Listening to her cackle even as her care became more humiliating made me realize how hard she was trying to keep a part of herself intact, even though it was a side of her she rarely made public. The nurses would laugh and continue their work and my mother would laugh between occasional groans of pain, as if she never wanted the joke to end.
At my father’s funeral, my mother kept whispering something under her breath. Finally, at the gravesite, I leaned over to hear what she was saying. She was muttering over and over, “Jusqu’à ce que la mort nous sépare.” “Until death do us part.”
Later, when I asked her why she was saying that, she told me that she was reminding my father that their contract had been terminated, that she’d signed up only until one of them was dead, and that she didn’t want my father to come back and bother her.
This is why I know my mother will not haunt me. She will not be a ghost, because she was afraid of ghosts. My mother once told me how in her grandparents’ time, the ankles of the dead were tied with a pretty ribbon or with a rope to keep them from coming back to haunt the living. I had a feeling that she would have tied my father’s ankles together if she’d been given a chance.
My mother wouldn’t have been funny in English. Even though she’d lived in the United States for decades, her English sounded like that of a newly arrived immigrant. Part of it was shyness. The other part was her lack of practice. There was not much English spoken in the factories where she worked. Everyone there had come from someplace else. She was embarrassed to speak English in other settings as well. She worried that she wouldn’t be understood. Her English was hesitant and inadvertently curt. She used as few words as possible, as though trying not to squander them.
I gave her a few more English words than she might have used in this prayer. I tried to bring in her humor too. I called my mother’s prayer “A New Sky.”
Dear Lord,
Please let this be my final prayer, my very final prayer. Let there be no more need for me to ask anything else of you and of this shaken and troubled but beautiful earth.
Let this be the last time I think of you, before we see each other face-to-face, light-to-light, or wind-to-wind, or sky-to-sky, or however we will be.
I can’t wait. I can’t wait to see what I will be: what colors, what shade, what light pillar, what rainbow, what moon bow, what sunbow, what glory, or what new sky.
Let me now accept all of this, as I have already accepted this world and all that it is and has been.
And please let the world go on. Let the sun still rise and set. Let the rain still fall, quiet and soft at times, and hard at other times. Let the oceans be still or roar, as they always have. Let the world go on as it always has, so that my children will know that only my spark has dimmed and not the entire world.
Let my children remember me. Both the good and bad of me. Let them not forget one thing about me that could help them be one better woman and three better men.
Please let the pain racking my body stop. Let it stop right now. Let my lungs stop aching. Let my breath stop sounding like hammers in my ear.
Let me not say anything hateful at this final hour.
Please make my daughter stop crying.
Let it be a sunny day when they bury me.
And, please, let my children find the five hundred dollars I left in the tin can in the freezer—I should have told them about that when I still could. Don’t let them throw out my good blender. All it needs is a new blade.
Okay, maybe you can make my children forget all the times I spanked them. There might not be much to be gained from that.
Let them say nice things about me at my funeral. Things I have never heard them say before, things I would never imagine them even thinking about me. Things that have nothing to do with being spanked. Don’t let them go on talking for too long at the service, though. Let them stop talking when it’s time.
And let them know that I have always been praying for them like this, silently, in my head. And that if it’s at all possible, I will never stop praying for them, like this, silently, from somewhere else.
Please remind them that none of us have all the time we think we have in this troubled but still beautiful world.
Let them not bury me in an ugly dress.
Guide them to my good wig. (I really should have told my daughter where it was.)
Let them not be talked out of a closed coffin. I now only want you to see my face.
And please, please, let my children survive this. Let them survive this. For I will not be just their Manman now. I will be their light pillar, their rainbow, their moon bow, their sunbow, their glory, their new sky.
Feetfirst
I had walked the fifteen or so blocks between the Newkirk Avenue subway station and my parents’ old house in East Flatbush, Brooklyn, for years, but never with such a sense of dread. It was my first trip back after my mother’s death and I wanted to revisit that stretch of Avenue D that she and I had sauntered, strolled, and marched along together throughout much of my life. I wanted to see if my mother would still be walking these same streets—alone, invisibly, without me.
In the past, my mother and I had walked to the supermarket or the Laundromat. When it was warm outside and we were both feeling heavy. Or when her doctor told her that she should walk between twenty and thirty minutes a day. Other times, we walked because she wanted to talk to me.
We never fought, but we sometimes disagreed. She and I were both the silent-treatment kind and one way we dealt with our grievances was to keep them inside until we stopped thinking about them. There was a kind of fragility to our relationship. Neither one of us thought we could handle a full-blown fight, because of all the years we’d spent apart. The wrong words might have shattered us to pieces. Every moment we spent together was time being made up. I did not realize it then, but maybe she did. If we’d had a symbol, it was our feet.
There’s a Haitian Creole expression, pye poudre, which is the equivalent of Zora Neale Hurston’s travel dust. My mother’s travel dust had taken her from Port-au-Prince to Brooklyn without me. During those walks with her, sometimes I would count my age in what I called my Manman years, subtracting the eight she and I had spent apart during my childhood. Eventually I would be the one who would have pye poudre, venturing away from my mother: going to graduate school, falling in love, getting married, moving to Miami.
When my mother was dying, I kept taking cell phone pictures of her feet—in sandals, in socks, barefoot. I took pictures of her feet with my feet lying in bed next to her, with her doctors’ feet, with her lab technicians’ feet. I did this sometimes to keep my head down, so she couldn’t see my tears as the nurses tried to draw her blood for the thousandth time or as she was being slid through yet another diagnostic machine that looked like a coffin. But I took these pictures also to remind me of our walks.
“Let me tell you something,” she would say to me during those walks: “Ban m di w yon bagay.” Then our walk would turn into a lecture about some issue of great concern to her: this one guy I liked whom both she and my father hated, the fact that I wasn’t sleeping enough or taking better care of myself.
Back then I looked so much like my mother that people mistook pictures of her as a younger woman for pictures of me. Our bodies even moved the same way, swaying a little bit from side to side at a rhythm and pace that nearly had us colliding. I sometimes purposefully collided with her, in lieu of a hug, which would have embarrassed her.
My mother couldn’t easily say “I love you,” but during these walks her body said it. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see her watching out for me, for possible potholes or sudden dips in curbs. She would take the street side so she would be more vulnerable than I was to passing cars.
My mother and I were not always going to the same place. I was commuting to Barnard College, first as a student and later to work as an administrative assistant in the financial aid office. My mother was working at another factory in Manhattan, Mary having not ye
t come into her life. She and I would leave the house together. If we’d just missed a bus, and the “dollar cabs” that followed the bus route were full, my mother immediately started walking to the next bus stop. Sometimes we’d make it to the subway by hiking between bus stops, my mother harboring a look of worry on her face.
Winters nearly stopped our walks. But every now and then, we’d have no choice but to make the trek, our breath forming clouds in front of us. Behind that frozen mist, my mother would notice that I was wearing the wrong kind of hat, scarf, or gloves.
“My only daughter, how are you supposed to get on in this world?” she’d say. “You will feel all this cold in your bones when you’re old.”
Sometimes we walked in the opposite direction, not toward the subway station but away from it, stopping at the Korean grocer’s to pick up some mangoes, breadfruits, avocados, and sugarcane stalks, laid out especially for the Caribbean clientele. Right before we got home, we would reach Saint Thérèse of Lisieux Catholic Church, where we’d attended funerals, including that of my mother’s older brother, Uncle Justin, who died after being hit by a car in the snow when he was over eighty years old.
Across from Saint Thérèse was the Frank J. Barone Funeral Home, which had scared my brothers and me when we moved to the neighborhood. Living three houses away from the newly dead as they were waiting to be either cremated or buried used to make us walk faster when we got off the bus.
When friends came over, they would ask us if we had ever seen any ghosts.
We hadn’t.
Didn’t we ever have nightmares? they’d ask.
Eventually we got so used to having the dead as neighbors that we stopped thinking about it. Besides, it wasn’t like living next to a cemetery. Our dead were only passing through.
But it was a kind of purgatory, another friend insisted, where the dead might be most restless.
Eventually, what bothered us most about living on the same block as a funeral home was having cars blocking our driveway during wakes. Now and then gunshots would ring outside our house as some of the mourners expressed their grief with firepower.
That day after my mother’s death, crossing the street to reach the funeral home felt like treading on holy ground, in the same way that everything one has lost takes on extra meaning. Just as remembering propping up my dying mother’s skeletal body against my own to give her a bath now makes me feel as though I were part of a reverse pietà.
More than once, at the beginning or the end of our walks, my mother and I had seen a hearse pull up and a gurney taken out, with a body either covered with a white sheet or wrapped in a black body bag, and pushed through the funeral home’s side door. My mother would turn to me and say, “Nou rantre tèt devan. Nou soti pye devan.” “Most of us enter this world headfirst, then we leave it feetfirst.”
She said it so often that she sometimes abbreviated the phrase: Tèt devan. Pye devan. Headfirst. Feetfirst.
On that walk after my mother’s death, I stood outside the funeral home for I don’t know how long, waiting for one of those bodies to show up. Seeing one would be a sign that my mother was still on that walk with me.
I then walked to a bench across the street and waited some more. I was also waiting in part because I knew I would eventually write about this and I wanted some type of resolution.
By then it was late afternoon, when the bodies were most likely to come, usually from hospitals, after all the paperwork had been filled out and all the arrangements had been made. Rarely did a day go by without at least one body coming through, except maybe Sundays. Sometimes there were several bodies a day. My mother and I once spotted the outline of a small child in an infant-size body bag. That day we said nothing.
Then I saw it. The hearse pulled up and parked next to the side door. Seeing my mother’s body being lifted off the hospital bed in my house, then lowered into one of those black body bags had been one of the most painful moments of my life. My mother really is a body now, I thought, and only that.
I waited for the two men who were accompanying the body to come out of the Frank J. Barone hearse. I waited for them to slide the gurney out. I had seen it done so many times that I could have closed my eyes and still described what happened next.
The men wheeled the gurney with the body toward the narrow door, its wheels grating against the sidewalk. One of them searched his pocket for the key and unlocked the door. Then they began to slide the body through the door. The first man disappeared inside, supporting what was clearly the feet. The bulge that was the head went last.
A year to the day after my mother died, I dream that I wake up shaking after realizing that I’d abandoned her in the hospice ward for a week and had completely forgotten about her. In the dream, I jump out of bed and rush to the hospital, panicked that my mother had been buried without anyone she loved saying good-bye.
The hospice room in my dream looks a lot like the one my mother had actually stayed in, with plain white walls and a window overlooking a courtyard with a walking trail that snaked through a garden full of cement benches. In my dream, when I walk into that room, I find someone who looks like my mother standing by her bed, waiting for me. She looks like she did in her coffin at her funeral: thin, though not as haggard, and with layers upon layers of dark pancake makeup on her face. In my dream, she’s wearing a long black wig and a short cocktail dress with silver sequins on the front, and before I can hug her, she begins rocking herself, then starts dancing a slow, mournful dance.
As she is dancing, I realize that she doesn’t recognize me. I suddenly do not recognize her either. I can’t figure out who the woman I’m looking at is, but she is not my mother. So I quickly turn around and walk out of that room, without saying good-bye.
In the hallway outside the hospice room, I mumble a few words to myself about a purse.
A few months before, among my mother’s things, I had found a beautiful purse. My mother was very fond of purses. She also liked church hats, but had more purses. Maybe it was because she used to make purses in the factories. In any case, she liked having purses around. Most of the handbags and purses I found in her house in New York, and that I eventually ended up giving away, had pieces of hard caramel candy tucked in the pockets along with bus fare: two dollars’ worth of coins individually wrapped in paper napkins.
Out of my mother’s dozens of purses, I had kept only a few and had only one on my night table. It was a seashell-shaped vintage purse covered with gray and silver beads. The two-headed metal clasp clicked loudly when you opened and closed it. The inside was lined with gold silk that had faded in some places and gotten browner in others. Inside a tiny pocket, I saw the number 2 written in black permanent marker and I realized that this purse had cost my mother two dollars at the Goodwill near the diagnostic center where she’d had some of her early tests, the same Goodwill where she and I would browse through shelves and bins searching for such treasures.
Somehow that purse makes its way into my dream and as I walk away from the dancing woman in the hospice ward, the woman who was not really my mother, I begin talking to my mother about that purse.
“Manman, sa se bous ou,” I mutter under my breath.
Manman, this is your purse.
It is a purse inside a dream.
As if there’s nothing left for it to carry,
In the real world.
But I am still carrying it.
Like I’m still carrying you.
Manman, I miss you.
Manman, I love you.
Manman, repoze.
Please rest.
Good-bye.
I would like to thank Kima Jones, who was the first person to bring The Art of series to my attention. Thanks also to Taiye Selasi for talking to me about her wonderful novel, Ghana Must Go. I am deeply grateful to doctors Rose-May Seide, Gershwin Blyden, Ronald Joseph, Hearns Charles, and Jean Philippe Austin, and to Freda Sanon, who helped me care for my mother in her last days. I am also extremely grateful to Bishop
Philius Nicolas and Pastor Gregory Toussaint, pastors Chris Cassagnol, Oscar Ferville, Joseph Samuel, Samuel Nicolas, and Serge Esperance Jr., and to Madame Yolande Ferville and Mrs. Patricia Toussaint for all their support during my mother’s illness.
Some parts of this book previously appeared in the following publications and have been modified and incorporated into new text for this publication.
Introduction: Writing Life
As “Significant Others” in Sojourners, November 2009
As “My Honorary Degree and the Factory Forewoman” in The Brown Reader: 50 Writers Remember College Hill, Judy Sternlight, ed. (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2014)
Living Dyingly
In Poets & Writers, July/August 2017
Ars Moriendi
As “Homage to a Creative Elder” in the Nation, January 2013
Dying Together
As “Lòt Bò Dlo: The Other Side of the Water” in Haiti after the Earthquake, Paul Farmer (New York: PublicAffairs, 2011)
As “Flight” in the New Yorker, September 2011
As “House of Prayer and Dreams” in Sojourners, April 2013