Freedom in Death | In the Silence
Everything Inside by Edwidge Danticat
From the internationally acclaimed, best-selling author of Brother, I’m Dying, a collection of vividly imagined stories about community, family, and love. — Book Description
Recommended by a good friend and fellow Haitian(shouts to Jen) when I was starting my end-of-life doula work, I learned about this book by Haitian writer, Edwidge Danticat, and was easily immersed into the worlds she created in these short stories. I was immediately taken by the tellings of people at the time of their death and how those around them approached it.
In a recent twitter thread (way after reading this book), I reflected on one of the things I love most about natural death care and this kind of work: that it is centered around bringing the process of dying and taking care of our dead back into the home and in the control of the families (whoever the dying consider to be so). In modern times, we are separated from the process and often so overwhelmed with grief and logistics right after the time of death. We don’t often get to spend time with our dead loved ones and care for them which can look like having their favorite music playing or cleaning their body — among many other things. Not only is there something sweet about being able to do this for our loved ones, but there’s also freedom in being able to have a good death and knowing that your loved one had a good death — however they define that for themselves.
I thought it was beautiful how this moment and the traditions were described in the book:
As I followed her down the hall, the minister and his wife began singing a mournful hymn, a lullaby for the dying.
Shall we gather at the river?
The beautiful, beautiful river.
“He is gone now,” she said. “He is free. We rejoice for his freedom.”
“There’s no rush, no emergency,” she said. She was composed once again, as though she had not been crying at all. “The doctor will pronounce him dead when you tell her to.
In the old days, she was telling me, conch shells blared for each person who died.
In the old days, the dead were initially kept at home. Farewell prayers were chanted and mourning dances were performed at their joy-filled wakes. When it was time to take the dead out of the house, they would be carried out, feet first, through back door, and not the front, so they would know not to return. Their babies and young children would be passed over their coffins so they could shake off their spirits and wouldn’t be haunted for the rest of our lives. Then a village elder would pour rum on the grave as a final farewell. In the old days, she said, I would have pronounced my father dead with my bereavement wails to our fellow villages, both the ones crowding the house and others far beyond.
My father’s soul will rise from another type of river to be reborn as a shadow, a dream, or a whisper in the wind. The daughter will be in there for a lifetime, for the same amount of time she’d missed with her father. How about the daughter just stay here until the end of time?
In the old days, coins might have been placed over his eyes to keep me from seeing even this much of the windows to his soul.
The window shades were drawn and the picture frames were covered with black bedsheets. “His spirit might stop and look in the glass,” my father’s wife called out to me from the front room. “That would keep him from traveling on.”
It isn’t easy to come to an understanding of death and isn’t easy to see those we love leave this earth. But I think it is important to remember these kind of traditions and beliefs that remind us to celebrate the life lived, the newfound freedom our loved one has, and that a natural part of life is death. It’s an act of care to ourselves and others to do what we can to have it end well.
One other part of the book’s discussion about death that I particularly appreciated was in this statement:
“They’re not always old,” she said. “Sometimes they’re young people who’ve been in car accidents or have cancer.”
Any work I pursue is guided and founded upon my purpose of supporting young people. When I decided to start training to become an end-of-life doula, I did so with the understanding that I wanted to support young people in particular because young people die too. Young people also experience a lot of grief and loss too. And unfortunately, they are often the most shielded from discussing and understanding death so when it happens, they may not know how to deal with it in a healthy way or may be fed fairytales about what happened. And young people who are dying also deserve to have a good death and have agency over what that looks like.
I’m still in the midst of my training, but I am grateful to soon be able to support people in this way. Death is the one thing we are guaranteed in this life and it’s often the last thing we want to think about. But how beautiful of a life we would create if we embraced the fact that it ends? How freeing would it be to know when we die, we will be cared for by those that loved us and in the ways we wish? How wonderful would it be if we came together as a village to care for our dying loved ones as we do for newly born ones?
|Renée|
More of my favorite quotes from Everything Inside:
From her experience working with the weak and the sick, she’d learned that the disease you ignore is the one that kills you, so she tried her best have everything out in the open.
“There are many falls before the big one,” he said.
Only people you care about can hurt you like he did us.
“Sometimes you have to take detours to get where you need to go.”
“I didn’t see him live the most important years of his life,” she said while rising from our table. “I don’t want to go see him die.”
“People don’t remember smells,” she’d told him, “unless the smells are tied to something or someone-” She’d meant to say: something or someone they love. But she knew this wasn’t always true. People also associate some smells with things they hate or are trying to forget.
The Tainos believed themselves to have originally been cave people who would turn into stone when touched by sunlight. They knew the risk when they stepped into the light, but they did it anyway in order to create a new world, a world that continues to exist, because we are still here.
Her daughter’s psyche is so feeble that anything can rattle her. Doesn’t she realize that the life she is living is an accident of fortune? Doesn’t she know that she is an exception in this world, where it is normal to be unhappy, to be hungry, to work nonstop and earn next to nothing, and to suffer the whims of everything from tyrants to hurricanes and earthquakes?
How long can anyone bear to live with someone whose mind wanders off to a place where their love no longer exists?
Sometimes you just have to shake the devil off you, whatever that devil is. Even if you don’t feel like living for yourself, you have to start living for your child, for your children.
This, whatever it is that she is feeling, she wants to tell him, isn’t about not wanting her son. It’s about not being up to the task; the job is too grand, too permanent, even with her husband’s help. It’s hard to explain her father or to anyone else, but something that was supposed to kick in, maybe a light that was meant to turn on in her head, never did. Despite her complex physical transformation, at times she feels as though she has not given birth at all. It’s not that she doesn’t want her son, or wishes he hadn’t been born; it’s just that she can’t believe that he is truly hers.
You are always saying hello to them while preparing them to say goodbye to you. You are always dreading the separations, while cheering them on, to get bigger, smarter, to crawl, babble, walk, speak, to have birthdays that you hope you’ll live to see, that you pray they’ll live to see. Jeanne will now know what it’s like to live that way, to have a part of yourself walking around unattached to you, and to love that part so much that you sometimes feel as though you were losing your mind.
No story is ever complete.
One reason not to own too many things was their crammed two-bedroom apartment, but the other, at least for him, had to do with ever wanting to feel bound.
To be attached to a few people was fine — to Paris and to Darline, who were as much a part of him as his blood was — but he never wanted to be tied to things, to clothes and shoes gathering dust in packed closets, to a fancy car that required hefty payments every month. No it was simpler to be free.
There are loves that outlive lovers.
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