Brother, I'm Dying - Edwidge Danticat [92]
“Did you see my father?” asked the daughter impatiently.
“I saw so many people there I couldn’t even tell you,” answered the old woman. “I saw my mother and father, my uncle and grandmother, my aunt who was trampled by a horse and my sister who died of tuberculosis in childhood. All my loved ones who’ve died were there.”
“Did you see my father?” shouted the daughter.
“Daughter,” answered the old woman, “I looked and I looked amongst all those people until I found your father.”
“Where is he?” asked the daughter.
“‘I’ve come to take you back to the land of the living,’ I told your father. ‘Your daughter’s heart has broken into a hundred pieces and she cannot live without you.’”
“What did he say to that?” asked the daughter.
“‘I’m so touched that my daughter wants me to come back,’ he said, ‘but my home is now here, in the land of the ancestors. Tell my daughter for me that when one is alive, one is alive, but when one is dead, one is dead.’”
The old woman then pulled from her pocket a set of false teeth that the father had religiously worn in his mouth when he was still among the living and had taken with him into the land of the dead.
“Your father sent you this,” said the old woman, “so that you might believe that I saw him and accept what he says.”
The daughter took the false teeth in her hands and looked at them with great sadness, but also with a new sense of courage.
“As my father wishes, so it shall be,” she said. “We will have the wake to honor him, to rejoice and celebrate his life before his body is put in the ground. We will eat. We will sing. We will dance and tell stories. But most importantly, we will speak of my father. For it is not our way to let our grief silence us.”
A few months after my father died, my parents’ house caught fire. The fire started at three a.m., in the same room where my father had lain in bed for nearly a year, in the corner where we once kept his emergency supply of several oxygen tanks. Given the nature of the fire—crackling in the walls, sparks in the ancient wiring, electricity—the fire marshal predicted that the entire house, which lost part of its roof and a few walls, could have been totally razed in fifteen minutes. Enough time, thankfully, for my mother, my brother Karl and his family, who’d moved in with my mother, to all quickly escape. But not enough time for my father, in the state he was in, to have gathered himself up and made his way out. He might not have even heard the hiss of spreading flames over the loud hum of his oxygen compressor, or seen the smoke beyond the ghostly faces that haunted his final nights.
After my uncle Joseph died, my father told me that he dreamed of him only once, and never in the small group he pictured around his bed. In my father’s dream, when my uncle calls him from Maxo’s apartment the night he nearly died, my father actually makes it there on time to ride in the ambulance with him and hold his hands as the paramedics drill the tracheotomy hole in his neck.
“He must have been so scared,” my father said, “not knowing whether he was going to live or die.”
Like perhaps most people whose loved ones have died, I wish that I had some guarantees about the afterlife. I wish I were absolutely certain that my father and uncle are now together in some tranquil and restful place, sharing endless walks and talks beyond what their too-few and too-short visits allowed. I wish I knew that they were offering enough comfort to one another to allow them both not to remember their distressing, even excruciating, last hours and days. I wish I could fully make sense of the fact that they’re now sharing a gravesite and a tombstone in Queens, New York, after living apart for more than thirty years.
In any case, every now and then I try to imagine them on a walk through the mountains of Beauséjour. It’s dawn, a dazzling morning over the green hills. The sun is slowly rising, burning through the fog. They’re peacefully making their