Brother, I'm Dying - Edwidge Danticat [1]
“I’m happy to see you,” he said while tugging at his too wide shirt collar.
Merging into traffic at the airport exit, he asked about my husband and the house we’d been renovating in the Little Haiti section of Miami for the past two years.
“Any new developments?” he winked. “Baby?”
Fedo, my husband, and I were waiting to complete the renovations before trying to get pregnant, I told him.
“You’re thirty-five years old,” he said. “You have more childbearing years behind you than you do ahead.”
Watching him effortlessly drive the same car he’d been driving for nearly a decade, I felt my stomach cramp again. We had a few hours still before his doctor’s appointment, so he suggested we visit an herbalist that his pastor, a minister whose Pentecostal church my father had been attending for more than thirty years, had recently recommended.
“Maybe the herbalist can examine us both,” I suggested. At that point, I still wanted to believe that our discomforts might be comparable, something that a few herbs and aromatic plants could fix.
The herbalist saw us immediately even though we didn’t have an appointment. A large Jamaican woman with a knit rainbow head wrap, she motioned my father to a chair next to a machine that looked like it was set up for an eye exam.
Before our iridology scans, she made us sign disclaimers saying we knew she wasn’t a medical doctor and could not cure any illness. This, she explained, was a legal necessity even though she had healed many people—as my father’s pastor had told him—including some terminal cancer patients.
She snapped a picture of each of my father’s pupils, then enlarged them on a computer screen. Leaning in, she examined the whites of his eyes on the screen.
“You need plenty of vitamins.” She pointed out some tiny spots to prove it. “You need to cleanse your system and unblock those lungs.”
When she was done with him, she handed my father a printout listing some syrups and pills she offered for sale.
After my own eye scan, she told me I had an imbalance in my uterus.
Had I ever missed any periods? Had I taken a pregnancy test?
My father, who’d been examining a catalog filled with pricey herbs, suddenly looked up.
“I have no reason to take a pregnancy test,” I told her. “My husband and I, well, we’re not trying.”
My father opened his mouth to say something, but his words dissolved into a long coughing spell, which led her to add a few more recommended items to his list.
“Something’s going on with you,” she told me, as we left with two hundred dollars’ worth of vitamins, coenzymes, liquid oxygen, and natural cough suppressants for my father. “The eyes don’t lie.”
Dr. Padman’s office was a sad and desperate place. Everyone in his waiting room, mostly Caribbean, African, and Eastern European immigrants, seemed to be struggling for breath. Some, like my father, were barely managing on their own, while others dragged mobile oxygen tanks behind them.
My brother Bob, who taught global studies at a nearby high school, was, because of his location and the free afternoons his work schedule allowed, my father’s most frequent waiting room companion. After a few visits, however, he too began dreading that gray and dingy room, its stale and stuffy smells, its peeling beige paint and anti-smoking posters, because it was the one place where our father’s predicament was most unambiguous, where his future seemed most uncertain. At the same time, it was where Papa appeared most comfortable, where he could cough without being embarrassed, because others were coughing too, some even more vociferously. In the skeletal faces and winded voices around him, he could place himself on some kind of continuum, one where he was still coming out ahead.
A nurse asked my father to step on a scale soon after we arrived. This was the part of the visits he would come to dread most, for it offered proof