Heaven's Coast: A Memoir

This author has an incredible talent with words and thoughts. I read this book on my Kindle and liked it so much that I bought the physical edition for my book collection. I highly recommend it.

Until you have waited for the funeral home to collect the remains of your spouse, until you have cleaned up and cared for them and they slip through your fingers and until you are able to touch and scatter their ashes without falling completely to pieces, then you don't completely know love. Mark Doty knows love, and he knows loss. He spoke to my soul with words so fluid as one reviewer described his prose, that reading this book felt like silk or a warm breeze against my cheek. Reading it, I felt these were my words if I had his gift for writing. After losing my partner of 25 years, not from AIDS, but complications of successful cancer treatment, I spend nearly three years reading every book I could find on grief. The gay themed books I read seemed to be looking for a replacement or quick sex as soon as they were at page 15. I felt bereft of finding any book that could speak to me of my particular loss, even though I did read some really good books about grief. When a friend suggested this book, I downloaded it immediately. If I hadn't, I would have missed out on one of the finest collections of prose, poetry and dignity that I have ever read. This book is about 2 gay men coming to a leave taking, but it could be helpful to anyone who has lost someone they are particularly close to.I would say this to the one really negative review I read. Do you not read these reviews? Do you read the blurbs? No one said this book was "about" AIDS, but how MORE could it be about AIDS when it documents his partner's journey into release with all pertinent medical and spiritual experience from both sides of the sick bed?This book is not only a tribute to Wally Roberts from Mark Doty; it is a gift to anyone who has ever experienced the most profound loss one can have in life...the loss of a soulmate. Please read and absorb this absolute gem.

I read this beautiful tribute and memoir in tandem with Living in the Light of Death by Larry Rosenberg as part of a course on contemplative caregiving. As a volunteer in hospice, I am privileged to be of service to people and their families during their final days and Heaven's Coast provided insights on how that time can be for a family. Mark Doty describes some of the helpful and unhelpful behaviors that his partner's hospice team demonstrated and I learned a lot from his sharing of that experience.Mark is such a talented writer - I literally stopped and re-read sentences over and over again because they were so powerful.Talking about his grief and contemplating life without his beloved partner Wally, Mark writes: "The future’s an absence, a dark space up ahead like the socket of a pulled tooth. I can’t quite stay away from it; hard as I may try."Describing a friend who is also close to dying: "Is there a luminous threshold where the self becomes irreducible, stripped to the point where all that’s left to see is pure soul, the essence of character? Here, in unfailing self-ness, is no room or energy for anything inessential, for anything less than what counts."Everything Mark chronicled, from Wally and their relationship, to their dogs Arden and Beau, to Cape Cod, to their eclectic group of friends, all came alive for me through this story.While there are many sad moments, overall this is a story of love and light and I feel richer for having read it.

In Heaven's Coast, Mark Doty masterfully captures the profound journey of losing his partner, Wally, to AIDS. His lyrical prose, rich with vivid imagery, provides an intimate exploration of love, loss, and the relentless passage of time. This memoir is a poignant testament to enduring love and the resilient human spirit amidst profound sorrow.

Mark Doty's memoir, Heaven's Coast, is one of the most poetic books I've read in a long time. Ripe with the most vivid imagery, Doty's talent as a poet shines through in his prose.In this book, Doty recounts the life and death of his lover Wally who succumbed to AIDS-related illness in the early 1990s. As Doty deals with this, he's also faced with the deaths of friends from AIDS and a very close friend who dies in a car accident. While all this sounds tragic, it's Doty's hopeful message that shines through. Parts of the story literally had me close to tears, but the articulation of hope and peace beyond grief - and survival through it - left me hopeful.As an "AIDS" memoir, this is an important book to read for the younger generations of gays that didn't necessarily have to watch their loved ones struggle and die with this disease. It's important to remember a time when medicine wasn't as good as it is now, and to know what this plague has meant to the gay community. That being said, I think anyone who has ever lost a loved one can relate to the struggle through grief Doty so poetically describes. I can't say enough good things about this book.

Doty’s is a distinctively Provincetown story about the death of his partner Wally from AIDS (and the self-destruction of a fellow female poet at about the same time). As would be expected from a poet, the prose is lush and beautiful, and the second-by-second account of Wally’s dying minutes is arresting, and beautiful, and brutal. Still, I didn’t feel like I knew Wally at the end of this book. I only knew that Doty loved Wally. In fact, by the end, I felt I knew more about Doty’s back pain than about Wally. And the otherwise thoughtful tone of the memoir was marred on occasion by diatribes against the medical community which, if justified in reality, were not justified by what Doty set forth in the memoir. These diatribes struck a sour note in an otherwise graceful memoir.

Mark Doty is a master of nonfiction! Couldn't help getting caught up in this story of love lost. Definitely a great read.