Brother, I'm Dying - Edwidge Danticat [88]
I said no such thing when we actually brought my daughter to meet my father three weeks later, five months after my uncle’s death. Standing at his bedside, I was stunned by how motionless he seemed, how much he appeared to have aged. The room too was stripped of all signs of verve. The oak-framed queen-sized bed he once shared with my mother had now been replaced by a narrow hospital bed that allowed him to prop himself up at the push of a button.
My husband lowered the bed’s railing and slipped our daughter into my father’s scrawny arms. I thought that at nearly nine pounds, she might prove too heavy a weight for him, but he raised her face close to his and planted a kiss on her forehead. Her eyes were closed. She was sleeping.
“Do you know how long I’ve been waiting to meet you?” he said. “And you’re not even awake.”
A smile formed on my father’s lips, which proved too much of a strain. He handed Mira back to my husband and began to cough.
After my husband returned to Miami, during the month that Mira and I would spend with my father, each time he held her, his smile would threaten to dissolve into a coughing spell and, after just a few minutes, I’d have to take her back. Until one morning when he’d walked out of bed by himself and over to the recliner by the window.
“Let me hold her,” he said, “while you take a picture, for posterity.”
I ran to my old bedroom and grabbed my camera. I had been hesitant to photograph Mira and my father during the brief moments he’d had her in his arms. I wanted him to enjoy those times as best he could without worrying about posing. Besides, as he’d grown sicker and thinner, he’d asked us not to photograph him. He wanted to be remembered, he said, the way he looked when he was well.
“Look at us, the two Miras,” he said, staring into the camera. In the first frame, my daughter’s eyes are half open, as though she’s struggling to stay awake.
“I’m really touched that you named her Mira,” he said, as I snapped another picture. “Now even when I’m gone—and we all can say that, even those of us who are not sick—even when I’m gone, the name will stay behind.”
My daughter was now fast asleep. For the next shot, my father looked down at her and smiled, a smile that miraculously did not trigger his cough.
Later that week, we celebrated my parents’ fortieth wedding anniversary, my brothers and I, our spouses and a few close friends, by gathering around my father’s bed and toasting him and my mother.
My father was too weak to raise a glass of apple cider to his lips. Sweating profusely, he tried to say something, but couldn’t. My mother quickly asked us to clear the room—he’d grown too hot—to give him some air.
Soon after we left the room, a friend of my father’s from church told me, “Why don’t you let him go? Tell him it’s okay to go.”
I couldn’t, I told her, because I didn’t want him to go. I didn’t want him to die.
During the day, my father hardly ate anything. At night he couldn’t sleep. Whenever he took a sleeping pill and dozed off for a few hours, he spoke loudly, incomprehensibly in rapid staccato speech. There were people, long dead, standing at his bedside, he would explain the next morning. His mother in a red dress. His father singing. His sister laughing. They were keeping him awake.
“Stay with me a while,” he’d tell my mother and me, after he’d said his evening prayers. Then he’d dismiss us a half hour later, saying, “I suppose you have to go. You can’t sit here all night.”
We would go reluctantly, leaving our doors open so we could easily hear the slightest stir. He would get hot, then cold, in the middle of the night and call on us to open or close the windows.
Karl and Bob would come and bathe him, rub medicated lotions over the scaly patches of psoriasis on his skin, some as raw as open wounds. They would cut his hair, trim his curved, oxygen-deprived fingernails and toenails. I’d still watch his game shows and movies with him and, when he could, would debate the news from Haiti and elsewhere.
One afternoon, while