Winter in Paul’s Garden

Paul Monette’s garden wears a winter face, with the leaves of a Chinese elm tree scattered about the patio and the bloomless rhododendron bushes oddly lackluster beneath an overcast December sky.

Only a brilliantly red poinsettia, placed carefully in the center of a small table, adds a flash of color to the small back yard, but that’s an intrusion. Hothouse plants don’t belong here.

“That’s a type of night-blooming jasmine,” Monette said, pointing to a huge, bushy tree that dominates a corner of the garden. “It will blossom in about two months, and its fragrance will haunt us once more.”

The phrase seemed to hang in the melancholy air, a representation of both the passing seasons and of the dwindling days of Paul Monette. The likelihood is he will not be here in two months. The man is dying of AIDS.

I had come to the garden this time as I have before to chronicle the relentless advance in one person of a disease that has infected another 2.5 million human beings around the world.

I had seen the garden in the ebullience of spring and now I was seeing its wintry face, the final metaphor in the days of a gifted writer whose end I have unwittingly chronicled.

Gaunt and frail from the ravages of AIDS-related cancer, his immune system gone, Monette has ended what he calls the sewers of medication entering his body and will let the disease take him.

“This is the time I have bought,” he said, as leaves continued to fall. “I must confront it.”

*

I met Monette five years ago after reading “Borrowed Time,” a sad, angry chronicle of his relationship with “beloved friend” Roger Horwitz, whom he had lost to AIDS.

It was a powerful and a moving book that blended prose and poetry into a fabric of rage and grief against not only his loss, but the loss of a generation to a disease that had become a firestorm.

He had seen 200 of his friends die of AIDS over the years and said, as we sat in his garden that first time, “I have no tears left.”

Monette himself, then 44, had tested positive for HIV, the precursor of AIDS. He lived in a surrealistic world, trapped between the vibrancy of life and the shadows of death, and was acutely aware of both.

“Sometimes I wonder where did Paul Monette go?” he asked once. “You become the disease after awhile, and the you-person disappears.”

He estimated back then that he had at most five years of life left. He did not squander the time in tears, but wrote two more books, making a total of 15, one of which won him a National Book Club Award for nonfiction.

But now the five years have passed and the cancer called Kaposi’s sarcoma has left him contemplating eternity; “God’s ground of being,” he calls it, quoting the theologian Paul Tillich.

“I’m part of a generation that continues to die,” he said as we stood by the back door overlooking his garden. “I’ve tried to humanize and articulate the crisis. I am a symbol without anger, hoping that the war will continue even as heroes fall.”

*

We talked for an hour. His decision to end all medications did not mean he was seeking death, Monette said. He was simply fighting the disease on his own terms. There was a quality of peace to that, a serenity that comes with knowing you are doing the best you can.

“I owe it to all the people I buried to keep fighting,” he said in a voice surprisingly strong. “We all have suffering in our lives. The best we can do is help each other and take the world seriously.”

He worries that he will be forgotten when he dies, and all the thousands of words he has written, the prose and the poetry, will die with him, like leaves scattered by a fearsome gale.

“I want my life to matter,” Monette said. “I want my work to survive me.”

I suspect it will. By his eloquence and by the compelling nature of a life ended too soon, Paul Monette’s legacy will be a powerful one. He has ignited fires that will not be damped and rages that will not be silenced.

I am a part of his rage, a voice still heard, and it will blend with the voices of others who mourn the passing of poets.

Monette confronts time the way a garden confronts a changing season, by becoming a part of it. But there is power to the inexorable blending, best expressed by the Argentine writer Jorge Borges.

“Time is the substance from which I am made,” he wrote. “Time is a river which carries me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that devours me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire.”