The Art of Death

by Edwidge Danticat

  Places can be holy, Almásy reminds us, not because we are told they are, but because we want and need them to be. Places can be holy because we are sharing them with someone we love, just as some places become cursed because they’ve taken people we love away from us.

  “It is important to die in holy places,” Almásy thinks toward the end of the novel, though sometimes we must become our own holy places, roaming cathedrals, and memory mausoleums.

  Circles and Circles of Sorrow

  It is said that when the writer Zora Neale Hurston was a little girl, she loved a Greek myth about the wrestler Antaeus. Antaeus is the son of Poseidon, god of the seas, and Gaia, goddess of the earth. Antaeus wins all his wrestling matches as long as he remains connected to the earth and his feet are touching the ground. Only Hercules is intelligent enough to defeat him by keeping Antaeus’s feet off the ground until he loses all his strength.

  Both Antaeus’s strengths and weaknesses must have intrigued young Zora. She might have been fascinated by the idea that being rooted or tied to the earth could empower even a god. That rootlessness could lead to defeat and possibly death might also have frightened her.

  When Hurston was a child, after she’d wandered off too many times, her mother, Lucy Hurston, suspected a neighbor of having sprinkled “travel dust” on the family doorstep.

  “If she had her way,” Hurston writes in her autobiography, Dust Tracks on a Road, “she meant to raise her children to stay at home.” Still, her headstrong mother encouraged her eight children to “jump at de sun.” They might not land on the sun, she told them, but at least they’d get off the ground.

  The contrast between Antaeus’s predicament and Hurston’s mother’s advice must have appeared less contradictory when her mother suddenly died when she was thirteen years old. There were some beautiful African-based rituals involving death and dying in the Southern African American communities of Hurston’s time.

  In Hurston’s community, before the dead took their last breath, pillows were to be removed from under their heads in order to make their transitions easier. Clocks and mirrors were to be covered to allow time to stand still and to stop departing spirits from seeing their reflections and staying put.

  Before she died, Hurston’s mother told her not to let anyone remove the pillow from under her head. She also told her not to let the clocks and mirrors be covered. But soon, in another ritual, Lucy Hurston’s bed was turned around so her eyes were facing east, toward the rising sun.

  “I thought that she looked at me as the head of the bed was reversed,” Hurston writes. “Her mouth was slightly open, but her breathing took up so much of her strength that she could not talk. But she looked at me, or so I felt, to speak for her. She depended on me for a voice.”

  That voice immediately begins to both personalize and mythologize death. In order to explain death to herself, young Zora made a story out of it. That’s what many of us do when the people we love die, especially, I believe, when our mothers die. Reading other daughters’ accounts of their mothers’ deaths, a genre that some have reductively called “momoirs”—Hurston’s Dust Tracks on a Road, Simone de Beauvoir’s A Very Easy Death, Mary Gordon’s Circling My Mother, and others—I sometimes feel as though we are all the daughters of the same mythical mother. Some of us are super direct, funny. Others are pensive, inquisitive, maudlin, bitter, sarcastic, or a combination of all those things. Yet we have all been orphaned, except by our words, which we eventually turn to in order to make sense of the impossible, the unknowable.

  We want to write not just of our mothers’ deaths but of their lives too and of the ways, beyond the obvious, that our lives and theirs were linked. We want to share the connections that we have built with our mothers, be they through books, clothes, or words. We want to write of the disconnections too. We want to write our mothers not only as our mothers but as people, lovers, women who had a beginning that did not include us but who are now pulling us along with them into their ending. Writing, we hope, might make all this easier to grasp, even though we cannot change the outcome. While I am reading these other daughters’ accounts, their mothers become my mother.

  One of the ways our stories differ—aside from the singular details—is in how much our mothers suffered. My mother was mercifully gone six months after she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. This is the way she would have wanted it. She had always said, after we’d returned from the funeral of someone who’d died suddenly, in a car accident or of a heart attack, that she would neither want to have a sudden death nor to suffer through a long illness. She wanted something in between, just enough time to put her affairs in order and get a few things off her chest. She got her wish. Not everyone gets theirs.

  “The Master-Maker in His making had made Old Death,” Hurston recalls thinking on the day her mother died. “Made him with big, soft feet and square toes. Made him with a face that reflects the face of all things.”

  On the day that we are born, our mother’s face is the face that reflects all things. She is for that brief moment when they first tuck us into her arms or press her breast into our mouth, everything to us.

  “Mama died at sundown and changed a world,” Hurston writes. “That is, the world which had been built out of her body and her heart.”

  Hurston’s mother’s death reactivated her travel dust, and as she traveled the world, she believed her mother’s ghost was shadowing her. She felt guilty most of her life that she’d been unable to keep those deathbed promises to her mother, to hold the pillow in place and to keep the clock and mirror in her room uncovered.

  Another Greek myth Hurston liked was about Persephone, the goddess of springtime and queen of the underworld. When Hades, the god of death, kidnaps Persephone and takes her to the underworld, the world above dries up because Persephone’s mother, Demeter, is so grief-stricken that she abandons her duties as global gardener to keep the world’s plants and flowers alive. But when Persephone returns from the underworld, the world blooms again because her mother is happy. Perhaps Hurston saw in her mother, Lucy, a version of Persephone, who is so missed when she’s gone that the world literally starts to die. This type of grief, as Toni Morrison writes in Sula, has no top and no bottom, “just circles and circles of sorrow.”

  A year before her death, my mother started losing weight. She gave up fatty foods and sweets and went to herbalists who sold her pills and herbs that were supposed to regulate her digestion. She was also seeing her primary physician in New York every three months.

  The weight flying off seemed like a reward for good behavior. The only downside was that my mother, who now weighed less than me after two pregnancies had plumped me up, was burping all the time, as if there were thunder trapped inside her shrinking body.

  At Christmastime, I invited her to come spend the holidays with me and my family in Miami. At first she said no. Her birthday was three days after Christmas and she wanted to spend it at her home in Brooklyn. She changed her mind right before Christmas and came to Miami.

  On Christmas Day, she cooked a lavish dinner, of which she ate very little. She ate even less at her birthday dinner, three days later, when we took her to one of her favorite Haitian restaurants.

  I took my mother to see my physician friend Rose-May right after New Year’s. I spotted the alarmed look on Rose-May’s face as soon as she touched my mother’s stomach, which in spite of her weight loss was twice its usual size. Rose-May took my hand and guided it to a spot near my mother’s protruding belly button, which felt like a well-polished rock.

  Rose-May immediately started writing down a list of tests my mother would need. Each test led to another, more complicated test, and slowly both Mom and I realized we were not on a quest to disprove something bad but on an expedition to identify how bad it was.

  For a long time, I would refer to it only as a mass. Not as a tumor or cancer. That is, until Rose-May got all the test results and sat my mother down and explained the stages and how cancer is not always a mass,
but how it’s sometimes like a blanket over organs, or like chains that trap them, and how cancer can’t always be cut out but at times only minimally reduced. I thought my mother would burst into tears, but she did not. She listened attentively and nodded. Her face betrayed no trace of fright or panic. She was still.

  In the car on the way home, we were both lost in a terrible silence that should have been filled with tears. At a red light, where I stopped for too long, my mother spoke up for the first time since we’d heard the news and warned, “Don’t suddenly become a zombie.” She was telling me not to lose my good sense, to keep my head on my shoulders.

  Later I would align this moment with something I’d read long ago by Hurston. In the 1930s, while doing anthropological fieldwork in Haiti, Hurston claimed to have come in contact with an actual zombie, a woman named Felicia Felix-Mentor. She even offered a photograph as proof.

  In the photo, dressed in a loose-fitting and shabby frock, Felicia Felix-Mentor has eyes that are glazed in a way that make her look blind. Her hair is closely cropped, and even though she is standing up, she looks as she might look lying in her coffin.

  The supposed zombie must remain a mystery, and Felicia Felix-Mentor looks like one, haggard and lost. The zombie’s inner spiritual geography has been erased by death, but the body is still forced to wander the earth. This is the kind of life and death nobody wants, a painfully eternal living death. Of this alleged zombie, Hurston writes, “How did this woman, supposedly dead for twenty-nine years, come to be wandering naked on a road?”

  If my mother came wandering down a road naked twenty-nine years from now, I would still want her, I thought in the car that day. This was the first time I understood why anyone would have their loved ones frozen through cryonics or some other method, so they could be revived at some point in the future. Then again, maybe C. S. Lewis was right. Wouldn’t it be awful to die and come back, only to have to die all over again? Maybe all the Larazuses of the world would have an even harder time dying than the rest of us.

  According to Haitian folklore, one way zombies can be liberated from their living death is by eating salt. People who suddenly receive terrible news are also given salt, in coffee, for example, to help ward off the sezisman, “the shock.”

  When we got home from Rose-May’s office that day, my mother made us each a small cup of coffee that she sprinkled with salt.

  My mother’s tranquility and levelheadedness remained throughout her illness. From her first chemotherapy treatment to her last, she showed a depth of faith that I’d seen only in my father, when he was dying. My mother’s faith was not so much in the doctors or in the medicine but in the belief that things would turn out exactly the way they were supposed to.

  “After all, hasn’t God led me here so you and I can deal with this together?” she’d say.

  My mother and I spent eight years apart when I was a child. Before her diagnosis, we were living in different cities, over a thousand miles away from each other. My mother and I had spent more of our lives apart than together, but she had unknowingly come to me to help her die.

  I was talking to my mother when she died. She was visibly slipping away. She was no longer eating or drinking. Her skin was cool even though she complained of feeling warm.

  “Open the window,” she’d say, meaning the sliding-glass door next to the hospital bed she was now sleeping in at my house. The hospital bed prevented me from sleeping next to her at night, which is something I had begun to do regularly since she got sick.

  Her eyes were glazed as she drifted in and out of consciousness at around one o’clock, on the afternoon she died.

  “I love you,” I told her over and over in Creole. “Mwen renmen ou.” I held her hand. I kissed her face, stroked the salt-and-pepper stubble that was left of her usually thick and wooly hair. “You’re a wonderful mother,” I told her.

  Hearing, they say, is one of the last senses to go.

  My mother smiled.

  I tearfully asked her, “Mommy, can you see heaven?”

  She smiled again. Then she was gone.

  There was no death rattle, no sudden in-breath or out-breath. She simply stopped breathing. She smiled and slipped away.

  Smiling while dying is apparently not that unusual. The body tries to produce a state of euphoria to usher us out. It releases the same kinds of neurochemicals, dopamine and serotonin, that flood our brains as we are falling in love.

  My mother’s face stilled. Rather than tighten in rigor mortis, it seemed to relax. One of the things I had told her at the last minute, in my rush of words and tears, was to let go.

  “You can let go, Manman,” I said. “It’s okay to let go.”

  She had let go. Her previously balled fists were now wide open. I lifted her hands and folded them over her chest. I reached down and closed her eyes. I was afraid they’d pop open again, but they stayed closed. I kept my face pressed against my mother’s right cheek for a few minutes and cried. Then I worried that my crying was too loud for her ears. I did not allow myself any silence between that moment and calling the rest of my family to tell them that my mother had died.

  The night before, I had slept on the floor next to my mother’s hospital bed. My mother would sleep a deep sleep under her oxygen mask, and she would wake up every now and then and ask me in a very hoarse voice to pran pye ya pou mwen, to “catch her right leg,” which was moving on its own, slipping over the top of the hospital bed. I couldn’t sleep. That same night I heard a man wailing outside my house. I knew the man a bit. He was a mentally ill homeless man who sometimes slept in the covered bus stop next to our house. In the past, he would shout out a random word or phrase now and then in the middle of the night, but he had never howled like this before.

  That night he cried nonstop like a professional mourner, what in Sula Toni Morrison calls “a fine cry—loud and long,” the kind of cry that made me think something awful was happening to him.

  I called an area policeman we knew to check up on him. The policeman came by but left him there, still wailing as though, I later thought, he had seen my mother’s spirit come and go and was frightened by it. I too was seeing my mother give up the ghost, as it were, in the leg that would not stay put, in the loud groans that I hoped were not groans of pain but of annoyance and frustration. Maybe, just as women experience birth pains, my mother was having death pains.

  My mother had refused painkillers at every step of her illness. She did not want to be “gaga” at the end, she said. She wanted to know what she was saying and doing until her final breath. But the morning before she died, she told me to ask the Haitian hospice nurse for some local anesthetic, like the kind they injected in her belly when she was getting the fluids extracted. Her voice was gravelly and deep, but she stressed the word lokal, “local anesthesia.” Her fists were balled, which the nurse said indicated that she was definitely in pain. By the time the nurse got permission from her supervisor to give my mother something stronger, some morphine, my mother was already dead.

  I realize I’m writing this in circles. This is the only way it makes sense to me now. “For in grief nothing ‘stays put,”’ C. S. Lewis writes. “One keeps on emerging from a phase, but it always recurs. Round and round. Everything repeats. Am I going in circles, or dare I hope I am on a spiral?”

  Soon after my mother died, I was talking to a writer friend who told me she had a couple of stories in mind that she will be able to write only after her mother dies. I wonder what those stories will be for me now.

  When my mother was sick, we had, at her request, nightly devotions, just the two of us. After everyone had gone to bed, we would sing a hymn from her French and Creole hymnbook, pray, recite the Lord’s Prayer, read another verse, then go to sleep.

  Mom had some favorites, the Beatitudes among them. The Beatitudes must have offered an extra dose of consolation. They were assurances, promises that were about to be fulfilled, something I imagine she’d pierce the veil of heaven to tell me about now, if she
could.

  In the Beatitudes, there was comfort both for her (Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God) and for me (Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted). She still had time to purify her heart. I had a lifetime to mourn.

  Most of the time, though, Mom couldn’t remember what verse she had in mind for us to read. She’d recall a word or two and I’d go fishing in an online concordance for them.

  “Syèl la,” she’s say in Creole, signaling that the verse was related to heaven.

  When dozens of possible choices would appear, she’d ask me to pick the one closest to the top, or one we hadn’t read yet. I would use different concordances, so the verses wouldn’t always appear in the same order. This is how I came across Revelation 14:13 one night.

  In my mother’s French Bible, it reads, “Et j’entendis du ciel une voix qui disait: Écris: Heureux dès à présent les morts qui meurent dans le Seigneur!” Then I heard a voice from heaven say, “Write this! Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord from now on.”

  Revelation 14:13 was so well suited to both my work and my mother’s circumstances that it seemed like a command, not just to the Apostle John, the reported author of Revelation, but also to me. “Write this,” it said, though as my mother’s life neared its end, I could barely sign my own name.

  I started reading C. S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed as part of my anticipatory grief. (“And grief still feels like fear. Perhaps, more strictly, like suspense. Or like waiting; just hanging about waiting for something to happen.”)

  Each death frames previous deaths in a different light, and even deaths to come. During the time my mother was sick, I found myself crying uncontrollably over the deaths of people I barely knew. I attended a couple of funerals, of relatives of church members, or people from my husband’s past, people I’d never even met. Mid-sob, I would realize that I was imagining sitting in the front row where the family was sitting, but at my own mother’s funeral. If it wasn’t her coffin I was looking at, then why had I come? Then I realized that I was rehearsing, so it wouldn’t hurt so much when it was my turn.