Brother, I'm Dying

pocketbook mirrors. When he lowered the mirror to Granme Melina’s nose, the glass remained unchanged. There was no mist, no fog. Granme Melina was not breathing.

“Check her eyes,” Nick suggested.

Moving his face closer to Granme Melina’s, Bob pulled back one of her eyelids. Leaning in, I saw what looked like a brown marble with bright red veins wrapped around it.

“Li mouri,” he said calmly. She’s dead.

“Are you sure?” Nick asked.

The eyelid did not snap back by itself, so Bob had to lower it with the same index finger with which he’d raised it. By then we were all sure.

Until his operation, a death meant an eloquent homily from my uncle, a sermon that echoed my friend’s declaration that indeed, every day, we are all dying.

“Death is a journey we embark on from the moment we are born,” he’d say. “An hourglass is turned and the sand starts to slip in a different direction as soon as we emerge from our mother’s womb. Thank God those around us are too blinded by joy then to realize it. Otherwise there would be weeping at births as well. But if we weep at a death, it’s because we do not understand death. If we saw death as another kind of birth, just as the Gospel exhorts us to, we wouldn’t weep, but rejoice, just as we do at the birth of a child.”

My uncle’s funeral homilies had rarely varied from this. Still, during Granme Melina’s funeral, as he sat quietly in his usual seat at the altar, he might have had more personal words in mind for his mother-in-law. For at some point during the service, when one of the associate pastors was announced, my uncle got up from his seat and raced to the pulpit.

Sitting in the front pew with her sister Leone and two of her brothers, Tante Denise moved from side to side, shifting her weight uneasily. Unlike Leone, who wore a plain, short-sleeved, black cotton dress, Tante Denise wore a black lace dress with matching gloves and veil.

Nick leaned over and whispered to Bob and me, “What’s Papa”-as he called his grandfather-”doing?” We were sitting in the second row, behind Tante Denise, who turned back and gave us a scolding glance as Uncle Joseph stood motionless behind the pulpit. Tante Denise wasn’t one to coddle children and could have easily pulled any one of us aside for a spanking, even in the middle of her own mother’s funeral service.

Tante Denise turned her eyes back to the front of the church and along with the entire congregation was once again looking up at my uncle. Had he forgotten that he couldn’t speak? Should they expect some kind of miracle? But standing there as though stunned into silence, his face sullen, his eyes circling the room-Granme Melina’s death perhaps a reminder of how close he himself had come to dying-he appeared a lot more distressed than the rest of the mourners. Reaching for the microphone, he unhinged it from its stand and raised it to his lips. He opened his mouth and just as he did every morning along with his Berlitz record, he mouthed one word: “Good-bye.”

A few gasps rose from the congregation, perhaps from people who thought they heard the same breathy murmur that those of us who were used to reading his lips and speaking for him often thought we heard. This, he seemed to want to say, was not like all the other funerals he’d attended, where he wished he’d been able to speak but couldn’t: those of the kids who died from microbes and viruses in infancy, the adolescents crushed by careless drivers on their way to or from school, the women who fell to malaria or typhoid fever or tuberculosis, the men who were beaten or shot to death by the henchmen of Francois Duvalier and later after his death in 1971, his replacement, son Jean-Claude. This was a woman, an old woman, who had traveled a long way from home and who had lived a long life. He too was hoping to live a long life. He had traded his voice for a cure. But now he couldn’t even properly say good-bye.

Giving Birth

Marie Micheline, Uncle Joseph and Tante Denise’s adopted daughter, was secretly pregnant in 1974, the year I turned five and she twenty-two. Wiry and slight, she was nevertheless able to hide her growing belly for nearly twenty-eight weeks, until the morning she overslept and didn’t wake up for an important nursing school exam.

When Tante Denise went to rouse her, she found her in her room, lying on her back, her stretched-out navel pointing straight up at the ceiling.

“Joseph Nosius!” Tante Denise cried out for my uncle, as though both she and Marie were in mortal danger.

Uncle Joseph was slow in coming, but Liline and I ran to Marie Micheline’s bedside. Liline and I both adored Marie Micheline because she was kind and pretty. But above all because of this: even though she was much older than us, she occasionally took time to ask us to her room or to sit down next to us at a meal and whisper in our ear a story that proved how much our absent parents loved us. Mine was the story of the butter cookies, which she told me over and over again. I don’t know what the details of Liline’s story were, but it had something to do with her father leaving her with us.

“He loved you so much,” she would say out loud at the end of the story, “he left you with us.”

With Tante Denise panting over her, Marie Micheline stirred and tried to rub the sleep out of her eyes. Her short hair was curled in tight sponge rollers and wrapped in the thick dark web of a fishnet. When she removed her hands from her eyes she seemed unsure of what we were all doing there.

“You can’t stay in this house now.” Tante Denise grabbed her by the shoulder and shook her. “Your father’s a pastor. How is it going to look if his daughter is pregnant without the benefit of marriage?”

Of course, Tante Denise herself had been pregnant and had given birth to Maxo without the benefit of a church ceremony. But her status back then had been different. Hers had been, even if not a religious marriage, a common-law one. She was in love with and living with her man and she was not yet in the church.

Marie Micheline looked down at her stomach, quickly lowered the nightgown and raised the sheet that had slipped off her body during the night. She did not immediately look up as Uncle Joseph at last walked into the room. He still had his crisp and muted voice then and lowered it even more to signal calm.

Sitting at the foot of the bed, he gently stroked Marie Micheline’s covered feet.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

Marie Micheline looked into his eyes. I want to understand, they seemed to say. Her long, narrow face, which sometimes looked as smooth and peaceful as a plastic doll’s, crumpled into sobs.

“She’s pregnant,” Tante Denise yelled, pulling the sheet and nightgown aside to show him Marie Micheline’s stomach.

My uncle gasped at the sight. Marie Micheline’s belly was small but heavily veined. Still it looked as though it might soon creep up and swallow the space occupied by her breasts.

“How many months?” he asked.

“Seven,” Marie Micheline answered, now cradling the belly between her hands. She purposely kept her eyes down, doing her best not to look at a fuming Tante Denise.

“What have we ever done to you?” Tante Denise cried out in a strained, high-pitched voice. “Haven’t we taken care of you from the time you were a baby?”

Marie Micheline sat up and lowered her feet off the bed.

“I knew it,” she shouted. “I knew you’d act like this. I’m pregnant, not ungrateful.”

My uncle raised his hands, signaling for them to quiet down. Then he