Brother, I'm Dying

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 Beausejour. It’s dawn, a dazzling morning over the green hills. The sun is slowly rising, burning through the fog. They’re peacefully making their way down the zigzag trail that joins the villages to the rest of the world below. And in my imagining, whenever they lose track of one another, one or the other calls out in a voice that echoes throughout the hills, “Kote w ye fre m?” Brother, where are you?

And the other one quickly answers, “Mwen la. Right here, brother. I’m right here.”

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am extremely grateful to the Lannan Foundation for a crucial fellowship at a most crucial time. Thank you, Cheryl Little, Mary Gundrum, Sharon Ginter and the entire staff at the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center for the acquisition, through legal action and extremely persistent Freedom of Information Act requests, of Krome, Jackson Memorial, Department of Homeland Security records and Office of the Inspector General reports so extremely crucial to this narrative. I am grateful to the Harvard Law Student Advocates for Human Rights and the Centro de Justica Global in Rio de Janeiro and Sao Paulo, Brazil, for their March 2005 report Keeping the Peace in Haiti? An Assessment of the United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti Using Compliance with Its Prescribed Mandate as a Barometer for Success. Also to Irwin P. Stotzky of the University of Miami School of Law and Thomas M. Griffin, Esq., for their report Haiti Human Rights Investigation: November 11-21, 2004. Thanks to Representatives Kendrick B. Meek, Charles Rangel and Major Owens, Robert Miller, John Schelbe, Drew Hamill, Alix Cantave and Esther Olavarria for hearing us out. I am extremely grateful to Jonathan Demme, Joanne Howard, James and Stephanie McBride, Susan Benesh, Kathy Klarreich, Ira Kurzban, Leslie Casimir, Patrick Sylvain, Ron Howell, Patricia Benoit, Lewis Kornhauser, Daniel Wolff, Jim Defede, Gina Cheron, Tamara Thompson and Johnny McCalla from the New York-based National Coalition for Haitian Rights for their interest and counsel early on. To John Patrick Pratt, for representing my uncle under extraordinarily difficult circumstances. For support and love shown to my father, I’d like to thank Elycin and Lourdes Pyram, Denifa Rejouis, Drs. P. Krishnan, Paul Farmer, Ketly Elysee, Jocelyn Celestin and Hearns Charles, Reverends Rene Etienne and Phylius Nicolas, Reverend and Mrs. Elima Mareus. Thank you, Nick, Maxo, Franck, Josephine and Zi Dantica, Nicole Aragi, Robin Desser, Alena Graedon, Bob, Kelly, Rose, Mia and Karl Danticat, Ruth and Garry Auguste, Issalia and Fedo Boyer.

Diane Wolkstein recounts a remarkable version of “The Angel of Death and Father God” as “Papa God and General Death” in her marvelous collection The Magic Orange Tree and Other Haitian Folktales. Harold Courlander does the same with “Who Is Older?” and “The Voyage Below the Water” in The Piece of Fire and Other Haitian Tales. Ruth Auguste’s as yet unpublished memoir, Mom in the Mirror, tells Marie Micheline’s story in greater and more exquisite detail.

A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Edwidge Danticat is the author of several books, including Breath, Eyes, Memory, an Oprah’s Book Club selection; Krik? Krak!, a National Book Award finalist; The Farming of Bones, an American Book Award winner; and The Dew Breaker, a PEN/ Faulkner Award finalist and winner of the first Story Prize. She is also the editor of The Butterfly’s Way: Voices from the Haitian Dyaspora in the United States and The Beacon Best of 2000: Great Writing by Women and Men of All Colors and Cultures.

She lives in Miami with her husband and daughter.

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