Brother, I'm Dying
Uncle Franck flew down from New York the next day to help with the funeral arrangements.
“Mira and I think he should be buried in New York,” he said.
We were driving to a funeral home in North Miami, where my uncle’s body had been transferred after an autopsy at the medical examiner’s office. The medical examiner had determined that my uncle died from acute and chronic pancreatitis, which it turns out he’d never shown any symptoms of before he became ill at Krome and for which he was never screened, tested, diagnosed or treated while he was at Jackson Memorial Hospital.
The advantage of a New York funeral, Uncle Franck explained on the way to the Miami mortuary, was that my father might be able to attend. Besides, after visiting there for more than thirty years, my uncle had a lot of friends in Brooklyn. It was the next best thing to Port-au-Prince.
When we got to the funeral home, Maxo asked to see his father’s body. The manager was reluctant to allow it, but Maxo insisted.
“I need to see him,” he said. “I just need to see him.”
“A lot of people think they want to view a body,” the manager said, “but then they find it’s too much, especially so soon after an autopsy.”
“I don’t care,” Maxo said, sounding like a little boy pleading for a favor from an adult. “I want to see him.”
“Okay, then.” The manager gave in. He was a tall, slender, butterscotch-colored man wearing a pastel-colored shirt and tie. His jacket was resting on the back of his swivel chair and he’d pick up the jacket and put it on each time he got up, then would take it off when he sat down again.
“I’ll let you see him,” he said, grabbing his jacket, “but we can’t bring you into the room where the other dead are. We must respect them. We must also ask you to speak in a moderate voice and not curse. Here we treat the dead with respect as though they were still alive.”
He should have been at the airport with my uncle, I thought, or at Krome when the medic was twisting his neck and raising his head up and down, or at Jackson, where perhaps because he was a prisoner—an alien prisoner, a Haitian one at that—he received what most doctors to whom I and others have shown his file agree that, given his age and symptoms, was deplorable care.
“You shouldn’t be part of this,” the manager said, pointing to my belly. “You have a life in you. You have no place with the dead.”
“But I’m going to the funeral,” I said.
What I really wanted to say was that the dead and the new life were already linked, through my blood, through me. Still, I agreed not to view the body yet. Besides, the time to have seen my uncle would have been hours, days, weeks earlier, when it could have made a difference, when we could have both been comforted.
The body was brought out on a gurney to a room next to the manager’s office. Maxo and Uncle Franck followed the manager into the room, leaving the door half open. Fighting the urge to peek inside, to see my uncle one more time, I sat with my back to the door. I thought of Granmè Melina peacefully slipping away in her sleep across the room from me when I was only a child, of Tante Denise lying naked on a metal table in the morgue on Rue de l’Enterrement, and I marveled at the relative ease of those situations. Surely there was nothing to fear. Of the many ways that death might transform the love that the living had experienced, one of them should not be fear.
I would have to look at my uncle immediately. How could I not? Turning around, I positioned myself to see him. He was covered from his legs up to his hips with what looked like blue tarp. His unshaven face had a thin layer of white cream, which the manager explained was supposed to keep the skin from retracting. There were squared marks with traces of glue spread out across his chest, most likely from adhesive electrocardiogram leads. After the autopsy, a line of gray rope had been used to sew the front of his body, from his neck down to where the blue tarp ended. His tracheotomy hole was sealed. His head was also sewn down the middle, from ear to ear, but with thinner, nearly transparent thread.
My uncle did not look resigned and serene like most of the dead I have seen. Perhaps it was because his lips were swollen to twice their usual size. He looked as though he’d been punched. He also appeared anxious and shocked, as though he were having a horrible nightmare.
When was he last conscious? I wondered. What were his final thoughts? When did he realize he was dying? Was he afraid? Did he think it ironic that he would soon be the dead prisoner of the same government that had been occupying his country when he was born? In essence he was entering and exiting the world under the same flag. Never really sovereign, as his father had dreamed, never really free. What would he think of being buried here? Would he forever, proverbially, turn in his grave?
My uncle looked even less like himself at his funeral in New York. Dressed in a brand-new tuxedo, he had so much eggplant-colored makeup on his face that he looked like he was wearing an ill-fitting mask. But it was my father who inspired gasps when he entered the church he had attended for more than thirty years. Dragging an oxygen tank behind him, he was panting as he walked toward my uncle’s coffin. He was skeletal, a stick figure. He hadn’t been able to attend services for some time, and most of his friends, the ones who hadn’t visited him at home, had not witnessed his gradual deterioration.
Standing before my uncle’s coffin, my father tugged at the oxygen tube in his nose. He was wobbly, sweating. My three brothers surrounded him, formed a half circle around him, ready to catch him from any angle should he fall.
Tapping my uncle’s cheek, as if to stir him from a fainting spell, my father simply said, “Brother, the last time we spoke, you said you were leaving me with a heavy heart. This time I’m the one leaving you with a heavy heart. We may not see each other again on this earth, but I will see you soon.”
My uncle was buried in a cemetery in Queens, New York. His grave sits by an open road, overlooking the streets of Cyprus Hills and the subway tracks above them. During his life, my uncle had clung to his home, determined not to be driven out. He had remained in Bel Air, in part because it was what he knew. But he had also hoped to do some good there. Now he would be exiled finally in death. He would become part of the soil of a country that had not wanted him. This haunted my father more than anything else.
“He shouldn’t be here,” my father said, tearful and breathlessly agitated, shortly before drifting off to sleep that night. “If our country were ever given a chance and allowed to be a country like any other, none of us would live or die here.”
Transition
There’s a stage in labor called transition, when the baby, preparing to separate from the mother, twists and turns to pass through the birth canal. I am sure there is a similar stage for exiting life, though it might be less definitive. Still, as I go into labor—thankfully with a risen placenta—each time I wish for an easy transition for my daughter and myself, I wish the same for my father.
Our midwife, Colleen, encouraged me to add some personal touches to the lavender labor room at the birthing center, so I brought two old photos of my mother and father. In his picture, my father is a handsome, serious-looking twenty-six years old. He’s wearing a pale jacket, a high-collared shirt, a pencil-thin tie and tortoiseshell glasses. My mother in hers is wearing a checked blouse with a giant button on the front. Her hair is straightened and her round face framed by small, star-shaped drop earrings. When Colleen sees my mother’s picture, she thinks my mother is me.
I looked at my parents’ sepia-toned faces intermittently during the sixteen hours that I walked, lay down, sat in a tub, on a ball, on the toilet, in constant agony. How could my mother have done this four times? I wondered.
My mother once briefly told me the story of my birth. I was nearly born in a pebbled courtyard, outside the maternity ward of Port-au-Prince’s General Hospital. My father was out of the city for his work and my mother, fiercely independent, proud and alone, was one of nearly a dozen women who were doubled over and wailing in the yard. There were too many of them and not enough do
ctors. No one even examined them until their babies crowned.
During her four hours of active labor, my mother tried very hard not to wish death upon herself. She staggered in and out of consciousness until a doctor finally surfaced and rushed her into the delivery room.
When my daughter was born, her face blood-tinted, her eyelids swollen with tiny light pink patches that Colleen the midwife called angel kisses, her body coiled around itself as if to echo the tightness of her tiny fists, I instantly saw it as one of many separations to come. She was leaving my body and going into the world, where she would spend the rest of her life moving away from me.
Groggy and exhausted, I asked Colleen, “Is it normal for me to think this?”
“Maybe you’re one of those women who enjoys being pregnant,” she said.
It wasn’t so much that I enjoyed being pregnant. I simply liked the fact that for a while my daughter and I had been inseparable.
Looking at her tiny face, her bow-shaped lips so red that her father said she looked like she was wearing lipstick, I remembered a message a girlfriend had sent me when my first niece and nephew, Bob’s daughter Nadira and Karl’s son Ezekiel, were born.
“May you be a repozwa,” she’d written, “a place where children can rest.”
I needed to rest myself, but I also wanted to speak to my daughter, cradle her, sing to her, inhale her mixed blood and soap smell, watch her ever so slightly open her eyes and tighten her mouth as she tried to make sense of all the new sounds around her: my husband’s laughter, my mother-in-law’s comparisons with relatives both living and gone.
I thought she most resembled my mother and pointed at the picture to prove it. But I also saw traces of my father, who my mother says was too frightened to hold me and my brothers when we were babies, but who would later hold my brothers’ children, laugh and sing to them. I grieved for Uncle Joseph and Tante Denise, who would never hold my daughter, and for my Haitian cousins, including Tante Zi’s son Richard, who might never know her. Or maybe she would return one day, to Léogâne or to Bel Air, to declare in heavily accented words that they were her family.
She might be honored by their nods of acknowledgment, the way they’d be forced to consent, “Of course, of course, I see the resemblance. You do look like your great-grandmothers around the cheeks. You do have the high forehead of your grandfather’s kin.” And hopefully those cheeks and that calabash-shaped forehead would gain her entry.
Looking into my daughter’s eyes, I thought of my mother, who had faced these first hours alone after I was born. She had been made no promises, been offered no guarantees that either she or I would even live past that night. If something had been ruptured inside of her, no one would have noticed. If something had been broken inside of newborn me, perhaps no one but my mother would have cared. My daughter’s quiet yet well-monitored first night was perhaps the one my mother had dreamed for me, for herself, a dream of kind words, kisses, flowers.
“What have you decided to call her?” asked Colleen.
My husband and I had discussed it. There seemed no other possible choice.
“Mira,” I said. “For my father.”
After patiently waiting his turn to hold her, my husband held out his hand. I was also reluctant to let this Mira go. Hopefully I’ll have an uninterrupted lifetime with her, I thought, a lifetime to plant some things that have been uprooted in me and uproot others that had been planted. But surrender her I did, with an urgent wish to also hand her over to my father.
Look, Papa, I’d say. You’ve waited for her. You’ve lived long enough to see her. Today is not just her day, but all of ours. And we’re not the only ones who will cradle and protect her. She will also hold and comfort us. She too will be our repozwa, our sacred place to rest.
I said no such thing when we actually brought my daughter to meet my father three weeks later, five months after my uncle’s death. Standing at his bedside, I was stunned by how motionless he seemed, how much he appeared to have aged. The room too was stripped of all signs of verve. The oak-framed queen-sized bed he once shared with my mother had now been replaced by a narrow hospital bed that allowed him to prop himself up at the push of a button.
My husband lowered the bed’s railing and slipped our daughter into my father’s scrawny arms. I thought that at nearly nine pounds, she might prove too heavy a weight for him, but he raised her face close to his and planted a kiss on her forehead. Her eyes were closed. She was sleeping.
“Do you know how long I’ve been waiting to meet you?” he said. “And you’re not even awake.”
A smile formed on my father’s lips, which proved too much of a strain. He handed Mira back to my husband and began to cough.
After my husband returned to Miami, during the month that Mira and I would spend with my father, each time he held her, his smile would threaten to dissolve into a coughing spell and, after just a few minutes, I’d have to take her back. Until one morning when he’d walked out of bed by himself and over to the recliner by the window.
“Let me hold her,” he said, “while you take a picture, for posterity.”
I ran to my old bedroom and grabbed my camera. I had been hesitant to photograph Mira and my father during the brief moments he’d had her in his arms. I wanted him to enjoy those times as best he could without worrying about posing. Besides, as he’d grown sicker and thinner, he’d asked us not to photograph him. He wanted to be remembered, he said, the way he looked when he was well.
“Look at us, the two Miras,” he said, staring into the camera. In the first frame, my daughter’s eyes are half open, as though she’s struggling to stay awake.
“I’m really touched that you named her Mira,” he said, as I snapped another picture. “Now even when I’m gone—and we all can say that, even those of us who are not sick—even when I’m gone, the name will stay behind.”
My daughter was now fast asleep. For the next shot, my father looked down at her and smiled, a smile that miraculously did not trigger his cough.
Later that week, we celebrated my parents’ fortieth wedding anniversary, my brothers and I, our spouses and a few close friends, by gathering around my father’s bed and toasting him and my mother.
My father was too weak to raise a glass of apple cider to his lips. Sweating profusely, he tried to say something, but couldn’t. My mother quickly asked us to clear the room—he’d grown too hot—to give him some air.
Soon after we left the room, a friend of my father’s from church told me, “Why don’t you let him go? Tell him it’s okay to go.”
I couldn’t, I told her, because I didn’t want him to go. I didn’t want him to die.
During the day, my father hardly ate anything. At night he couldn’t sleep. Whenever he took a sleeping pill and dozed off for a few hours, he spoke loudly, incomprehensibly in rapid staccato speech. There were people, long dead, standing at his bedside, he would explain the next morning. His mother in a red dress. His father singing. His sister laughing. They were keeping him awake.
“Stay with me a while,” he’d tell my mother and me, after he’d said his evening prayers. Then he’d dismiss us a half hour later, saying, “I suppose you have to go. You can’t sit here all night.”
We would go reluctantly, leaving our doors open so we could easily hear the slightest stir. He would get hot, then cold, in the middle of the night and call on us to open or close the windows.
Karl and Bob would come and bathe him, rub medicated lotions over the scaly patches of psoriasis on his skin, some as raw as open wounds. They would cut his hair, trim his curved, oxygen-deprived fingernails and toenails. I’d still watch his game shows and movies with him and, when he could, would debate the news from Haiti and elsewhere.
One afternoon, while my daughter was sleeping, I was sitting with him and my mother was downstairs in the kitchen, when he told me to ask her to cook him some plain long-grain white rice for supper. Early in his illness, he’d decided that rice grains were aggravating his cou
gh, so he abruptly stopped eating them.
Overjoyed that he was actually craving food, I shared the news with my mother, who was downstairs cooking.
“Guess what?” I said. “Papa wants some rice.”
My mother sent me back to ask exactly how he wanted his rice prepared. Could she soak it in chicken broth, mix it with black or brown beans or mushrooms, sprinkle it with shredded cashews? Would he mind if she lubricated it with butter or margarine to add some extra calories and taste, stirred in chunks of sausage or bacon for much-needed protein? Perhaps he wanted some fresh vegetables thrown in for fiber?
He only wanted a small bowl of the plainest white rice she could possibly prepare, he said. He even provided a shorthand recipe. “Cup of rice, water, drop of salt, spoonful of vegetable oil so nothing sticks to the pan. Boil it all.”
My father had always been a picky eater. However, he had only learned to cook during his early years in the United States, while my mother was still in Haiti. When she joined him two years later, the first thing he did was cook for her.
My mother’s first Brooklyn meal was very much like Bob’s and mine. It consisted of stewed chicken, fried sweet plantains, which my mother loves, and diri ak pwa, rice and beans. For a while, each time someone would visit from Haiti, my father would help cook that same meal, just as he had for us, his welcome repast, he called it, because he wanted his visitors to taste something that had buffered his transition to immigrant life. And even if their stays were not meant to be as long as his, he hoped that they would feel, as he did, that one could easily return home, simply by lifting a fork to one’s lips.
I watched as my mother prepared my father’s rice. As she dropped the contents of an overflowing measuring cup into a pot of boiling water, a few grains spilled over the side, turning black in the burner’s blue flames. Her hands trembled as she lowered the lid to trap some steam to prevent the rice from becoming sticky. My father liked his rice light and fluffy, but separate. If given the choice, he’d rather eat it al dente than soggy. Since he’d gone so long without a taste, the possibility of disappointing him weighed heavily on my mother.