There’s a stage in labor called transition, when the baby, preparing to separate from the mother, twists and turns to pass through the birth canal. I am sure there is a similar stage for exiting life, though it might be less definitive. Still, as I go into labor-thankfully with a risen placenta-each time I wish for an easy transition for my daughter and myself, I wish the same for my father.
Our midwife, Colleen, encouraged me to add some personal touches to the lavender labor room at the birthing center, so I brought two old photos of my mother and father. In his picture, my father is a handsome, serious-looking twenty-six years old. He’s wearing a pale jacket, a high-collared shirt, a pencil-thin tie and tortoiseshell glasses. My mother in hers is wearing a checked blouse with a giant button on the front. Her hair is straightened and her round face framed by small, star-shaped drop earrings. When Colleen sees my mother’s picture, she thinks my mother is me.
I looked at my parents’ sepia-toned faces intermittently during the sixteen hours that I walked, lay down, sat in a tub, on a ball, on the toilet, in constant agony. How could my mother have done this four times? I wondered.
My mother once briefly told me the story of my birth. I was nearly born in a pebbled courtyard, outside the maternity ward of Port-au-Prince’s General Hospital. My father was out of the city for his work and my mother, fiercely independent, proud and alone, was one of nearly a dozen women who were doubled over and wailing in the yard. There were too many of them and not enough doctors. No one even examined them until their babies crowned.
During her four hours of active labor, my mother tried very hard not to wish death upon herself. She staggered in and out of consciousness until a doctor finally surfaced and rushed her into the delivery room.
When my daughter was born, her face blood-tinted, her eyelids swollen with tiny light pink patches that Colleen the midwife called angel kisses, her body coiled around itself as if to echo the tightness of her tiny fists, I instantly saw it as one of many separations to come. She was leaving my body and going into the world, where she would spend the rest of her life moving away from me.
Groggy and exhausted, I asked Colleen, “Is it normal for me to think this?”
“Maybe you’re one of those women who enjoys being pregnant,” she said.
It wasn’t so much that I enjoyed being pregnant. I simply liked the fact that for a while my daughter and I had been inseparable.
Looking at her tiny face, her bow-shaped lips so red that her father said she looked like she was wearing lipstick, I remembered a message a girlfriend had sent me when my first niece and nephew, Bob’s daughter Nadira and Karl’s son Ezekiel, were born.
“May you be a repozwa,” she’d written, “a place where children can rest.”
I needed to rest myself, but I also wanted to speak to my daughter, cradle her, sing to her, inhale her mixed blood and soap smell, watch her ever so slightly open her eyes and tighten her mouth as she tried to make sense of all the new sounds around her: my husband’s laughter, my mother-in-law’s comparisons with relatives both living and gone.
I thought she most resembled my mother and pointed at the picture to prove it. But I also saw traces of my father, who my mother says was too frightened to hold me and my brothers when we were babies, but who would later hold my brothers’ children, laugh and sing to them. I grieved for Uncle Joseph and Tante Denise, who would never hold my daughter, and for my Haitian cousins, including Tante Zi’s son Richard, who might never know her. Or maybe she would return one day, to Leogane or to Bel Air, to declare in heavily accented words that they were her family.
She might be honored by their nods of acknowledgment, the way they’d be forced to consent, “Of course, of course, I see the resemblance. You do look like your great-grandmothers around the cheeks. You do have the high forehead of your grandfather’s kin.” And hopefully those cheeks and that calabash-shaped forehead would gain her entry.
Looking into my daughter’s eyes, I thought of my mother, who had faced these first hours alone after I was born. She had been made no promises, been offered no guarantees that either she or I would even live past that night. If something had been ruptured inside of her, no one would have noticed. If something had been broken inside of newborn me, perhaps no one but my mother would have cared. My daughter’s quiet yet well-monitored first night was perhaps the one my mother had dreamed for me, for herself, a dream of kind words, kisses, flowers.
“What have you decided to call her?” asked Colleen.
My husband and I had discussed it. There seemed no other possible choice.
“Mira,” I said. “For my father.”
After patiently waiting his turn to hold her, my husband held out his hand. I was also reluctant to let this Mira go. Hopefully I’ll have an uninterrupted lifetime with her, I thought, a lifetime to plant some things that have been uprooted in me and uproot others that had been planted. But surrender her I did, with an urgent wish to also hand her over to my father.
Look, Papa, I’d say. You’ve waited for her. You’ve lived long enough to see her. Today is not just her day, but all of ours. And we’re not the only ones who will cradle and protect her. She will also hold and comfort us. She too will be our repozwa, our sacred place to rest.
I said no such thing when we actually brought my daughter to meet my father three weeks later, five months after my uncle’s death. Standing at his bedside, I was stunned by how motionless he seemed, how much he appeared to have aged. The room too was stripped of all signs of verve. The oak-framed queen-sized bed he once shared with my mother had now been replaced by a narrow hospital bed that allowed him to prop himself up at the push of a button.
My husband lowered the bed’s railing and slipped our daughter into my father’s scrawny arms. I thought that at nearly nine pounds, she might prove too heavy a weight for him, but he raised her face close to his and planted a kiss on her forehead. Her eyes were closed. She was sleeping.
“Do you know how long I’ve been waiting to meet you?” he said. “And you’re not even awake.”
A smile formed on my father’s lips, which proved too much of a strain. He handed Mira back to my husband and began to cough.
After my husband returned to Miami, during the month that Mira and I would spend with my father, each time he held her, his smile would threaten to dissolve into a coughing spell and, after just a few minutes, I’d have to take her back. Until one morning when he’d walked out of bed by himself and over to the recliner by the window.
“Let me hold her,” he said, “while you take a picture, for posterity.”
I ran to my old bedroom and grabbed my camera. I had been hesitant to photograph Mira and my father during the brief moments he’d had her in his arms. I wanted him to enjoy those times as best he could without worrying about posing. Besides, as he’d grown sicker and thinner, he’d asked us not to photograph him. He wanted to be remembered, he said, the way he looked when he was well.
“Look at us, the two Miras,” he said, staring into the camera. In the first frame, my daughter’s eyes are half open, as though she’s struggling to stay awake.
“I’m really touched that you named her Mira,” he said, as I snapped another picture. “Now even when I’m gone-and we all can say that, even those of us who are not sick-even when I’m gone, the name will stay behind.”
My daughter was now fast asleep. For the next shot, my father looked down at her and smiled, a smile that miraculously did not trigger his cough.
Later that week, we celebrated my parents’ fortieth wedding anniversary, my brothers and I, our spouses and a few close friends, by gathering around my father’s bed and toasting him and my mother.
My father was too weak to raise a glass of apple cider to his lips.
