I knew that my mother’s death might feel like the death of my father, whom I had not seen take his last breath. More than a decade after he died, I still miss my father as though he died only yesterday. I can start feeling sad weeks before the anniversary of his death, even without realizing the date is approaching. I still see him in the faces and postures of some of the old, skinny, dark-skinned Haitian men I run into now and then. This is what he would look like at seventy-five, I tell myself, or seventy-eight, eighty, or, now, eighty-two years old.
In the days leading up to my mother’s death, I would dream of running into my father unexpectedly at cocktail parties. He would be sharply dressed in a black tuxedo and I would be wearing a retro pink ballgown that was nearly identical to my mother’s bell-shaped wedding gown. My father and I would chat pleasantly about his new hobby as a cocktail-party attendant, as though this were the sole element of his new life.
“This party is better than the last one,” he’d always say right before I’d wake up. Just as he did when he was alive, he would speak to me in Creole.
In my dreams of my tux-clad dad, our conversations were strictly limited to small talk about the party we were attending, a party whose purpose I could never figure out, and whose other attendees I could never make out.
“I might leave soon,” he’d say. Or “Party’s over soon.”
In those dreams it was as though my mother didn’t exist. She didn’t come up in conversation or even cross my mind. I never even thought to connect the two of them. He was my father and he was at a mysterious party that I was also attending, and that was all.
Dreams are sometimes portals of grief. Later I would realize that I was dreaming for my mother. In the dream, I was her. I was wearing her dress and it is even possible that I was wearing her face.
Toward the end, my mother shared only one of her final dreams with me. A new factory was opening up in lower Manhattan, and she’d gotten a call from Mary, her old factory forewoman, to come work there.
I kept reading A Grief Observed as my mother was hospitalized for the last time and was preparing for home hospice. One never stops hoping for a miracle, but as my mother’s body whittled away, it appeared less and less likely. Without asking any questions at all, she had signed a Do Not Resuscitate order. The focus of her prayers shifted. Rather than praying for healing, she started lingering on the part of the Lord’s Prayer that says, “Thy will be done,” as though it was now the only necessary prayer.
Ten years before, my father had made the same transition as he was dying, from pulmonary fibrosis. His suffering—he was constantly coughing and out of breath—was a lot more visible than my mother’s. No one had to ask him to rate his level of agony. It was always writ large on his skeletal face. His “Thy will be done” had also become a plea for death.
“I didn’t put myself on this earth and I can’t take myself out,” he’d say. “But if I could …”
He never allowed himself to finish the thought, but we knew he wanted out.
Mom wanted out too and started to withdraw. She stopped watching television. She no longer talked on the phone. Her own voice, she said, sounded strange to her. The cancer had invaded her lungs; she was often out of breath. She no longer wanted me to read the Bible to her. It was as if the biblical tête-à-tête had now shifted inside her head, becoming a secret chat from which I was suddenly barred.
One of the tragedies of death is that it interrupts a lifelong dialogue, rendering it a monologue. Instead of talking now, my mother mostly listened. As I watched her sleeping in the hospital bed in my house one night, I tried to imagine a type of story I could tell her to keep her awake, and thus alive—a story that would never end.
When she was awake, my mother would actively listen to updates about conversations I’d had with my brothers, discussions that she knew were mostly about her.
What had I told them about her condition? she’d ask. Her latest setback? Her recent glimmer of hope?
We’d made a pact that I would always tell them the truth, I told her.
“You’re the oldest,” she’d say. “You must protect them.” Then I knew that she was talking about more than that particular day. She was also talking about after her death.
During the last week of her life, when she was home with us, I was playing a game with my eight-year-old daughter and was carrying her on my back.
“Put that big girl down,” my mother-in-law said. “You’re going to hurt your spine.”
My mother, who had seemed to be asleep in her hospital bed, roused to say, “Let her carry her daughter now because one day it will be her daughter who will carry her, like she is carrying me.”
With my mother pulling back on her devotions, I tried to find solace in the verses and half verses she’d led me to. Reading the Bible was one more thing I’d have to do without her after she was gone. So I kept reading A Grief Observed as a companion to my mother’s Bible verses. I read it as my mother slept. A few phrases stayed with me.
“The death of a beloved is an amputation.”
That amputation has always terrified me.
“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.”
No one told me either.
Terror should have been part of Elisabeth Kúbler-Ross’s grief cycle of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance. After my mother died, I became terrified—frankly, I still am—that I would suddenly drop dead and leave my children motherless.
On the one-year anniversary of my mother’s death, I developed her first symptoms—bloating, indigestion, gas—and they lasted for weeks. After a few tests, it was discovered that I had an infection caused by a bacteria called H. pylori, which I might possibly have had since childhood and which the stress of grief might have reactivated. The homeopath I went to for body talk, a kind of holistic “read” of the body, told me that my body was remembering what it was like to watch my mother die. Even after a lengthy round of antibiotics and more body talk, my symptoms subsided only after I spent half a day in bed crying on what would have been my mother’s eightieth birthday.
Like Mom, C. S. Lewis’s wife died from cancer.
“One never meets just Cancer, or War, or Unhappiness (or Happiness),” he writes. “One only meets each hour or moment that comes.”
In the end, each moment with my mother was bringing a deeper understanding that she was slipping away from me and that heaven, her heaven, syèl la, was growing nearer in her sight. She had fully surrendered, but I was still flailing. Heaven did not seem like such a great place if everyone who was there had been plucked from somebody’s arms. They might be blessed, those who are dead in the Lord, but what of the wretched lot of us, those they have left behind?
Lewis seemed to have had a similar thought. “If His [God’s] ideas of good are so very different from ours, what He calls ‘Heaven’ might well be what we should call Hell.”
Lewis asks his dying wife to come to him on his deathbed.
“Heaven would have a job to hold me,” she tells him; “and as for Hell, I’d break it into bits.”
Reading the Bible out of context is discouraged by all the ministers I know, but it was the only way my mother and I could read it together in the end. We only had time to zigzag through it to find what Mom wanted and needed to hear. The way we were reading it, though, led us to many comforting fragments, pockets of isolated thoughts, islands of ideas that, completely stripped of their context, perfectly suited us.
Mixing history and prophecy, Revelation, with its fiery forecasts of famines, earthquakes, plagues, and wars, is filled with apocalyptic fury. Yet it is the one book I kept returning to in the early days after my mother died. This felt odd, even to me, but I found comfort in its plethora of gloomy imagery along with its breakneck pace and dark but highly poetic language.
Like Dante’s Inferno, it reads at times like a horror story, yet it is more digestible, though still a forceful, cautionary tale. Revelation’s vision of the world’s last day
s is so ominous and terrifying that, though I’m sure my mother had heard parts of it read in church or had listened to sermons on it, I never would have read the whole book to her. But once she was gone, I kept finding bits of it I thought she might like.
Take, for example, the twelfth verse from the twentieth chapter:
And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Another book was opened, which is the book of life.
The book of life. Not the book of death, which is somewhat hopeful. But then the rest of the book is full of death and all kinds of monsters too:
The dragon stood on the shore of the sea. And I saw a beast coming out of the sea. It had ten horns and seven heads, with ten crowns on its horns, and on each head a blasphemous name. The beast I saw resembled a leopard, but had feet like those of a bear and a mouth like that of a lion.
No one writes death like the Bible writers—resurrection too. Their vivid and detailed testimonials, their visions and messianic theophany not only bring back the dead but put flesh on their long-dead, dry bones, as in Ezekiel. The writers of Ezekiel and Revelation follow the school of exuberant and energetic description. In Revelation, though, I found myself relishing the unending rollout of horrors, all of which made it seem as though my mother was lucky to have departed from a place for which this type of dystopia was, as she believed, a real and possible future.
The framing of Revelation is a central part of its narrative. It might be a more modest writer’s worst nightmare (or perhaps dream gig) to be given such a tremendous task, to jot down the lyrical yet bloodcurdling visions of an incensed muse who holds the key to life and death, and who’s also ordering you not to change a single word. Still, nestled in the midst of all that destruction and fire and brimstone, what Gabriel García Márquez might call “that other death which exists within death,” was my mother’s little glacier, her own oasis, her vision of heaven, and even more reassuring fragments I now wish I’d had a chance to share with her, places where, after the torment and terrible suffering, everything suddenly becomes peaceful, idyllic.
It turns out that Revelation has a happy ending. In the final chapters, we catch a glimpse of a brand-new heaven and a new earth where there’s no more death or grief or pain, where rivers flow clear as crystal and crops bear abundant fruit, similar, one might say, to the kind of place the world becomes when Persephone returns from Hades and rejoins her mother, Demeter, again.
“All writing of the narrative kind, and perhaps all writing, is motivated, deep down, by a fear of and a fascination with mortality—by a desire to make the risky trip to the Underworld, and to bring something or someone back from the dead,” the novelist Margaret Atwood writes in “Negotiating with the Dead,” an essay adapted from the Empson Lectures she delivered at Cambridge University in 2000. In other words, even when we are not writing about death, we are still writing about death. After all, death is always the eventual outcome, the final conclusion of every story.
“All plots tend to move deathward,” Don DeLillo writes in the voice of his professor narrator in his 1985 novel, White Noise. “This is the nature of plots. Political plots, terrorist plots, lovers’ plots, narrative plots, plots that are part of children’s games. We edge nearer death every time we plot. It is like a contract that all must sign, the plotters as well as those who are the targets of the plot.”
In her 2007 memoir, Circling My Mother, the novelist Mary Gordon admits that she wrote about her dead mother because writing was the only way she thought she could mourn her. I have mourned my mother in many ways—mostly by sharing stories about her with family and friends—but writing about my mother is the most active way I have grieved.
The first few weeks after my mother died, I didn’t want to talk to anyone but the people who’d seen her as she was dying. I was shocked by how quickly many others expected me to bounce back and rejoin the world.
“I know your mom recently passed, but …” or “Sorry about your mom, but …” would begin requests to perform tasks that were still beyond my ability to carry out. Maybe the way death folds into the most private of spaces encourages us to underestimate the shattering weight of such a devastating loss. Perhaps uninterrupted routines and the daily flow of life force us to forget that losing a loved one to death is confounding, excruciating, sometimes even unbearable. That is, until it is our turn to grieve, and no matter how many people surround us, we end up, at one point or another, feeling totally alone.
During those first few weeks after my mother died, I had to drop out of everything but my family, out of social activities and all kinds of work.
“Perhaps, for a writer, there is no such thing as simple mourning,” Gordon writes.
There’s no such thing as simple mourning for anyone, really, except that as writers our grief becomes woven into the fabric of our work as well as into our source material. Mary Gordon’s grieving process involved visiting the paintings of the French artist Pierre Bonnard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, paintings that she associated with her Catholic mother.
My mother would have called it sacrilegious: to say that to come to a museum is a kind of prayer. But I want to tell her: Do you see that what I am doing is a kind of prayer? Adoration, contrition, thanksgiving, supplication. I am writing about you to witness to the mystery of an impossible love. I am sorry for the exposure that this entails. I am full of gratitude for what you gave me. I am, as artists are, a suppliant—but to whom? Saying to someone, faceless, in the air: Help me set down what I see.
Help me, Manman, I want to add. Help me, please.
“What does it mean to grieve in the absence of religious culture?” the poet Elizabeth Alexander asks in The Light of the World, her memoir about her artist husband’s sudden death from a heart attack.
I am not sure, because I have always been surrounded by some type of religious culture, but Alexander offers a clue.
“Art is certainly my religion,” she writes. But there is also her family—as well as her cultural heritage, a “syncretic” black culture that blends rituals from different strands of the African diaspora. She also has gospel music (particularly Mahalia Jackson), Lucille Clifton’s poems, her own poems, her deceased husband’s paintings, and deities from different continents, spirit guides, and her ancestors.
“In the absence of organized religion,” she writes, “faith abounds, in the form of song and art and food and strong arms.” In a lecture she gave after her husband died, she elaborated, “Art tries to capture that which we know leaves us, as we move in and out of each other’s lives, as we all must eventually leave this earth. Great artists know that shadow, work always against the dying light.… Survivors stand startled in the glaring light of loss, but bear witness.”
The need to bear witness can feel almost unrelenting after a loved one has died. Still, Alexander admits to yearning for even more guidance and more rituals.
After my mother died, I tried to follow one of the rituals she had followed after her mother died, when I was a teenager. My mother had left my brothers and me in New York with my father to go to Léogâne with her sisters to attend her mother’s funeral. When she came back she wore only black clothes for six months. After that she eased into lighter colors—beige and pale pastels—but she didn’t wear red or any other vivid color until an entire year had gone by.
I have been wearing mostly black clothes since college. Both my parents used to joke that when they died, I wouldn’t need to buy anything to wear during my official yearlong mourning period. I was trying to look thinner and, for someone with no fashion sense at all, a bit more stylish, but my parents thought I was wearing mourning clothes when I had no one yet to mourn. They thought I always looked “coffin-ready,” as the scholar Cornel West refers to the way he’s dressed—black suits, black scarf—since his father’s death, in 1994.
“I want rules,” Alexander writes in The Light of the World. “I want the prayers to say every day for a year at dusk and I want them to be beaut
iful and meaningful.”
I wanted these same kinds of rules and prayers too.
A few months after my mother died, I was asked to write a prayer for a panel I was on at the PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature in New York. I had procrastinated for as long as I could until the morning when I was supposed to send the prayer in so it could be printed in a small book that would be distributed at the event.
I grew up in a family that prayed all the time. First at my minister uncle’s in Haiti. Then with my parents and brothers in Brooklyn. Yet it was hard for me to write a prayer. This is in part because I believe prayers are meant to be private, since they often reflect our most vital desires.
I used to tell myself that writing is a kind of prayer, that silence can be prayer, that even children are prayers, living and growing prayers, that love is the most powerful prayer of all. Yet the prayer I ended up writing was inspired by my mother. It is the prayer I imagined her saying in her head during her final moments on this earth, during those minutes when she couldn’t speak anymore but could still hear a little bit, as she was drifting away.
My mother had a singular and wicked sense of humor, one that’s hard to convey in translation. Her type of humor was mostly for intimates, or people she’d quickly made into intimates. Her jokes were best understood by people who already knew how she spoke, who could read her body language and listen for the nuances in her speech.
When my mother was occasionally hospitalized, most of the nurses who took care of her were Haitian. My mother was hesitant to ask too much of them, but she’d joke with them in Creole. To the one nurse who always had trouble drawing her blood, she said, “It’s too bad you’re not like those vampires on TV who just put their teeth on someone’s neck and get blood there. Maybe there’s still some blood in my neck.” To the one who had to extract feces from her rectum when she was impacted, she said, “For your sake, my sister, I wish I had swallowed a big piece of gold earlier today.”
The Art of Death Page 11