38 The New York Review
Mourning in Place
Edwidge Danticat
something (which was often true) but
that he could bring it back (which was
mostly a lie). But the point of genu-
ine mourning is that the thing you are
grieving for cannot be restored. The
grief is an acceptance that the loss is
irreparable. There is and always will be
the empty chair at the table, the black
hole in the chest.
Perhaps this true sense of bereave-
ment is a necessity for America—a
hard, sad, relentless reckoning withthe knowledge that much of what it has
been should be allowed to die, that the
structures of inequality and oppression
and rapaciousness that have been a
part of its life for so long must finally
be let go. A false notion of greatnessmust be given a decent burial. Biden
can perhaps be the chief mourner at its
obsequies. If there is really to be a new
creation, there must be no doubt that
the old world is dead. Q
—August 26, 2020My neighbor died recently. I saw the
ambulance arrive. The red and blue
strobes bounced off every glass sur-
face on both sides of our block. She was
eighty years old, and ambulances had
come for her before. There was that
time she broke her arm in her back-
yard, and already accustomed to oste-
oporotic and arthritic pain, she treated
herself until her movements led to
other fractures. She ended up staying
in the hospital for several days because
her blood pressure wouldn’t go down,
then she spent a few weeks at a rehab
center.
She was among the first people we
met when we moved to Miami’s Lit-
tle Haiti neighborhood eighteen years
ago. We had an avocado tree in our
yard, and one day we saw her standing
outside the gate looking at it. The gate,
locked only with a metal coat hanger,
allowed easy access to the avocado
tree. For years before we moved in,
when the house was empty, everyone
on our block could come into the yard
to get avocados. Our buying the house
changed that.
My husband gave her some avocados.
She suggested a few other neighbors
who had benefited from previous har-
vests. My husband gave them some too.
“See,” she told my husband. “I’ve
made you popular on the block.”
It’s hard to figure out how to mourn
during a pandemic. Our mourning rit-
uals have all been disrupted or taken
away: the home visits, the festive
wakes, the funerals, and post- burial
repasts. My husband walked to our
neighbor’s front yard after we first saw
the ambulance lights through our bed-
room window. Usually I would have
gone with him, but the city we live in,
Miami, was an epicenter of the pan-
demic, so we took turns being exposed
to the elements.
My two daughters, my mother- in-
law, and I waited inside. My husband
returned a few minutes after the am-
bulance pulled away. Our neighbor had
no pulse, he said, but the emergency
medical technician told our neighbor’s
daughter, who lives with her, that they
would work on her mother on the way
to the hospital. The daughter was told
she couldn’t ride in the ambulance, nor
would it be a good idea for her to go
to the hospital. It sounded to me like
my neighbor was already dead. Maybe
the EMT thought it was best not to pro-
nounce her death yet, in front of her
family.
My neighbor’s death was not, as far
as I know, a Covid death. She’d had
gallbladder surgery and was in the hos-
pital for two weeks. When she came
home she no longer had any appetite or
thirst. I had visited her in the hospital
during previous stays, but this time we
were not even aware that she was sick.
I suppose her daughter figured, Why
tell? since no one, including family
members, would be able to visit her.
When my mother died of ovarian
cancer in our house, this neighbor came
over to sit with us that same night. She
came over to pray with us when my
mother was near death. We attended
the same small church and sometimes
I gave her and her slightly younger sis-
ter a ride home. She loved to hand out
cookies and hard candy to the kids at
church. She cooed over both my daugh-
ters when they were just days old.
Some weeks before, for her eightieth
birthday, her daughter had organized a
“drive- by” celebration. Over a dozen
cars—she was the matriarch of a large
family—streamed by her house. Her
friends and family members honked
their horns while waving handwritten
signs and banners that said “Happy
Birthday” and blasting loud cele-
bratory music. We all went outside
(masked) to wish her a happy birthday,
and watched as she swayed to the dif-
ferent types of music—hip- hop, Hai-
tian konpa, gospel—that were playedfor her. She was wearing a beautiful
pink suit and had a Miss America–
type sash across her chest. She looked
very happy.
The next day I called her to more for-
mally wish her a happy birthday. She
said her children had been planning a
lavish party pre- Covid. They’d rented
a banquet hall, and friends and family
members were supposed to come from
all over the world, including Haiti and
the Bahamas, where she’d spent her
youth.
I think back now to my neighbor’s
description of her pre- Covid birthday
party plans. Her party sounded like a
dream my mother- in- law had described
to me a week before our neighbor
died. There was a lavish banquet at
church. People were singing and danc-
ing, rejoicing that they could finally
be together again. That same day, my
mother- in- law learned that two of her
friends had died.
In dreams, a feast means death, my
mother- in- law had explained. Might it
be because death is a kind of celebra-
tion in some other realm, I was tempted
to ask her. But lately there had been too
much death in our realm, and too fewopportunities to celebrate the lives the
dead had lived.Four of my parents’ friends died from
Covid in New York. Their funerals
were streamed on Zoom and Face-
book. I watched one of the funerals,
but couldn’t bear to watch the others.
My parents’ octogenarian minister told
me that thirty members of another
Haitian church in Brooklyn had died,
and in each case only ten people were
allowed to attend the service in per-
son. A historian friend told me that she
thinks more Caribbean people have
died of Covid- 19 in New York than in
the entire Caribbean so far.
“Since we can’t mourn in person
now,” my parents’ minister said, “we’ll
have a massive memorial when this is
all over. Whenever that is.”
After our neighbor’s death was con-
firmed by another friend, my mother-
in- law and I walked over to her front
yard and knocked on the window of
her living room, where a family meet-
ing was taking place. Our neighbor’s
daughter stood in the doorway and
said, “My mother left us. She left us
tonight.”
I remember having to announce my
mother’s death over and over to family
members, and friends. “She’s gone,” I
would say, leading some to think that
my mother had left Miami while she
was sick and returned to New York,
where she’d spent most of her life. (I re-
cently had to do it again, six years later,
telling an old friend I haven’t spoken to
in some time.)
As my mother- in- law and I were
standing in front of our neighbor’s
house, a sprinkle of rain began falling,
and it felt as though the God our neigh-
bor loved so much was weeping for her.
We could not touch or hug her daugh-
ter. We could not even shake her hand.
We could not go inside and sit with her
and her siblings, so we stood out in the
rain for a few minutes, and while look-
ing up at her daughter we kept mutter-
ing, “Kondoleyans. Sorry. We are so
sorry. Very very sorry.”
Recently, while sitting with my fam-
ily on the sand, at dusk, on a beach
near our home, I looked up at the sky
and was in awe. Perhaps it was because
I had been inside for weeks. It’s also
possible that in quarantine, my eyes
had grown unused to having unob-
structed views of sunsets, but that af-
ternoon on the beach, the sky looked
the most luminous I had ever seen it.
Swirls of cirrus, cumulus, and altostra-
tus clouds appeared to have been set
aflame. What I didn’t realize then was
that I was looking at a Sahara dust sun-
set. The fact that a plume of dust from
the Sahara Desert could be hovering
over the sky in Miami the same weekDidier William: Dancing, Pouring, Crackling and Mourning, 2015Didier William