Brother, I'm Dying - Edwidge Danticat [91]
“M pa kapab,” he told her. I can’t.
His eyes rolled back in his head, which fell back, limp, against his pillow.
My mother called Bob, who came over and, after calling my father a few times (“Pop!”) and after placing a nebulizer mask over his nose and mouth and getting no response, called 911.
When the paramedics arrived, they asked Bob if my father had a DNR. Bob said no. A clear measure of our inability to release him, we hadn’t encouraged him to make one even after the doctor at Columbia Presbyterian had suggested it.
The paramedics removed my father’s clothes, laid him on the wooden floor in his room naked and pounded at his chest for an hour. Even if they had succeeded in resuscitating him, he probably would have had a couple of broken ribs.
Neither Bob nor my mother could stay and watch, so as the paramedics worked on my father, they went downstairs, where they were interviewed by a policeman.
The policeman, the distant outside authority figure, was a curious presence. Was this standard practice in all American deaths, even expected ones like my father’s? I asked my mother and brother.
It was, the policeman had explained, a measure to make sure there was no foul play, no euthanasia involved.
How long had my father been sick? the policeman asked my mother and brother. What medications was he taking?
When I was home with my father, just a few days before, lying with my daughter in the same bed I’d slept in as a teenager, there were nights when I stayed awake wondering what I’d do if I woke up the next morning and found my father dead. During those nights, heeding his friend’s call to let him go, I would do a kind of mental rehearsal of several possibilities.
When it seemed irreversible and absolutely definite that my father was dying, I would finally tell him to go.
Don’t be afraid, I’d say. It’s okay. We love you. We will always remember you. Then naming each of us, I would tell him that we’d be fine and so would he. Manman will be fine, I’d say. Kelly will be fine. Karl will be fine. Karl’s son Ezekiel will be fine. His daughter Zora will be fine. Bob will be fine. And his daughter Nadira will be fine. I will be fine and Mira will be fine. Then I would lean down and kiss him good-bye.
I don’t know that I would have been able to do this. Perhaps the desire to see him return, to have him back, even for one more day, would have continued to be too strong.
Granmè Melina once told a story about a daughter whose father had died. The daughter loved her father so much that her heart was shattered into a hundred pieces. When it came time to plan for the jubilant country wake, which was once held the night before all funerals, the daughter wanted no part of it and ordered that it not be held.
“Daughter,” said one of the wise old women in the daughter’s village, “let the people rejoice at your father’s wake tonight before they cry at his funeral tomorrow.”
“There will be no rejoicing,” answered the daughter. “Why should I ever rejoice again when my father is dead?”
“Daughter,” insisted the old woman, “let the wake be held. Your father is now in the land beneath the waters. It is not our way to let our grief silence us.”
Knowing that the old woman had the gift that the ancestors granted to only a chosen few, of being able to journey between the living and the dead, the daughter said to the old woman, “I will allow the wake to be held only if you go to the land beneath the waters and bring my father back.”
The old woman walked to the nearest river and slipped into the waters. A few hours later, she reemerged and walked straight to the daughter’s house.
“Where’s my father?” asked the daughter.
“Daughter,” said the old woman, “I am back from beneath the waters, deep into the bowels of the earth. There were some wide and narrow roads. I took them. There were many hills and mountains, and I climbed them. There were hamlets and villages,