Brother, I'm Dying - Edwidge Danticat [90]
My father’s pained utterances quickly went from moans to wails.
“Oh God!” he called out tearfully. “Oh God!”
An hour later, my father was still trembling, under no fewer than three piled-up dry comforters.
“It feels,” he said, “as though I’ve been sleeping on a bed of ice for days.”
It took some oxygen and a nebulizer to stabilize him. By then the rice was cold and he showed no desire for it.
‘I’m sorry, Papa,” I said, trembling myself at his bedside. I had terrible visions of watching him freeze to death as a result of my carelessness.
“It was an accident.” He raised one bony hand from under the comforters to grab mine. “I know you didn’t mean to do it.”
“I am sorry I ruined the rice for you,” I said. “I know how much you wanted it.”
He hesitated, then pressed my hand harder.
“I didn’t want it so much as I wanted to want it,” he said. “The truth is, I don’t feel hungry or thirsty anymore. I just wish I did.”
It pained me much more to hear this than it did to have heard him say a few weeks before that he’d dreamed of Granpè Nozial and Granmè Lorvana and Tante Ino, his long-dead father, mother and sister, standing at his bedside. It pained me more than the way he’d been starting every sentence with “Lè m ale.” When I’m gone.
Sitting beside him that afternoon, I remembered being angry with him two Thanksgivings before when he’d sat down at the dinner table and left his plate untouched.
“There’s nothing here I want to eat,” he had declared.
After cooking for two days, my mother had been devastated by what she’d considered a blatant condemnation of her cooking. But what we didn’t know then, and what my father himself wasn’t aware of at the time, was that he already had a disease that was slowly eating away at his body, including his yearning for food and his reliance on it to sustain him.
We could smell it before we saw it. A new batch of long-grain white rice prepared by my mother. This time she brought it up herself and not on the bed tray, but on a round silver server from the special cabinet. My father raised himself on the bed to receive it and as soon as my mother handed him the spoon, for he always ate his rice with a spoon, he immediately dived in.
He barely chewed at all, simply bouncing the grains from cheek to cheek, then swallowing quickly. Had I not known, I would have thought him famished, ravenous, even insatiable. And perhaps he was. Or maybe he was desperately trying to nourish himself with something recognizable and familiar.
When he was halfway done, my father handed me the plate.
“Do you want some?” he asked.
“There’s more in the kitchen,” my mother said. “She can have some later. This is for you.”
“Let her have some,” he insisted.
I reached over and took the plate. Using my father’s spoon, I piled a mound of rice into my mouth. It was plain but flavorful. I suspected that my mother had slipped in some broth or margarine, even a few drops of coconut milk.
I realized that afternoon that for nearly a year, while my mother, brothers and I had constantly carried food up to my father, we had rarely eaten with him. Somehow it hadn’t occurred to me that he missed sharing a table or a plate, passing a spice or a spoon. But he did. Just as he missed seeing certain faces and places and hearing certain voices that neither his friends nor family nor the television could successfully transport to his room.
I returned to Miami with my daughter the next morning. Three days later, Bob called me before daybreak. I knew from the timing that it was not good news.
“He’s gone, isn’t he?” I asked.
“He’s gone,” he replied.
I think now that my father waited for me to leave. That he did not want me to hold Mira with one hand and his corpse with the other.
The night my father died, my mother heard the same type of rapid staccato speech coming from his room that she’d now grown accustomed to. In the middle of it, he somehow managed to shout her name. She ran