It astounded me how quickly it was possible to give up on someone as sick as my father. Before my father’s illness, I’d thought that the sicker a person was, the harder doctors would try to save him. Not so, it seemed.
When we got to the hospital, I watched my uncle sprint down the long corridor toward my father’s room. Although he had high blood pressure and an inflamed prostate, the only obvious signs of his being eighty-one were his bifocals and the way his body tilted slightly toward one side. He was wearing his usual dark suit and tie and carrying an oversized Bible that he kept tucked under his armpit.
Before we entered my father’s room, my mother, whose hands were burdened with a bag filled with food-packed Tupperware, waited for us to be all grouped together. Her eyes filling up with tears, she said, “If you look sad, you’ll make him sadder. So please, look hopeful.” And then just as though magic dust had been sprinkled into her weary and reddened eyes, her face brightened with a hopeful grin.
My father’s bed was next to the window, giving him a clear view of the parking lot below. But his eyes remained fixed on a television set bolted on the opposite wall.
He wasn’t expecting me. Lowering his oxygen mask, he wrapped both his arms around me when I leaned over to say hello.
His body was even smaller than the last time I’d seen him, yet his face looked round and full from the prednisone. He also appeared relaxed, calm, as though relishing the brief respite the hospital allowed him from having to cope with his illness on his own. There, at least, he could turn it over to the doctors and nurses to manage for a while.
“How’s Fedo?” he asked.
“Good,” I said.
“Married life?”
He slid his finger over my blouse, checking to see how much the baby had grown. I was still not showing. I simply looked like I had put on a few pounds.
Turning to my uncle, my father winked. I hadn’t had a chance to tell my uncle I was pregnant. His phone in Bel Air wasn’t working. I probably should have told him sooner, written him a letter, but as with my parents I hadn’t found the right tone or time.
“Your daughter,” my father said, teasing my uncle. “And she doesn’t even tell you you’re going to be a grandfather.”
My uncle’s hands came together in a joyful clap.
“Denise would have been so glad,” he said.
My father was discharged from the hospital the next day. After consulting with Dr. Padman, a resident prescribed around-the-clock oxygen. Once the tanks were delivered, my father stopped working. His daily routine was now centered around a few activities. He would wake up in the morning and walk to the bathroom to shower and brush his teeth. He’d then return to bed, where my mother would bring him a breakfast of tea and soup or sometimes eggs—scrambled or boiled—and bread or cornmeal and herring. Along with his breakfast, he would take his first series of medicines, both herbal and pharmaceutical. Then he would pray out loud as though conducting a boisterous one-sided conversation with God.
His prayers were most often about his illness—“God, if you see it fit to cure me, please do. If not, your will be done”—but he also prayed for me and my brothers, for our safety and well-being. He prayed for patience and strength for my mother, who was caring for him. He asked God to bless her for taking care of him. He prayed for a favorable outcome to the American presidential elections, for peace in Haiti and in the world in general.
The week after my father left the hospital, my uncle would rise early to pray with him. Sleeping in the room next to my father’s, I would sometimes be awakened by their combined voices, my father’s low, winded, my uncle’s loud, mechanical, yet both equally urgent in their supplications.
Sometimes, my father remained quiet while my uncle alone implored. “God, do not forsake your servant now. He’s sixty-nine years old. He has so much yet to experience. He’d so like to live to rejoice in all the promises you’ve made to those who serve you. He’d like to watch his progeny flourish, to see the generations emerge before him. He would glorify your name if you were to grant him your grace and lengthen his days. Were you to allow him to return from where he’s standing now on the edge of the valley of death, he’d have a testimony to match that of many of your prophets.”
After the morning prayers, my uncle would sit in a folding chair at my father’s bedside. To fill the silence, my father would attempt to start a conversation, recalling a person they’d both known or some incident they’d shared.
One morning my father asked, “What became of the Syrian you used to work for?”
Scratching his widow’s peak, my uncle replied, “He’s now one of the richest men in Haiti.”
“What about the Italian I worked for?”
“He went from selling shoes to somehow making them.”
Then glancing at me, my father asked my uncle, “Do you remember when you wrote me that letter saying that a boy had beaten Edwidge in school?”
Remembering neither beating nor boy, I asked, “When was that?”
“You must have been six,” my uncle said. “In primary school.”
“I was so mad,” my father said, turning over on his side on the bed, “I wanted to get on a plane right then and there, forget everything and go back home to my children.”
“That’s when I stopped reporting all their cuts and scrapes,” my uncle said.
More, please, I wanted to say. Please tell me more. Both of you, together, tell me more. About you. About me. About all of us. But my father began coughing, so my uncle leaned over and whispered, “Ush, Mira. Just rest.”
Every day at lunchtime, my father would leave his bed and venture downstairs, where he had a desk in a corner of the dining room. There he’d sit and sort through his mail and, whenever he was able to, return phone calls. My uncle would take advantage of this time to nap or walk around our neighborhood. My father would also make an effort to come down to the living room whenever his friends came by. Later, the trips downstairs, even the trips to the bathroom, would become too difficult, and he’d have no choice but to receive his guests in bed.
At five p.m. every day, my father would slowly make his way back upstairs. Sometimes he’d linger a bit longer to have an early dinner, but most often my mother brought supper to him in his room at around seven. Usually it was something light, steamed vegetables or a simple stew. Sometimes, however, he would get a craving for take-out fried chicken and plantains, and either Bob or Karl would stop at a nearby restaurant and pick them up for him before coming over to the house to help bathe him. After his bath and supper, he’d take his final round of medications for the day and then settle in for an evening of television watching.
Over the years my father had accumulated an extensive collection of Haitian-produced movies and professional wrestling tapes. He would watch his favorites of those over and over until he knew all the dialogue. Whenever I watched with him, whether it was a Haitian movie or wrestling, he’d brief me on the scenario, forgetting that he had done so many times before.
He did the same to my uncle whenever my uncle would sit with him in the evenings. My uncle, who never watched anything on television but a few minutes of the evening news, unsuccessfully feigned interest, but ended up grimacing disapprovingly as my father became lost in the spectacles.
In early September, my uncle began packing. School was starting in Haiti and he had to go back to his students and church.
One night after my father had fallen asleep, my uncle asked to speak to me alone in the guest room where he slept. He was wearing a sleeveless undershirt and as he raised the voice box to his neck, I could see the tracheotomy hole throb with every breath.
“I have a thought concerning your father,” he said. “I know a doctor in Haiti. He’s the head of the national sanatorium. I think he can help.”
Remembering the mountaintop national sanatorium as a place to which people, like Liline’s cousin Melina, were often exiled before their deaths, I answered defensively, “Papa doesn’t have tuberculo
sis.”
“I know,” he replied. “But this doctor has had to deal with all kinds of lung diseases. He can help. I’ve already discussed it with your father. He can’t go now. With the oxygen, it’s too much to manage. I’m thinking maybe you can pay for a plane ticket and a hotel for the doctor to come here to examine him.”
My father wanted none of it.
“I can’t bring that doctor here,” my father told me the next day. Though he seemed touched by my uncle’s suggestion, he also understood the futility of it. “It would be a waste of time and money.”
The morning of my uncle’s departure, he stopped several times in the narrow hallway while walking from the guest room to my father’s bed. Pressing his face against the wooden panels, he was crying. Before entering my father’s room, he pulled a handkerchief from his shirt pocket and wiped his eyes.
That morning, my uncle prayed the longest he had ever prayed at my father’s bedside. My father closed his eyes and listened quietly, only occasionally chiming in with “Yes. Thank you.”
“Lord,” my uncle said, “You already know our deepest wish. You know how much it would please us to see your servant rise from this bed and live and work again among those who are well. You know how even the angels would hear our cries of jubilation if his pain were to disappear. You know how much wisdom he would gain, how much insight he’d have to share with others who take their lives for granted.”
My uncle lowered the hand that wasn’t holding the voice box and pressed it against my father’s forehead. He then recited the Lord’s Prayer, encouraging me to join with a nod of his head.
“So you’re going?” my father said when we were done.
Maybe I should have convinced my uncle to stay. Maybe it would have helped, done my father some good, helped them both.
“I must go,” my uncle said.
“Okay,” my father said, “but don’t frighten the others in Haiti. Don’t tell them about the hospital and the oxygen. Don’t make it sound like I’m on my deathbed.”
“I won’t,” my uncle promised. Then, stroking my father’s prednisone-rounded face, my uncle said, “I will keep praying for you.”
A hush came over them, just long enough to make me think that if he stayed even a minute longer Uncle Joseph might miss his plane. The silence was broken by the youngest of my uncles, Franck, who lived not too far from my father in Brooklyn, honking his car horn downstairs.
“Brother, I’m going, but I’m leaving you with a heavy heart,” Uncle Joseph told my father. “I really am.”
Reaching up to shake my uncle’s hand, my father said, “I know you are.”
“I don’t know if or when we’ll see each other again,” my uncle said.
“God knows,” my father said.
Then my uncle slapped his forehead the way he did when he remembered something that had previously slipped his mind.
“I’ll be coming to Miami in October to visit some churches,” he said. “I’ll come up and see you then.”
My uncle was aiming for my father’s forehead, but fell short, his mouth landing on the bridge of his nose. Still it ended up being a gentle kiss, like a grown man kissing a sick child, partly with love, but mostly out of fear.
“Why don’t you walk Uncle out,” my father said to me, to avoid, I am certain now, having me see him cry.
I followed Uncle Joseph down the steps and to the door of my uncle Franck’s car. That morning the tilt of his body seemed a little more pronounced.
“You know we can’t all stay together all the time,” he said.
Knowing how much my father would not only miss but worry about him, I stood there on my parents’ tree-lined street and waited until the car had turned the corner and was completely out of sight.
In mid-October, my husband and I learned our child’s gender from our midwife, Colleen, at the Miami maternity center where we’d chosen to have our baby. Based on how quickly my belly had grown in a few weeks, I was sure I was carrying twins, while my husband was convinced it was a boy. So during the sonogram, rather than marvel at the crescent-shaped bubble that was our daughter, my husband was looking for a penis and I for a sibling.
My daughter’s sex, however, was not what we discussed most that afternoon. Colleen pointed out that I had a low-lying placenta, which was usually self-correcting but could complicate the delivery if it remained unchanged. Statistically three out of four such cases resolved themselves, she said, and the placenta drifted upward as the pregnancy progressed; however, it was something we’d need to keep an eye on.
“If you’re going to have a problem, that’s the one you want,” Colleen added in a gentle, comforting voice. “It’s not a huge deal.”
Still I worried, imagining mine being the one out of the four placentas that never budged. I called my parents to tell them.
“Don’t worry,” my mother said. “The body knows what it’s doing.”
Even though it seemed that was no longer the case for my father.
“You’re just like us,” my father added, now ignoring the placenta matter altogether. “Your mother and I had our girl first. You’ll have to follow us further with three boys.”
“No way,” I said. “I think I’m just having this one.”
“God didn’t make us with one eye,” he said. “You don’t want to parent an only child.”
My father was having a good day. The night before, he’d slept more than six hours and in the morning had experienced fewer coughing spells than usual. I could always tell when he was having a good day because our conversation would slowly drift beyond his health and my pregnancy to broader topics, mostly Haitian news items he’d heard about on the radio or seen on television.
That night we discussed Tropical Storm Jeanne, which had struck Gonaïves, Haiti’s fourth-largest city, the week Uncle Joseph had left New York. Jeanne had displaced more than a quarter of a million people and left five thousand dead.
During his illness, whenever my father would bring up news-related deaths such as the ones from Jeanne, I’d try to steer him away from the subject. Knowing that he was often, if not always, thinking about his own death, I feared that other deaths might further demoralize him.
Still pondering Tropical Storm Jeanne, my father said, “Gonaïves is still underwater. I’ve seen the pictures. In one of the hospitals, patients drowned in their beds. Children were washed away.” His wheezing made him sound like a hasty witness. He’d watched the images so many times that he’d dreamed he was there.
Did these dreams make him grateful to be dying the way he was, at home? Or maybe he envied the others their mutual sinking, their communal vanishing. But isn’t death, no matter how or when it takes place, always solitary?
“I’ve been trying to call Uncle in Haiti this week,” he said, “but his phone isn’t working.”
I too had been trying to reach my uncle with no success. However, it wasn’t unusual for his phone to be out of service for weeks, even months.
The last time my father had heard from Uncle Joseph, seven days before, Uncle Joseph had called to give him the telephone number of the doctor who was the head of the sanatorium in Port-au-Prince.
“It can’t hurt to speak to him,” my father recalled him saying.
“I’m worried,” my father added now. “He’s called nearly every other day since he left to ask how I’m doing. All of a sudden seven days go by and I don’t hear from him.”
“I’m sure he’s okay,” I said. “Otherwise we would have heard something.”
Tropical Storm Jeanne had caused relatively little damage in Bel Air. Instead, another kind of storm was brewing there. After September 30, 2004, thirteen years since President Jean-Bertrand Aristide was removed from power the first time and six months since the second time, the protests became a daily event in Bel Air. They usually started outside the small square in front of Our Lady of Perpetual Help, a crumbling, bullet-riddled Catholic church down the street from my uncle’s apartment and church. After Arist
ide’s second ouster, in February 2004, the UN Security Council had passed Resolution 1542 establishing the Brazil-led MINUSTAH, Mission des Nations Unies pour la Stabilisation en Haiti, a stabilization mission. More than eighty people had died when the Haitian national police, operating in collaboration with MINUSTAH soldiers, had clashed with neighborhood gangs during the demonstrations. Headless bodies, including those of two policemen, had been found in different parts of the capital.
That night, along with the newspaper articles that reported these events, I searched the Internet for images of Bel Air. Above a cloud of smoke rising from a burning tire, I saw the wine-colored gates of my uncle’s church. I enlarged and rotated the picture as much as I could, hoping to find the church’s plain metal steeple or the narrow staircase that led to the classrooms on the bottom floor. Or the courtyard corridor from which you could look up and see my uncle’s wrought-iron-framed dining room window. And not too far from it, the jalousies on the recently added third-story apartment where my cousin Maxo lived with his second wife, Josiane, and his five young children, who had all been born since he’d returned to Haiti in 1995.
The next day, I called my uncle Franck in Brooklyn to see if he’d heard from Uncle Joseph. He had the phone number of one of Uncle Joseph’s neighbors, and also a number for one of Tante Denise’s cousins, Man Jou, but he tried not to use those numbers to reach him. Given the demonstrations and gang activity and beheading threats, Uncle Franck reminded me, each time Uncle Joseph left his house to return a phone call, or even when he did not leave his house, he was putting his life in danger.
Beating the Darkness
On Sunday, October 24, 2004, nearly two months after he left New York, Uncle Joseph woke up to the clatter of gunfire. There were blasts from pistols, handguns, automatic weapons, whose thundering rounds sounded like rockets. It was the third of such military operations in Bel Air in as many weeks, but never had the firing sounded so close or so loud. Looking over at the windup alarm clock on his bedside table, he was startled by the time, for it seemed somewhat lighter outside than it should have been at four thirty on a Sunday morning.