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Uncle Franck flew down from New York the next day to help with the funeral arrangements.

“Mira and I think he should be buried in New York,” he said.

We were driving to a funeral home in North Miami, where my uncle’s body had been transferred after an autopsy at the medical examiner’s office. The medical examiner had determined that my uncle died from acute and chronic pancreatitis, which it turns out he’d never shown any symptoms of before he became ill at Krome and for which he was never screened, tested, diagnosed or treated while he was at Jackson Memorial Hospital.

The advantage of a New York funeral, Uncle Franck explained on the way to the Miami mortuary, was that my father might be able to attend. Besides, after visiting there for more than thirty years, my uncle had a lot of friends in Brooklyn. It was the next best thing to Port-au-Prince.

When we got to the funeral home, Maxo asked to see his father’s body. The manager was reluctant to allow it, but Maxo insisted.

“I need to see him,” he said. “I just need to see him.”

“A lot of people think they want to view a body,” the manager said, “but then they find it’s too much, especially so soon after an autopsy.”

“I don’t care,” Maxo said, sounding like a little boy pleading for a favor from an adult. “I want to see him.”

“Okay, then.” The manager gave in. He was a tall, slender, butterscotch-colored man wearing a pastel-colored shirt and tie. His jacket was resting on the back of his swivel chair and he’d pick up the jacket and put it on each time he got up, then would take it off when he sat down again.

“I’ll let you see him,” he said, grabbing his jacket, “but we can’t bring you into the room where the other dead are. We must respect them. We must also ask you to speak in a moderate voice and not curse. Here we treat the dead with respect as though they were still alive.”

He should have been at the airport with my uncle, I thought, or at Krome when the medic was twisting his neck and raising his head up and down, or at Jackson, where perhaps because he was a prisoner—an alien prisoner, a Haitian one at that—he received what most doctors to whom I and others have shown his file agree that, given his age and symptoms, was deplorable care.

“You shouldn’t be part of this,” the manager said, pointing to my belly. “You have a life in you. You have no place with the dead.”

“But I’m going to the funeral,” I said.

What I really wanted to say was that the dead and the new life were already linked, through my blood, through me. Still, I agreed not to view the body yet. Besides, the time to have seen my uncle would have been hours, days, weeks earlier, when it could have made a difference, when we could have both been comforted.

The body was brought out on a gurney to a room next to the manager’s office. Maxo and Uncle Franck followed the manager into the room, leaving the door half open. Fighting the urge to peek inside, to see my uncle one more time, I sat with my back to the door. I thought of Granmè Melina peacefully slipping away in her sleep across the room from me when I was only a child, of Tante Denise lying naked on a metal table in the morgue on Rue de l’Enterrement, and I marveled at the relative ease of those situations. Surely there was nothing to fear. Of the many ways that death might transform the love that the living had experienced, one of them should not be fear.

I would have to look at my uncle immediately. How could I not? Turning around, I positioned myself to see him. He was covered from his legs up to his hips with what looked like blue tarp. His unshaven face had a thin layer of white cream, which the manager explained was supposed to keep the skin from retracting. There were squared marks with traces of glue spread out across his chest, most likely from adhesive electrocardiogram leads. After the autopsy, a line of gray rope had been used to sew the front of his body, from his neck down to where the blue tarp ended. His tracheotomy hole was sealed.