Brother, I'm Dying - Edwidge Danticat [53]
I was walking next to my father and uncle when three shots rang out in quick succession. The mourners scattered in a nervous stampede, leaving us in the middle of the suddenly empty street. The flurry of people disappearing around street corners and down alleys seemed hazy and unclear. My heart was beating fast, a pool of sweat gathering on my face. Was this how Marie Micheline felt before she died?
My father’s fingernails were digging into my forearm.
“Edwidge!” he called out, alarmed.
“Papa,” I said, trying hard to focus on his worried face.
“You look like you’re about to faint,” he said.
My uncle had drifted away toward a group of church ushers who were trying to gather our mourners together again. The trouble was over, the ushers were calling out. The storm had passed. We could proceed.
Suddenly people began to emerge, from behind parked cars, store galleries, alleys, porches. Our procession was slowly moving again, where only my uncle, my father, the hearse and I had stood.
Later we’d learn that the gunshots had been the result of an attack on a cemetery guard by members of a neighborhood gang. The guard had fired three shots in the air to scare them off. But as we finally headed for the gravesite, I will never forget hearing Léone shout, “Denise, sè mwen, sister, what is this, a twenty-one-gun salute? You’re not in the military, Denise. You’re not a policeman. Why is there shooting at your funeral?”
Brother, I Leave You with a Heavy Heart
In late August 2004, Uncle Joseph came to New York for a summer visit. At eighty-one years old, and without Tante Denise to keep him company, he wanted a respite from the increasing number of protests in Bel Air. Uncle Joseph’s trip also coincided with my father’s first hospitalization since his diagnosis.
I was nearing the end of my first trimester and though I had no morning sickness, I felt fatigued and on some hot Miami mornings found myself weeping uncontrollably when I woke up alone in bed after my husband had left for work. Suddenly being separated from others felt like a much more drastic form of isolation, a sentence of banishment for not being near my dying father. So when Bob called to tell me that Papa was in the hospital, I leaped out of bed and boarded the next plane to New York.
Karl picked me up. (And even that felt odd, for it was my father who always did the picking up from airports.) My mother and Uncle Joseph were in the backseat of Karl’s car. I could see that Uncle Joseph had lost a few pounds since Tante Denise’s funeral—mostly from eating less, he said, now that his wife was gone—yet he looked sporty and fit. Like my mother’s, his face also betrayed a hint of fear, which I immediately recognized: it was about my father.
“So how’s the patient?” I asked, trying to ease the obvious gravity of the moment.
“You’ll see for yourself,” Karl said, his face unreadable in profile. “We’re taking you to him now.”
Could it have happened so quickly? I wondered. Only a few weeks after my father’s diagnosis was I being ushered to his bedside to say good-bye?
“What does the doctor say?” I asked.
“Not much,” Karl answered. “He’s getting IVs. He’s also getting respiratory treatment, but they’re not going to keep him there long. The doctor’s already told us that.”
It astounded me how quickly it was possible to give up on someone as sick as my father. Before my father’s illness, I’d thought that the sicker a person was, the harder doctors would try to save him. Not so, it seemed.
When we got to the hospital, I watched my uncle sprint down the long corridor toward my father’s room. Although he had high blood pressure and an inflamed prostate, the only obvious signs of his being eighty-one were his bifocals and the way his body tilted slightly toward one side.