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_There is some firm place in me which knows that what happened to Wally, whatever it was, whatever it is that death is as it transliterates us, moving us out of this life into what we can__ know, is kind. I shock myself, writing that. I know that many deaths are anything but gentle. I know people suffer terribly_I know many die abandoned, unseen, their stories unheard, their dignity violated, their human worth ignored. I suspect that the ease of Wally__ death, the rightness of it, the loving recognition which surrounded him, all made it possible for me to see clearly, to witness what other circumstances might obscure. I know, as surely as I know anything, that he__ all right now.And yet. And yet he__ gone, an absence so forceful it is itself a daily hourly presence. My experience of being with Wally_ brought me to another sort of perception, but I can__ stay in that place, can__ sustain that way of seeing. The experience of knowing, somehow, that he__ all right, lifted in some kind process that turns at the heart of the world, gives way, as it must, to the plain aching fact that he__ gone. And doubt. And the fact that we can__ understand, that it__ our condition to not know. Is that our work in the world, to learn to dwell in such not-knowing? We need our doubt so as to not settle for easy answers. Not-knowing pushes us to struggle after meaning for ourselves_Doubt__ lesson seems to be that whatever we conclude must be provisional, open to revision, subject to correction by forces of change. Leave room, doubt says, for the unknowable, for what it will never quite be your share to see. Stanley Kunitz says somewhere that if poetry teaches us anything, it is that we can believe two completely contradictory things at once. And so I can believe that death is utter, unbearable rupture, just as I know that death is kind.