When we told Thula about the latest ceremony’s success, she was stupefied that babies she’d carried around the village had now entered manhood. “I’m glad I’m coming back soon,” she said. “I don’t want to return and discover my friends are grandparents.” In that letter, which was her final correspondence from America, she told us of an impromptu farewell party her friends had thrown for her, how her friends had made her cry as they spoke about all the adventures they’d had together, the places they’d traveled across America. For most of the letter, though, she told us about her own recent passage:
Two days ago I went to Austin’s apartment to have dinner with him. We had decided that it would be best if we stopped talking about the fact that I’m leaving in three months, better we just enjoy ourselves as if we’d always be together. Sometimes we succeeded, but I could tell from his sullen demeanor the moment I entered his apartment that it wouldn’t be so that day. While we were eating the fried ripe plantains with beans and mushroom stew he’d learned how to make in Bézam, he took my right hand and told me that he had to tell me something.
Princess, he said. I’m dying.
I scanned his face, words refusing to leave my tongue.
What do you mean, you’re dying? I asked him finally.
I’m dying, he said again. I don’t know when, I don’t know what my cause of death will be, but today, tomorrow, next week, next year, I’ll be dead.
What’s going on? I said. Were you at the doctor’s? He shook his head. My heart quieted; I decided he was just in one of his contemplative moods.
Are you writing a story about death that’s upsetting you? I asked.
Every story I write is about death, he said. It dawned on me today that life is death, death is life—what’s the point of it all?
So you’re not sick? I asked him. He shook his head. A drop of water spilled from my eyes, and he wiped it with his free hand.
We sat there for I don’t know how long, looking into each other’s eyes. Water started rushing out of my eyes, I couldn’t understand why. My body felt heavy, fatigued after a turbulent life. And yet I felt an awakening of my spirit. I began sobbing, and Austin started wiping my tears, which made me sob harder.
He said to me: You’re dying too, princess. We’re all dying. I haven’t been able to stop thinking about it all week, how close death is. Doesn’t it make you want to change the way you live? It makes me want to. I want to float through life, untethered from human vanities. It’s unbelievable, you know, what a blip our existence is in the infinite expanse of the universe. It’s baffling, so humbling and liberating, don’t you think? We don’t even matter.
He chuckled and lifted my hand to his lips, to kiss the back of it.
You know what I’m realizing? he said. Living is painful. That’s why we so often forget that we’re dying, we’re too busy catering to our pains. I think it’s one of nature’s tricks—it needs us to not dwell on the fact that we’re dying, otherwise we’d spend our days eating low-hanging fruits from trees and splashing around in clear rivers and laughing while our pointless lives pass us by. Nature makes sure that pain awaits us at every turn so that in our eternal quest to avoid it, or rid ourselves of it, we’ll keep on wanting one thing after another and the earth will stay vibrant. We feel pain, we cause pain, a ridiculous endless cycle. All the misery we cause others, what is it but a result of us dumping our pain on them? I don’t want to do it anymore, living my life by the dictates of my pain. This pain I’m feeling at your leaving, I want to channel it into love. I want to love and love and love, no conditions. I could be dead before you get on the plane, I could die tonight. I don’t mean to be macabre, I’m just trying to learn how to hold on to nothing in life. My entire life has been a game of holding on tightly, and wanting to never let go, and yet losing. It’s painful….My mother, today is the anniversary of her death.
That was the first time he told me the date on which she had died.
How could I rebuke him for never sharing it with me when her passing still so deeply grieved him? His father recently had a fall. Austin flew to see him and spent two days with him at the hospital. I think all of that was on his mind, the thought that, with his father’s passing and me returning home and His Excellency not wanting him back in our country, he might live and die alone in America.
If my mother were here today, he said, she would tell you to just love, and be kind to everyone. That’s what she used to say to me every day, and I saw her practicing it. I saw how she smiled at everyone. She smiled even when the weather was cold. She smiled when people in stores stared at her because she didn’t look and talk like them. When her time came, she died with a smile on her face. These past years, the world has tried to tell me that there’s a better way to live; I should
