Brother, I'm Dying - Edwidge Danticat [25]
Nick was carrying a small tray with a piece of bread and a thermos full of coffee. Walking to his great-grandmother’s bed, he lowered the tray and placed it on a flat surface at her feet.
“She’s still sleeping?” Nick looked down at her face. It was paler than usual, wizened and pitted. Her lips were puckered and her jaws fastened tightly as though wired together. The sheet was raised over her chest in the same place Tante Denise had carefully tucked it the night before.
I checked beneath her cot. Her chamber pot was empty. She’d been unusually quiet throughout the night, I told the boys, never waking up to pee.
“I thought she asked for coffee,” Nick said. “Or did Manman [as he now called his grandmother] just send it?”
Suddenly it occurred to me that she might be dead. I had seen lots of dead bodies, not in their beds at home but at viewings and funerals at my uncle’s church.
Before my uncle’s operation, a big part of his job was to eulogize the dead. And even after his operation, he faithfully attended all church funerals, and believing that children shouldn’t be shielded from either the idea or the reality of death, he often brought Nick, Bob and me with him. So the sight of a corpse was not new to us. But the task of identifying one, recognizing the transition from the living to the dead, was.
“Let’s hold a mirror to her nose,” Bob suggested.
Had he heard about someone doing this? Had he seen it in one of the comic books he and Nick were always reading?
He ran out of the room and came back with one of Tante Denise’s pocketbook mirrors. When he lowered the mirror to Granmè Melina’s nose, the glass remained unchanged. There was no mist, no fog. Granmè Melina was not breathing.
“Check her eyes,” Nick suggested.
Moving his face closer to Granmè Melina’s, Bob pulled back one of her eyelids. Leaning in, I saw what looked like a brown marble with bright red veins wrapped around it.
“Li mouri,” he said calmly. She’s dead.
“Are you sure?” Nick asked.
The eyelid did not snap back by itself, so Bob had to lower it with the same index finger with which he’d raised it. By then we were all sure.
Until his operation, a death meant an eloquent homily from my uncle, a sermon that echoed my friend’s declaration that indeed, every day, we are all dying.
“Death is a journey we embark on from the moment we are born,” he’d say. “An hourglass is turned and the sand starts to slip in a different direction as soon as we emerge from our mother’s womb. Thank God those around us are too blinded by joy then to realize it. Otherwise there would be weeping at births as well. But if we weep at a death, it’s because we do not understand death. If we saw death as another kind of birth, just as the Gospel exhorts us to, we wouldn’t weep, but rejoice, just as we do at the birth of a child.”
My uncle’s funeral homilies had rarely varied from this. Still, during Granmè Melina’s funeral, as he sat quietly in his usual seat at the altar, he might have had more personal words in mind for his mother-in-law. For at some point during the service, when one of the associate pastors was announced, my uncle got up from his seat and raced to the pulpit.
Sitting in the front pew with her sister Léone and two of her brothers, Tante Denise moved from side to side, shifting her weight uneasily. Unlike Léone, who wore a plain, short-sleeved, black cotton dress, Tante Denise wore a black lace dress with matching gloves and veil.
Nick leaned over and whispered to Bob and me, “What’s Papa”—as he called his grandfather—”doing?” We were sitting in the second row, behind Tante Denise, who turned back and gave us a scolding glance as Uncle Joseph stood motionless behind the pulpit. Tante Denise wasn’t one to coddle children and could have easily pulled any one of us aside for a spanking, even in the middle of her own mother’s funeral service.
Tante Denise turned her eyes back to the front of the church and along with the entire congregation was once again looking up at my uncle. Had he forgotten that he couldn’t speak? Should they expect some