Brother, I'm Dying

During the asylum hearing, Joseph experiences a seizure and vomits violently, and then “my uncle’s body grew rigid and cold, his arms falling limply at his side” (211). A nurse and medic arrive only after 15 minutes and find Joseph “almost comatose,” but the medic determines that Joseph is faking his seizure and, as they put him into a wheelchair, accuses him of not cooperating. Later in the day, his condition worsens, and he is moved, shackled, to Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami. That same morning, Edwidge’s father leaves his house for the first time in nine weeks for his medical examination. Asked by the doctor if he is willing to sign the Do Not Resuscitate document, he acquiesces, saying, “There’s already been enough suffering” (215). 

Joseph arrives to the hospital at 1:00pm. His urine shows blood and a high level of glucose, and his blood contains a high number of white cells. His gallbladder and liver function abnormally. At 5:00pm, they transfer him to a prison ward, stating he is ambulatory and without acute distress. The next morning his heart rate rises dangerously, and the physician sees him for the first time a full day after he arrived. An abdominal ultrasound shows fluid around the liver. His consent form states, “PATIENT UNABLE TO SIGN” (217). At 8:30pm the guard finds him “pulseless and unresponsive” (218), and he is pronounced dead at 8:46pm (218).

Edwidge remembers how in 1975 Uncle Joseph contracted malaria and almost died. When Edwidge and the other children went to visit him in the hospital, he mistook them for his dead siblings and relatives. Now, he died all alone, and Edwidge finds out about his death only after midnight. When her mother informs Mira about his brother’s death, he takes it calmly and without a word: “It was, she said, as if he already knew” (221). 

The family makes the decision to inter Joseph at a cemetery in Queens, New York. Edwidge recounts Joseph’s early memory when, in 1933, near the end of the US occupation of Haiti, he came down from his village in the mountains to the city on an errand and saw the white army men for the first time, catching them beating up a Haitian. The mortician advises the pregnant Edwidge not to view her uncle’s body, although she feels “the dead and the new life were already linked, through my blood, through me” (226), and she enters to look at Joseph’s face, which “appeared anxious and shocked” (227). During the funeral, Mira’s deathly look causes more shock among the mourners than Joseph’s remains. Barely standing, he whispers to his brother, “I will see you soon” (228). Edwidge feels her uncle will now forever be in exile, and her father adds, “If our country were ever given a chance and allowed to be a country like any other, none of us would live or die here” (228). 

Edwidge compares a stage in childbirth, transition, when the baby turns to pass through the birth canal, with exiting life as a person prepares for death. As opposed to her own birth, which almost happened in a pebbled yard outside the maternity ward in Port-au-Prince, Edwidge’s daughter Mira, named after her father, is born in a modern hospital. Looking at her daughter, Edwidge feels the long line of her Haitian ancestors within her: “Today is not just her day, but all of ours” (232).

Three weeks later, she and Fedo bring Mira to meet her dying grandfather, and he insists Edwidge take a picture of him with baby Mira, “for posterity.” He is touched that she bears his name; “even when I’m gone, the name will stay behind” (233). The family gathers around the dying man, taking care of him. A few days after Edwidge returns to Miami, her father dies. She believes “he did not want me to hold Mira with one hand and his corpse with the other” (239). She recalls one of Granmè Melina’s stories about a woman wishing to bring her father back from the dead, which ends with the moral that “when one is alive, one is alive, but when one is dead, one is dead” (241). Edwidge still likes to imagine her uncle and her father walking and talking peacefully together in the afterlife.