* * *
This way of behaving, this way of feeling, so hysterical, so sad, when someone has died, I don’t like at all and would like to avoid. It’s not as if the whole thing has not happened before, it’s not as if people have not been dying all along and each person left behind is the first person ever left behind in the world. What to make of it? Why can’t everybody just get used to it? People are born and they just can’t go on and on, and if they can’t go on and on, then they must go, but it is so hard, so hard for the people left behind; it’s so hard to see them go, as if it had never happened before, and so hard it could not happen to anyone else, no one but you can survive this kind of loss, seeing someone go, seeing them leave you behind; you don’t want to go with them, you only don’t want them to go.
On that last visit that I made to see my brother, the visit where I quarreled with him (not him with me) and I did not kiss or hug him goodbye, and even told him that I did not want to kiss or hug him and did not tell him that I loved him (and he did not say that he loved me, something he had said many times before), I spent one day trying to find Dr. Prince Ramsey. My brother was in great pain. A stream of yellow pus flowed out of his anus constantly; the inside of his mouth and all around his lips were covered with a white glistening substance, thrush. Dr. Ramsey’s old office, which had been just a stone’s throw from my mother’s house, the house in which my brother lay dying, had been destroyed in the hurricanes (Luis, then Marilyn) and his temporary office was far away, on the All Saints Road (the road which leads to a village called All Saints) and in a building that had not been destroyed by the hurricanes, perhaps because it did not need to be, it was so dilapidated already, a building called the Hotel Bougainvillea. He was not at his office but he was expected back quite soon and I joined a group of people sitting in chairs waiting and waiting for the doctor, and we waited not in joy, not in anger, but more as if we were in a state of contemplation, as if we were seeing the whole panorama of life, from its ancient beginnings in the past to its inevitable end in some future, and we accepted it with indifference, for what else could we do? And this is the way people wait, people all over the world wait in this way, when they are powerless or poor, or both at the same time. And after I had waited for a while, his nurse, a woman who had always been so nice to me and kind to my brother, always putting me through immediately to Dr. Ramsey whenever I called, always asking after my brother and showing him sympathy, but a woman whose name I could not ever remember, told me that I most likely would find him at a funeral at two o’clock that afternoon, a funeral for a boy who was four years old.
The funeral—that is, the church part of the funeral—was being held at the Methodist church; I knew this church well, I had been baptized in it, though this would have taken place on a weekday, not on a Sunday, because my mother and father were not married at the time I was conceived, my mother and father were never married at all; from about the time my mother was seven months pregnant with me, she and my father quarreled and they never spoke again, except in court, except when I was a grown-up woman and he complained to her about something I had written, which he had not read because he could not read, and she said some words to him, she cursed him, and so I had no parents, I had only a mother and a father, and they were not ever married, and so I could not have been baptized at the Methodist church on a Sunday, only on a weekday, though a service for my burial could have been held any day of the week. And it was in this church that I was received; that is, I became eligible to partake of Holy Communion, and I remember this passage of my life as being filled with fear, and I remember feeling already disappointed and already defeated, already hopeless, thinking and feeling that I was standing on a fragile edge and at any moment I might fall off into a narrow black hole that would amount to my entire earthly existence: I felt I hated my mother, and even worse, I felt she hated me, too; my brother Devon, the one dying just then at that moment, was one year old and I did not wish him dead; I only wished that he had never been born, because it was his birth that plunged our family into financial despair, his birth and his father’s illness; and then, just around that time, his father and his and my mother, who were married, no longer liked each other (“in love” is not something I can imagine about my mother and so, too, “out of love”) but did not do anything about it, for he (the father) was too old and she (my mother) is at her most intelligent when she is in a fret. Her life is a long fret.
And in that church then, the Methodist church of St. John’s, Antigua (where I had been baptized and received, and where my brother who was then dying was baptized as a child, though not received, for by the time he was fourteen years of age our father, Mr. Drew—his real father, a father not really mine—was sick and took up most of our mother’s attention and so he was beyond our mother’s influence), there was a funeral for a four-year-old boy I did not know, and I was looking for the doctor who might keep the funeral for a man I did know at bay. Dr. Ramsey was not in that church full of people; his wife was there, a beautiful woman I thought her so, but he, Dr. Ramsey, was not there, he was at the hospital, or visiting someone at home, or just anywhere, but he was not at the church. The church was full; in the front pews were the dead boy’s immediate family and their relatives, and also his little schoolmates. The little schoolmates looked nervous and miserable (though I might have only imagined this, perhaps if I had asked them they would have said they were not miserable to be at a classmate’s funeral, they were feeling something else, not miserable) and for a good reason, for they would eventually sing a hymn about the love Jesus had for little children in particular. This little boy had been dead for two weeks, but the funeral was postponed until the many relatives could come from all the corners of the earth where they had purposely and gratefully scattered themselves, for the island on which they were born could not sustain them; it could sustain other people, people born of Europe especially, but it could not sustain them, this boy’s relatives; the irony of all this is that the little boy was not of Antigua, he was of the United States; his parents had adopted him, they had the means to do so, to adopt someone from far away; someone from nearby would have only confirmed their ordinariness. But this little boy from far away, now dead and only going the way of people from near or far, the way of eternity, was in a coffin that was standing just inside the door of the church. This coffin was meant to look like a box in which precious jewels were placed: it was covered with white velvet, but instead it looked cheap, like the living-room furniture of poor people in rich countries. His immediate female relatives were all dressed in clothes made from the same cloth—a white silk with some image from the vegetable kingdom woven into it, not the animal kingdom—though not all in the same style; the men were in suits, the kinds of suits that men everywhere wear when it is said of them that they are in a suit. And this scene in my old church, the schoolchildren standing only a few feet away from their former little friend now mysteriously (for so it would have seemed to me if I had been one of them) vanished, though also surely only inside that beautiful (if you were a child) velvet box; the parents and their relatives mourning, sad, even though they were dressed so elegantly, so carefully, beautifully really, the surface of their clothing so at odds with the actual event, a funeral; the church with its big open windows, its big open doors, built many years ago by the ancestors of the people inside it, or certainly built by the ancestors of people who looked like the people now inside it; Dr. Ramsey’s wife, whose son had been a classmate of the dead boy; the people just outside the church who were only passing by and who had no real interest in the events inside the church but only perhaps wanting to witness immediately, not through some remote medium, someone less fortunate (the dead boy, his parents, the people related to them), someone suffering right now: the dead, or those related to someone unfortunate enough to have died—all this made me not sad then, only now when I think of it am I sad, at the time when I was taking in the whole spectacle, at some moments I felt disdain, at some moments I felt triumph
ant, at some moments I felt awe, at some moments I felt bewilderment, at some moments I had a revelation; but never did I feel sad then. At the cemetery where the little boy was buried I felt curious, I wanted to get a good look at the face of the boy’s mother, for at the sight of her son in his coffin being lowered into the ground, she threw up a thick colorless liquid and the other relatives and mourners did not look at her, for though there was nothing at all unusual about a mother collapsing at the sight of her own son vanishing forever from her sight, this mother’s behavior did not go with her dress. Her dress was so white and pristine and proper and clean, not the thing to wear if you are going to have the dry heaves—her stomach had been emptied of even the thick, colorless liquid. And the mourners did not look at her, not only because it would have been impolite to do so, but also because the people in the place I am from do not like a vivid expression of feeling, they like only the gesture of a vivid expression of feeling, and then after the gesture they like to go home and speak of something else in which truups, that placing of the lips together and forcing air out through them, is heard quite frequently. And now to make that sound, the truups, makes my stomach feel strange, as if I am in a vessel sailing on waters I have never sailed on before, and the current is unfamiliar, and I will throw up, only I will throw up nothing solid, just a thin colorless liquid.
* * *
My friend Bud (of Bud and Connie, Bud and Connie Rabinowitz) said to me he found it strange the way people in Antigua regard illness, that when a person is ill no one mentions it, no one pays a visit; but if the person should die, there is a big outpouring of people at the funeral, there are bouquets, people sing hymns for the dead with much feeling. There was a man named Freeston (and he really was but is not anymore), and he was and is, as far as I know, the only person to publicly admit he was afflicted with the HIV virus; in making his situation public, he hoped to perform a public service. He spoke on the radio, he appeared on television, he gave talks before groups of schoolchildren. It is perhaps because of the reaction to his publicly identifying himself as a person with AIDS that no one in Antigua will do this again. The doctor who had been his permanent physician refused to see him after Freeston told him of his condition; ordinary people thought him foolish (“’E mek pappy-show of ’eself”); one day when I was visiting him and we were sitting on the gallery was the exact opposite of all those things, and that was the thing: my brother’s mother (my mother) only judged, never was accepting, had many thoughts; she was (is, for she still is) intelligent, her intelligence is like a weapon, and it has destroyed her, it destroyed some of her children: her son, my brother, was then dying. Freeston died. He went to Miami to be treated, he went to London to be treated, from London he came off the airplane in a wheelchair, and then he went to his mother’s house, where he died. I do not know any details of his death; his death was not notorious, only his way to his death was so.
* * *
And my brother died, for he kept dying; each time I remembered that he had died it was as if he had just at that moment died, and the whole experience of it would begin again; my brother had died, and I didn’t love him; or, at any rate, I didn’t love him in the way that I had come to understand love, something so immediate it was always in front of me even when my back was turned away from it, something so immediate it was like breath itself. My children were like that, breath itself; their father was like that, breath itself; but my brother was not like that, I could breathe easily (and did breathe easily) without him in front of me, he grew up without my seeing him do so (I saw him when he was three years old and didn’t see him again until he was twenty-one). I love the people I am from and I do not love the people I am from, and I do not really know what it means to say so, only that such a thing as no love now and much love now, these feelings are not permanent, or possibly not permanent. One day something may happen and I will understand that all the things I now feel, which do not at all seem like love (the word I would use to describe my feelings about my family, the people I have made my own: my husband, my children, my friends, though that word “friend” is so thin to explain that thickness), are in fact love; that I loved my brother and the other people I am from, my mother, my other brothers, and Mr. Drew (the father of my brothers, who was a father to me, though at the same time not my father at all).
* * *
His mouth so white, abloom with thrush; his lips so red, glowing, shiny from fever; his skin blackened as if his normal quotient of pigment (normal in a way unique to him, he was descended from Africans mostly) had increased from some frightening source: his face was like a mask, and this was while he was still alive, or still amounted to something called being alive; I mean he breathed and he spoke and he took in nourishment, and fluids of different textures would pass out of his anus, and these fluids did not have a fragrance, they had a smell, and only someone trained to ignore it (a nurse, a doctor) or someone who knew him deeply (his mother) could tolerate it, or not mind it, or say “But what to do” (his mother again) in that way of total resignation and acceptance that always defeats any attempt to make something of it, to interpret it, to give it a meaning embossed, or embellished, or spare, or even neutral. His smells only made his mother (my mother) say, “But what to do.” And saying that, she changed his bed, his diapers, his clothing, but could not help keeping the same tone of annoyance at the trouble he put her through and the trouble he had put her through from the beginning, when she had hoped he would not be born, and then he was, and our family could not support his added presence, and our father got sick, and I was sent away to help a family disaster that I did not create, and I did not love him because I did not know him, and then I knew him again, but then he was dying and so “What to do?” which by that time perhaps everyone in my family (that family I could not help having) said as almost a constant refrain, “What to do,” and we did some things, but none of them prevented him from dying, and the moment when he realized that “What to do” would not prevent that (his dying) is a moment so universal, so common; how I wish he could have just told me: “What to do, what to do?”
My Brother Page 9