When the rice was done, my mother searched a cabinet filled with her special-occasion dishes, the kind she used only when she had company, and pulled out a white porcelain plate with two giant cherries sketched in the middle. The cherries overlapped in a way that made them look like one large heart and as my mother heaped the rice on top of them, they seemed like a coded message from a woman who was beyond taking ordinary moments with her husband for granted.
I took the rice up to my father on the bright yellow tray on which all his meals were served. My mother added a tall glass of ice-cold water, which my father had requested at the last minute. When I walked into the room, my father’s face lit up, his eyes sparkling with anticipation. He was sitting in the recliner, his eyes glued to the plate. I leaned over to place the tray in front of him. He was covered in four layers of blankets, which were doing the work that muscle and fat had once done for his body. What seemed like room temperature to someone else could feel glacial to my father.
The forward sway of my body made the water glass skid across the tray, spilling the chilled water into my father’s lap. The water soaked through the blankets onto his pajamas, leaking into the sponge padding beneath him.
My father let out a loud cry. I quickly pulled the tray aside, resting it on the dresser behind the television. Even as he moaned and tried to wriggle away from the soaked sheets, my father’s eyes trailed the plate of rice that was now cooling off just a few feet away.
My mother heard my father’s screams from downstairs and rushed to his rescue. She quickly peeled back the blankets, all the while shouting for me to get her a towel and dry pajamas from the closet.
My father’s pained utterances quickly went from moans to wails.
“Oh God!” he called out tearfully. “Oh God!”
An hour later, my father was still trembling, under no fewer than three piled-up dry comforters.
“It feels,” he said, “as though I’ve been sleeping on a bed of ice for days.”
It took some oxygen and a nebulizer to stabilize him. By then the rice was cold and he showed no desire for it.
‘I’m sorry, Papa,” I said, trembling myself at his bedside. I had terrible visions of watching him freeze to death as a result of my carelessness.
“It was an accident.” He raised one bony hand from under the comforters to grab mine. “I know you didn’t mean to do it.”
“I am sorry I ruined the rice for you,” I said. “I know how much you wanted it.”
He hesitated, then pressed my hand harder.
“I didn’t want it so much as I wanted to want it,” he said. “The truth is, I don’t feel hungry or thirsty anymore. I just wish I did.”
It pained me much more to hear this than it did to have heard him say a few weeks before that he’d dreamed of Granpè Nozial and Granmè Lorvana and Tante Ino, his long-dead father, mother and sister, standing at his bedside. It pained me more than the way he’d been starting every sentence with “Lè m ale.” When I’m gone.
Sitting beside him that afternoon, I remembered being angry with him two Thanksgivings before when he’d sat down at the dinner table and left his plate untouched.
“There’s nothing here I want to eat,” he had declared.
After cooking for two days, my mother had been devastated by what she’d considered a blatant condemnation of her cooking. But what we didn’t know then, and what my father himself wasn’t aware of at the time, was that he already had a disease that was slowly eating away at his body, including his yearning for food and his reliance on it to sustain him.
We could smell it before we saw it. A new batch of long-grain white rice prepared by my mother. This time she brought it up herself and not on the bed tray, but on a round silver server from the special cabinet. My father raised himself on the bed to receive it and as soon as my mother handed him the spoon, for he always ate his rice with a spoon, he immediately dived in.
He barely chewed at all, simply bouncing the grains from cheek to cheek, then swallowing quickly. Had I not known, I would have thought him famished, ravenous, even insatiable. And perhaps he was. Or maybe he was desperately trying to nourish himself with something recognizable and familiar.
When he was halfway done, my father handed me the plate.
“Do you want some?” he asked.
“There’s more in the kitchen,” my mother said. “She can have some later. This is for you.”
“Let her have some,” he insisted.
I reached over and took the plate. Using my father’s spoon, I piled a mound of rice into my mouth. It was plain but flavorful. I suspected that my mother had slipped in some broth or margarine, even a few drops of coconut milk.
I realized that afternoon that for nearly a year, while my mother, brothers and I had constantly carried food up to my father, we had rarely eaten with him. Somehow it hadn’t occurred to me that he missed sharing a table or a plate, passing a spice or a spoon. But he did. Just as he missed seeing certain faces and places and hearing certain voices that neither his friends nor family nor the television could successfully transport to his room.
I returned to Miami with my daughter the next morning. Three days later, Bob called me before daybreak. I knew from the timing that it was not good news.
“He’s gone, isn’t he?” I asked.
“He’s gone,” he replied.
I think now that my father waited for me to leave. That he did not want me to hold Mira with one hand and his corpse with the other.
The night my father died, my mother heard the same type of rapid staccato speech coming from his room that she’d now grown accustomed to. In the middle of it, he somehow managed to shout her name. She ran into the room and found him sweating and gasping for breath. She made sure the oxygen tube was properly placed in his nose and tried to slip a nebulizer tube between his lips.
“M pa kapab,” he told her. I can’t.
His eyes rolled back in his head, which fell back, limp, against his pillow.
My mother called Bob, who came over and, after calling my father a few times (“Pop!”) and after placing a nebulizer mask over his nose and mouth and getting no response, called 911.
When the paramedics arrived, they asked Bob if my father had a DNR. Bob said no. A clear measure of our inability to release him, we hadn’t encouraged him to make one even after the doctor at Columbia Presbyterian had suggested it.
The paramedics removed my father’s clothes, laid him on the wooden floor in his room naked and pounded at his chest for an hour. Even if they had succeeded in resuscitating him, he probably would have had a couple of broken ribs.
Neither Bob nor my mother could stay and watch, so as the paramedics worked on my father, they went downstairs, where they were interviewed by a policeman.
The policeman, the distant outside authority figure, was a curious presence. Was this standard practice in all American deaths, even expected ones like my father’s? I asked my mother and brother.
It was, the policeman had explained, a measure to make sure there was no foul play, no euthanasia involved.
How long had my father been sick? the policeman asked my mother and brother. What medications was he taking?
When I was home with my father, just a few days before, lying with my daughter in the same bed I’d slept in as a teenager, there were nights when I stayed awake wondering what I’d do if I woke up the next morning and found my father dead. During those nights, heeding his friend’s call to let him go, I would do a kind of mental rehearsal of several possibilities.
When it seemed irreversible and absolutely definite that my father was dying, I would finally tell him to go.
Don’t be afraid, I’d say. It’s okay. We love you. We will always remember you. Then naming each of us, I would tell him that we’d be fine and so would he. Manman will be fine, I’d say. Kelly will be fine. Karl will be fine. Karl’s son Ezekiel will be fine. His daughter Zora will be fine. Bob will be fine. And his daughter Nadira will be fine. I will be f
ine and Mira will be fine. Then I would lean down and kiss him good-bye.
I don’t know that I would have been able to do this. Perhaps the desire to see him return, to have him back, even for one more day, would have continued to be too strong.
Granmè Melina once told a story about a daughter whose father had died. The daughter loved her father so much that her heart was shattered into a hundred pieces. When it came time to plan for the jubilant country wake, which was once held the night before all funerals, the daughter wanted no part of it and ordered that it not be held.
“Daughter,” said one of the wise old women in the daughter’s village, “let the people rejoice at your father’s wake tonight before they cry at his funeral tomorrow.”
“There will be no rejoicing,” answered the daughter. “Why should I ever rejoice again when my father is dead?”
“Daughter,” insisted the old woman, “let the wake be held. Your father is now in the land beneath the waters. It is not our way to let our grief silence us.”
Knowing that the old woman had the gift that the ancestors granted to only a chosen few, of being able to journey between the living and the dead, the daughter said to the old woman, “I will allow the wake to be held only if you go to the land beneath the waters and bring my father back.”
The old woman walked to the nearest river and slipped into the waters. A few hours later, she reemerged and walked straight to the daughter’s house.
“Where’s my father?” asked the daughter.
“Daughter,” said the old woman, “I am back from beneath the waters, deep into the bowels of the earth. There were some wide and narrow roads. I took them. There were many hills and mountains, and I climbed them. There were hamlets and villages, towns and cities, and I passed through them too. And finally I reached the land of the ancestors, the city of the dead.”
“Did you see my father?” asked the daughter impatiently.
“I saw so many people there I couldn’t even tell you,” answered the old woman. “I saw my mother and father, my uncle and grandmother, my aunt who was trampled by a horse and my sister who died of tuberculosis in childhood. All my loved ones who’ve died were there.”
“Did you see my father?” shouted the daughter.
“Daughter,” answered the old woman, “I looked and I looked amongst all those people until I found your father.”
“Where is he?” asked the daughter.
“‘I’ve come to take you back to the land of the living,’ I told your father. ‘Your daughter’s heart has broken into a hundred pieces and she cannot live without you.’”
“What did he say to that?” asked the daughter.
“‘I’m so touched that my daughter wants me to come back,’ he said, ‘but my home is now here, in the land of the ancestors. Tell my daughter for me that when one is alive, one is alive, but when one is dead, one is dead.’”
The old woman then pulled from her pocket a set of false teeth that the father had religiously worn in his mouth when he was still among the living and had taken with him into the land of the dead.
“Your father sent you this,” said the old woman, “so that you might believe that I saw him and accept what he says.”
The daughter took the false teeth in her hands and looked at them with great sadness, but also with a new sense of courage.
“As my father wishes, so it shall be,” she said. “We will have the wake to honor him, to rejoice and celebrate his life before his body is put in the ground. We will eat. We will sing. We will dance and tell stories. But most importantly, we will speak of my father. For it is not our way to let our grief silence us.”
A few months after my father died, my parents’ house caught fire. The fire started at three a.m., in the same room where my father had lain in bed for nearly a year, in the corner where we once kept his emergency supply of several oxygen tanks. Given the nature of the fire—crackling in the walls, sparks in the ancient wiring, electricity—the fire marshal predicted that the entire house, which lost part of its roof and a few walls, could have been totally razed in fifteen minutes. Enough time, thankfully, for my mother, my brother Karl and his family, who’d moved in with my mother, to all quickly escape. But not enough time for my father, in the state he was in, to have gathered himself up and made his way out. He might not have even heard the hiss of spreading flames over the loud hum of his oxygen compressor, or seen the smoke beyond the ghostly faces that haunted his final nights.
After my uncle Joseph died, my father told me that he dreamed of him only once, and never in the small group he pictured around his bed. In my father’s dream, when my uncle calls him from Maxo’s apartment the night he nearly died, my father actually makes it there on time to ride in the ambulance with him and hold his hands as the paramedics drill the tracheotomy hole in his neck.
“He must have been so scared,” my father said, “not knowing whether he was going to live or die.”
Like perhaps most people whose loved ones have died, I wish that I had some guarantees about the afterlife. I wish I were absolutely certain that my father and uncle are now together in some tranquil and restful place, sharing endless walks and talks beyond what their too-few and too-short visits allowed. I wish I knew that they were offering enough comfort to one another to allow them both not to remember their distressing, even excruciating, last hours and days. I wish I could fully make sense of the fact that they’re now sharing a gravesite and a tombstone in Queens, New York, after living apart for more than thirty years.
In any case, every now and then I try to imagine them on a walk through the mountains of Beauséjour. It’s dawn, a dazzling morning over the green hills. The sun is slowly rising, burning through the fog. They’re peacefully making their way down the zigzag trail that joins the villages to the rest of the world below. And in my imagining, whenever they lose track of one another, one or the other calls out in a voice that echoes throughout the hills, “Kote w ye frè m?” Brother, where are you?
And the other one quickly answers, “Mwen la. Right here, brother. I’m right here.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I am extremely grateful to the Lannan Foundation for a crucial fellowship at a most crucial time. Thank you, Cheryl Little, Mary Gundrum, Sharon Ginter and the entire staff at the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center for the acquisition, through legal action and extremely persistent Freedom of Information Act requests, of Krome, Jackson Memorial, Department of Homeland Security records and Office of the Inspector General reports so extremely crucial to this narrative. I am grateful to the Harvard Law Student Advocates for Human Rights and the Centro de Justiça Global in Rio de Janeiro and Sâo Paulo, Brazil, for their March 2005 report Keeping the Peace in Haiti? An Assessment of the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti Using Compliance with Its Prescribed Mandate as a Barometer for Success. Also to Irwin P. Stotzky of the University of Miami School of Law and Thomas M. Griffin, Esq., for their report Haiti Human Rights Investigation: November 11–21, 2004. Thanks to Representatives Kendrick B. Meek, Charles Rangel and Major Owens, Robert Miller, John Schelbe, Drew Hamill, Alix Cantave and Esther Olavarria for hearing us out. I am extremely grateful to Jonathan Demme, Joanne Howard, James and Stephanie McBride, Susan Benesh, Kathy Klarreich, Ira Kurzban, Leslie Casimir, Patrick Sylvain, Ron Howell, Patricia Benoit, Lewis Kornhauser, Daniel Wolff, Jim Defede, Gina Cheron, Tamara Thompson and Johnny McCalla from the New York–based National Coalition for Haitian Rights for their interest and counsel early on. To John Patrick Pratt, for representing my uncle under extraordinarily difficult circumstances. For support and love shown to my father, I’d like to thank Elycin and Lourdes Pyram, Denifa Rejouis, Drs. P. Krishnan, Paul Farmer, Ketly Elysée, Jocelyn Celestin and Hearns Charles, Reverends Rene Etienne and Phylius Nicolas, Reverend and Mrs. Elima Maréus. Thank you, Nick, Maxo, Franck, Josephine and Zi Dantica, Nicole Aragi, Robin Desser, Alena Graedon, Bob, Kelly, Rose, Mia and Karl Danticat, Ruth and Garry Auguste, Issalia and Fedo Boyer.
/> Diane Wolkstein recounts a remarkable version of “The Angel of Death and Father God” as “Papa God and General Death” in her marvelous collection The Magic Orange Tree and Other Haitian Folktales. Harold Courlander does the same with “Who Is Older?” and “The Voyage Below the Water” in The Piece of Fire and Other Haitian Tales. Ruth Auguste’s as yet unpublished memoir, Mom in the Mirror, tells Marie Micheline’s story in greater and more exquisite detail.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Edwidge Danticat is the author of several books, including Breath, Eyes, Memory, an Oprah’s Book Club selection; Krik? Krak!, a National Book Award finalist; The Farming of Bones, an American Book Award winner; and The Dew Breaker, a PEN/ Faulkner Award finalist and winner of the first Story Prize. She is also the editor of The Butterfly’s Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States and The Beacon Best of 2000: Great Writing by Women and Men of All Colors and Cultures.
She lives in Miami with her husband and daughter.
ALSO BY EDWIDGE DANTICAT
FICTION
The Dew Breaker
The Farming of Bones
Krik? Krak!
Breath, Eyes, Memory
NONFICTION
After the Dance: A Walk Through Carnival in Jacmel, Haiti
FOR YOUNG READERS
Anacaona, Golden Flower
Behind the Mountains
AS EDITOR
The Butterfly’s Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States
The Beacon Best of 2000: Great Writing by Women and Men of All Colors and Cultures
THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK