Brother, I'm Dying - Edwidge Danticat [86]
My uncle did not look resigned and serene like most of the dead I have seen. Perhaps it was because his lips were swollen to twice their usual size. He looked as though he’d been punched. He also appeared anxious and shocked, as though he were having a horrible nightmare.
When was he last conscious? I wondered. What were his final thoughts? When did he realize he was dying? Was he afraid? Did he think it ironic that he would soon be the dead prisoner of the same government that had been occupying his country when he was born? In essence he was entering and exiting the world under the same flag. Never really sovereign, as his father had dreamed, never really free. What would he think of being buried here? Would he forever, proverbially, turn in his grave?
My uncle looked even less like himself at his funeral in New York. Dressed in a brand-new tuxedo, he had so much eggplant-colored makeup on his face that he looked like he was wearing an ill-fitting mask. But it was my father who inspired gasps when he entered the church he had attended for more than thirty years. Dragging an oxygen tank behind him, he was panting as he walked toward my uncle’s coffin. He was skeletal, a stick figure. He hadn’t been able to attend services for some time, and most of his friends, the ones who hadn’t visited him at home, had not witnessed his gradual deterioration.
Standing before my uncle’s coffin, my father tugged at the oxygen tube in his nose. He was wobbly, sweating. My three brothers surrounded him, formed a half circle around him, ready to catch him from any angle should he fall.
Tapping my uncle’s cheek, as if to stir him from a fainting spell, my father simply said, “Brother, the last time we spoke, you said you were leaving me with a heavy heart. This time I’m the one leaving you with a heavy heart. We may not see each other again on this earth, but I will see you soon.”
My uncle was buried in a cemetery in Queens, New York. His grave sits by an open road, overlooking the streets of Cyprus Hills and the subway tracks above them. During his life, my uncle had clung to his home, determined not to be driven out. He had remained in Bel Air, in part because it was what he knew. But he had also hoped to do some good there. Now he would be exiled finally in death. He would become part of the soil of a country that had not wanted him. This haunted my father more than anything else.
“He shouldn’t be here,” my father said, tearful and breathlessly agitated, shortly before drifting off to sleep that night. “If our country were ever given a chance and allowed to be a country like any other, none of us would live or die here.”
Transition
There’s a stage in labor called transition, when the baby, preparing to separate from the mother, twists and turns to pass through the birth canal. I am sure there is a similar stage for exiting life, though it might be less definitive. Still, as I go into labor—thankfully with a risen placenta—each time I wish for an easy transition for my daughter and myself, I wish the same for my father.
Our midwife, Colleen, encouraged me to add some personal touches to the lavender labor room at the birthing center, so I brought two old photos of my mother and father. In his picture, my father is a handsome, serious-looking twenty-six years old. He’s wearing a pale jacket, a high-collared shirt, a pencil-thin tie and tortoiseshell glasses. My mother in hers is wearing a checked blouse with a giant button on the front. Her hair is straightened and her round face framed by small, star-shaped drop earrings. When Colleen sees my mother’s picture, she thinks my mother is me.
I looked at my parents’ sepia-toned faces intermittently during the sixteen hours that I walked, lay down, sat in a tub, on a ball, on the toilet, in constant agony. How could my mother have done this four times? I wondered.
My mother once briefly told me the story of my birth. I was nearly born in a pebbled courtyard, outside the maternity