prepared by my mother. This time she brought it up herself and not on the bed tray, but on a round silver server from the special cabinet. My father raised himself on the bed to receive it and as soon as my mother handed him the spoon, for he always ate his rice with a spoon, he immediately dived in.
He barely chewed at all, simply bouncing the grains from cheek to cheek, then swallowing quickly. Had I not known, I would have thought him famished, ravenous, even insatiable. And perhaps he was. Or maybe he was desperately trying to nourish himself with something recognizable and familiar.
When he was halfway done, my father handed me the plate.
“Do you want some?” he asked.
“There’s more in the kitchen,” my mother said. “She can have some later. This is for you.”
“Let her have some,” he insisted.
I reached over and took the plate. Using my father’s spoon, I piled a mound of rice into my mouth. It was plain but flavorful. I suspected that my mother had slipped in some broth or margarine, even a few drops of coconut milk.
I realized that afternoon that for nearly a year, while my mother, brothers and I had constantly carried food up to my father, we had rarely eaten
I returned to Miami with my daughter the next morning. Three days later, Bob called me before daybreak. I knew from the timing that it was not good news.
“He’s gone, isn’t he?” I asked.
“He’s gone,” he replied.
I think now that my father waited for me to leave. That he did not want me to hold Mira with one hand and his corpse with the other.
The night my father died, my mother heard the same type of rapid staccato speech coming from his room that she’d now grown accustomed to. In the middle of it, he somehow managed to shout her name. She ran into the room and found him sweating and gasping for breath. She made sure the oxygen tube was properly placed in his nose and tried to slip a nebulizer tube between his lips.
“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.
Granme 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, towns and cities, and I passed through them too. And finally I reached the land of the ancestors, the city of the dead.”
“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
