Brother, I'm Dying - Edwidge Danticat [0]
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
PART ONE: HE IS MY BROTHER
Have You Enjoyed Your Life?
Brother, I’m Dying
What Did the White Man Say?
Heartstrings, Shoestrings
We’re All Dying
Good-bye
Giving Birth
The Return
One Papa Happy, One Papa Sad
Gypsy
PART TWO: FOR ADVERSITY
Brother, I Can Speak
The Angel of Death and Father God
You’re Not a Policeman
Brother, I Leave You with a Heavy Heart
Beating the Darkness
Hell
Limbo
No Greater Shame
Alien 27041999
Tomorrow
Afflictions
Let the Stars Fall
Brother, I’ll See You Soon
Transition
Acknowledgments
A Note About the Author
Also by Edwidge Danticat
Copyright
For the next generation of “cats”:
Nadira, Ezekiel,
Zora, Timothy
and Mira
To begin with death. To work my way back into life,
and then, finally, to return to death.
Or else: the vanity of trying to say anything about anyone.
PAUL AUSTER,
The Invention of Solitude
PART ONE
HE IS MY BROTHER
This is how you can show your love to me:
Everywhere we go, say of me, “He is my brother.”
GENESIS 20:13
Have You Enjoyed Your Life?
I found out I was pregnant the same day that my father’s rapid weight loss and chronic shortness of breath were positively diagnosed as end-stage pulmonary fibrosis.
It was a hot morning in early July 2004. I took a six thirty a.m. flight from Miami to accompany my father on a visit to a pulmonologist at Brooklyn’s Coney Island Hospital that afternoon. I’d planned to catch up on my sleep during the flight, but cramping in my lower abdomen kept me awake.
I interpreted the cramps as a sign of worry for my father. In the past few months his breathing had grown labored and loud and he’d been hospitalized three times. During his most recent hospital stay, he had been referred to a pulmonologist, who’d since performed a new battery of tests.
My father picked me up at the airport at nine a.m. We hadn’t seen each other in a month. Two years before, in August 2002, I had married and moved to Miami, where my then fiancé was living. Fearing my father’s disapproval, I hadn’t announced my intention to leave New York until a month before the wedding when my father summoned me to his room for a chat.
“How can you leave New York?” he asked while filling out a check on top of a book on his lap. Back then he was still healthy, yet lanky, with a body that looked and moved like an aging dancer’s, a receding hairline and half a head of salt-and-pepper hair.
Removing his steel-rimmed bifocals so I could better see his amber eyes, he had added in his slow, scratchy voice, “Your mother’s here in Brooklyn. I’m here. Two of your three brothers are here. You have no family in Miami. What if this man you’re moving there for mistreats you? Who are you going to turn to?”
The lecture ended with his handing me the equivalent of five months of his mortgage payments toward the wedding reception costs. Looking back now, I wish he’d simply said, “Don’t go. I’m going to get sick and I might die.”
At the airport, my father was too weak to get out of the car to greet me.
The blistering heat made his breathing even more difficult, he explained on his cell phone, while waving from the driver’s seat of his apple red Lincoln Town Car, a car he used as both a gypsy cab and a family car.
When he leaned over to open the door, he began to cough, a deep and hollow cough that produced a mouthful of thick phlegm, which he spat out in paper napkins piled up in a plastic bag next to him.
During the six months that he’d been visibly sick, my father had grown ashamed of this cough, just as he’d been embarrassed about his arms and legs over the many years he’d battled chronic psoriasis and eczema. Then too he’d felt like a “biblical leper,” the kind people feared might infect them with skin-ravaging microbes and other ills. So whenever he coughed, he covered his entire face with both his hands.
I waited for him to stop coughing, then leaned over and kissed him. The blunt edge of his high cheekbones struck my lips hard. He had taken to wearing a jacket even on the warmest