anyone else you
like, it was all the same, but for him things were bad. And this conclusion
struck Ivan Ilyich painfully, calling up in him a feeling of great pity for
himself and great anger at this doctor, who was indifferent to such an
important question" (62).
3. "Everyone sees that it is hard for him, and they say: "We can quit if
you're tired. Get some rest." Rest? No, he is not the least bit tired, and
they play out the rubber. Everyone is gloomy and silent. Ivan Ilyich feels
that it is he who has cast this gloom over them, and he cannot disperse it" (66).

Thoughts:  I think that Ivan's families emotions towards his illness did not help his cause and that is part of the reason that I asked the question that I did.  It would be like someone in your family not accepting your beliefs or something that has happened to you that in the end is uncontrollable.

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1. The past history of Ivan Ilyich's life was most simple and ordinary and most terrible" (47).
2. "Maybe I did not live as I should have?" would suddenly come into
his head. "But how not, if I did everything one ought to?" he would say to himself and at once drive this sole solution to the whole riddle of life and death away from him as something completely impossible" (85).
3. "Just then Ivan Ilyich fell through, saw light, and it was revealed to him that his life had not been what it ought, but that it could still be rectified. He asked himself what was "right," and grew still, listening. Here he felt that someone was kissing his hand. He opened his eyes and looked at his son. He felt sorry for him. His wife came over to him. He looked at
her. She was gazing at him with a despairing expression, openmouthed,
and with unwiped tears on her nose and cheek. He felt sorry for her" (90).

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Question
As Ivan Ilyich's death closed in on him and his family he became angry instead of choosing denial as a coping mechanism like the rest of his family. Anger became Ivan's way of life and effected his "peaceful" death. If Ivan's family would have accepted his death would Ivan have felt less pain?
1. "This ill humor, growing stronger and stronger, began to spoil the pleasantness of the easy and decent life that had been established in the Golovin family" (page 60).
2." as if death was an occurrence proper only to Ivan Ilyich, but not at all to him" (page 45).
3. "The dreadful, terrible action of his dying, he saw, was reduced by all those around him to the level of an accidental unpleasantness, partly indecency...in the name of very "decency" he had served all his life; he saw that no one would feel sorry for him, because no one even wanted to understand his situation" (page 75).
Final thoughts
Ivan's struggle with death came roughly as his family did not accept his illness and suffering. As he spoke about wanting to diminish the lie and have someone listen and understand the concept of denial and false optimism is not on the sick but the other family member's. I wonder if anger made Ivan's suffering worse and during this time period what it would be life to not even have a doctor to speak truthfully towards you and your illness.

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Sample question (or two) for discussion or a problem the text poses about how to define a good life or a good death.

Three (or more) passages I found meaningful:
1
2
3

A few additional thoughts on today's reading: