letter, but as with my parents I hadn’t found the right tone or time.
“Your daughter,” my father said, teasing my uncle. “And she doesn’t even tell you you’re going to be a grandfather.”
My uncle’s hands came together in a joyful clap.
“Denise would have been so glad,” he said.
My father was discharged from the hospital the next day. After consulting with Dr. Padman, a resident prescribed around-the-clock oxygen. Once the tanks were delivered, my father stopped working. His daily routine was now centered around a few activities. He would wake up in the morning and walk to the bathroom to shower and brush his teeth. He’d then return to bed, where my mother would bring him a breakfast of tea and soup or sometimes eggs-scrambled or boiled-and bread or cornmeal and herring. Along with his breakfast, he would take his first series of medicines, both herbal and pharmaceutical. Then he would pray out loud as though conducting a boisterous one-sided conversation with God.
His prayers were most often about his illness-“God, if you see it fit to cure me, please do. If not, your will be done”-but he also prayed for me and my brothers, for our safety and well- being. He prayed for patience and strength for my mother, who was caring for him. He asked God to bless her for taking care of him. He prayed for a favorable outcome to the American presidential elections, for peace in Haiti and in the world in general.
The week after my father left the hospital, my uncle would rise early to pray with him. Sleeping in the room next to my father’s, I would sometimes be awakened by their combined voices, my father’s low, winded, my uncle’s loud, mechanical, yet both equally urgent in their supplications.
Sometimes, my father remained quiet while my uncle alone implored. “God, do not forsake your servant now. He’s sixty-nine years old. He has so much yet to experience. He’d so like to live to rejoice in all the promises you’ve made to those who serve you. He’d like to watch his progeny flourish, to see the generations emerge before him. He would glorify your name if you were to grant him your grace and lengthen his days. Were you to allow him to return from where he’s standing now on the edge of the valley of death, he’d have a testimony to match that of many of your prophets.”
After the morning prayers, my uncle would sit in a folding chair at my father’s bedside. To fill the silence, my father would attempt to start a conversation, recalling a person they’d both known or some incident they’d shared.
One morning my father asked, “What became of the Syrian you used to work for?”
Scratching his widow’s peak, my uncle replied, “He’s now one of the richest men in Haiti.”
“What about the Italian I worked for?”
“He went from selling shoes to somehow making them.”
Then glancing at me, my father asked my uncle, “Do you remember when you wrote me that letter saying that a boy had beaten Edwidge in school?”
Remembering neither beating nor boy, I asked, “When was that?”
“You must have been six,” my uncle said. “In primary school.”
“I was so mad,” my father said, turning over on his side on the bed, “I wanted to get on a plane right then and there, forget everything and go back home to my children.”
“That’s when I stopped reporting all their cuts and scrapes,” my uncle said.
Every day at lunchtime, my father would leave his bed and venture downstairs, where he had a desk in a corner of the dining room. There he’d sit and sort through his mail and, whenever he was able to, return phone calls. My uncle would take advantage of this time to nap or walk around our neighborhood. My father would also make an effort to come down to the living room whenever his friends came by. Later, the trips downstairs, even the trips to the bathroom, would become too difficult, and he’d have no choice but to receive his guests in bed.
At five p.m. every day, my father would slowly make his way back upstairs. Sometimes he’d linger a bit longer to have an early dinner, but most often my mother brought supper to him in his room at around seven. Usually it was something light, steamed vegetables or a simple stew. Sometimes, however, he would get a craving for take-out fried chicken and plantains, and either Bob or Karl would stop at a nearby restaurant and pick them up for him before coming over to the house to help bathe him. After his bath and supper, he’d take his final round of medications for the day and then settle in for an evening of television watching.
Over the years my father had accumulated an extensive collection of Haitian-produced movies and professional wrestling tapes. He would watch his favorites of those over and over until he knew all the dialogue. Whenever I watched with him, whether it was a Haitian movie or wrestling, he’d brief me on the scenario, forgetting that he had done so many times before.
He did the same to my uncle whenever my uncle would sit with him in the evenings. My uncle, who never watched anything on television but a few minutes of the evening news, unsuccessfully feigned interest, but ended up grimacing disapprovingly as my father became lost in the spectacles.
In early September, my uncle began packing. School was starting in Haiti and he had to go back to his students and church.
One night after my father had fallen asleep, my uncle asked to speak to me alone in the guest room where he slept. He was wearing a sleeveless undershirt and as he raised the voice box to his neck, I could see the tracheotomy hole throb with every breath.
“I have a thought concerning your father,” he said. “I know a doctor in Haiti. He’s the head of the national sanatorium. I think he can help.”
Remembering the mountaintop national sanatorium as a place to which people, like Liline’s cousin Melina, were often exiled before their deaths, I answered defensively, “Papa doesn’t have tuberculosis.”
“I know,” he replied. “But this doctor has had to deal with all kinds of lung diseases. He can help. I’ve already discussed it with your father. He can’t go now. With the oxygen, it’s too much to manage. I’m thinking maybe you can pay for a plane ticket and a hotel for the doctor to come here to examine him.”
My father wanted none of it.
“I can’t bring that doctor here,” my father told me the next day. Though he seemed touched by my uncle’s suggestion, he also understood the futility of it. “It would be a waste of time and money.”
The morning of my uncle’s departure, he stopped several times in the narrow hallway while walking from the guest room to my father’s bed. Pressing his face against the wooden panels, he was crying. Before entering my father’s room, he pulled a handkerchief from his shirt pocket and wiped his eyes.
That morning, my uncle prayed the longest he had ever prayed at my father’s bedside. My father closed his eyes and listened quietly, only occasionally chiming in with “Yes. Thank you.”
“Lord,” my uncle said, “You already know our deepest wish. You know how much it would please us to see your servant rise from this bed and live and work again among those who are well. You know how even the angels would hear our cries of jubilation if his pain were to disappear. You know how much wisdom he would gain, how much insight he’d have to share with others who take their lives for granted.”
My uncle lowered the hand that wasn’t holding the voice box and
