Brother, I'm Dying - Edwidge Danticat [6]
“The reason for this gathering,“ he announced, “is to discuss what is going to happen to your mother after I’m gone.”
My father was sitting in his usual seat at the head of the table. My mother was on the other end facing him. I was sitting on his left, her right, with Karl, who, at six foot one, towered over all of us. Kelly and Bob, the middle children, as I liked to call them, were sitting across from us. We were all stunned into silence by my father’s pronouncement, both those among us who thought we should recount to him what the doctor had said (brothers Karl and Kelly) and the rest of us who did not. But maybe the doctor was the wisest of any of us. Of course the patient always knows. My father must have suspected even before the doctor had. After all, he inhabited the body that was failing.
“I’m not getting better.” My father covered his face with his hands, then slowly pulled them apart as though he were opening a book. “And when a person’s sick, either you’re getting better or you’re dying.”
He said this so casually and with so little sorrow that my sadness was momentarily lifted.
“What would you like to happen after I’m gone?” he asked, looking directly at my mother. “Do you want to stay in the house, or sell it and buy an apartment?”
“I’m not going anywhere,” my mother said defiantly.
A line of sweat was growing over her lips as she spoke. I appreciated her unwillingness to embark for such an unknown world, to look toward another life, beyond her husband’s.
“The house might be too big for you to live in by yourself,” my father continued, matter-of-factly. “Someone would have to move in with you.”
I kept my eyes on the sheer plastic sheath that covered my mother’s hibiscus-embroidered tablecloth. Was my father trying to prepare us? Put us at ease? Show us that we shouldn’t worry about him, or was he trying to tell us that he was ready for whatever lay ahead?
“Pop.” Bob rubbed his eyes with his balled fists, then raised his hands to catch my father’s attention. While I’d been staring at the tablecloth, he’d been crying.
“Pop, can I ask you a question?” The tears were flowing down Bob’s face. He was easily the huskiest and the most overtly emotional of my three brothers, Karl being the most levelheaded and Kelly the most reserved.
“What is your question?” my father asked, his own eyes growing moist, though he was doing his best to hold back his tears.
“Have you enjoyed your life?” Bob asked, pausing after each word as if to take in its weight and meaning.
I lowered my head again, absorbing the stillness that also followed this question, the kind of hush that suddenly forces you to pay attention to so many unrelated things around you: the shell of the dead fly trapped in the window screen, the handprints on the plastic over the tablecloth, the ticking of a giant clock in the next room, the pressing desire for anything, including an explosion, to burst forth and disrupt the calm.
“I don’t know what to say about that.” My father drew in his breath, something that required a great deal of effort and thus resulted in a grimace-like contortion of his face. “I don’t—I can’t—remember every moment. But what I can say is this. I haven’t enjoyed myself in the sense of party and glory. I haven’t seen a lot of places and haven’t done that many things, but I’ve had a good life.”
My father went on to list what he considered his greatest accomplishments: Kelly, Karl, Bob and me, as well as his three grandchildren, Karl’s five-year-old son Ezekiel and two-year-old daughter Zora and Bob’s five-year-old daughter Nadira.
“You, my children, have not shamed me,” he continued. “I’m proud of that. It could have been so different. Edwidge and Bob, your mother and I left you behind for eight years in Haiti. Kelly and Karl, you grew up here, in a country your mother and I didn’t know very well when we had you. You all could have turned bad, but you didn’t. I thank God for that. I thank God for all of you. I thank God for your