Dust to Dust

I remember the night we left Haiti like a dream. It was a hot and sticky August night, and my little brother and I slept huddled together on the same bed. He had wet his bed the day before, so his mattress was still leaning on the patio railing to dry. My mother woke us hurriedly, shaking our legs in hushed tones.

“We have to go,” she urged. “Grab your things,” she continued as she walked to the other end of the room. I remember thinking, what things? What time is it? But as I rubbed the sleep from my eyes, I saw our school bags plumped and perched against the wall and somehow knew those were the things. Those were all of our things. 

So in the cover of darkness, and in the stillness of the night, with only the moonlight as our guide, we piled our things in the trunk of my mother’s Datsun and drove in silence to my grandfather’s house. I was the only stop we would make on our way to the airport. I often think about that drive, wishing I knew to take one last look at my home and commit every detail to memory. I wished I’d hugged my grandfather longer when we said our goodbyes and told him I loved him because it would be the last time we saw each other. I wished I had inhaled deeper, to take in all the sweetness of the fruit trees in the air, and listened to the noises of the animals and birds more carefully to play it over in my head whenever I got homesick. I wished I had known that after landing in the United States, I would search far and wide and still never find anything quite like home in the vastness of this land. But I didn’t know. 

“Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to remember the life of a remarkable man.” People huddled in small groups under their umbrellas, protecting themselves from the drizzle, as they listened to the pastor speak. It was humid, and the air felt heavy. The clouds filled the sky, and a light fog shaded everything and everyone in grey. 

Maybe I had missed his remarkable years, I thought. That’s why I couldn’t conjure tears. Growing up, he was the boogeyman in my life. He was the infamous character who’d pop up if I was being bad or disrespectful to my mother.  

“Do you want your father to come get you?” She’d say. “Do you want to go live with him?” She’d threaten me at the end of any lecture she gave me because I was acting like a wild child again. My father was a faceless memory that slowly faded, year after year, into insignificance. But, to these people, he was remarkable. 

One day, the week before we left Haiti, my little brother and I were playing in the front of the house, pretending to be mechanics and fixing our bikes, when my father came home, smelling of rum and slurring his speech. He yelled about the front door being opened and tripped over our bikes on his way into the house. He fell forward clumsily, hitting his forehead on the concrete and scraping his arm. My little brother, his namesake, rushed to check on him while I remained seated and watched from where I was. And as he approached, my father attempted to get up and swung his arm quickly, smacking my brother in the face as he turned. 

“Don’t touch me!” He yelled. “You little idiot. Pick up your damn bike!” 

I sucked in my breath and held it in, hoping and praying it would end there. But my brother froze, as he usually did in these situations, which provoked him even more. 

“Don’t you hear me talking to you? What?! You’re mute AND deaf!?” He screamed as he approached him, preparing to strike again. 

“Don’t!” I said, letting out the breath I held in all at once. I thought I would pass out from all the blood rushing to my head. He looked at me pointedly and shifted his body towards me. Slowly approaching, he asked, “What did you say?”

“What’s going on out there!?” Someone shouted from inside the house. In that small moment of distraction, I leaped up, grabbed my brother by the arm, and pulled him as I ran towards the neighbor’s house. 

The pastor finished speaking, and the casket slowly lowered to the ground. People approached one by one and dropped roses into the grave. Some lingered. Some cried. I stood still, observing everything as if it were a scene in a movie. 

“How did you know him?” A woman asked, approaching me. She looked young, about my little brother’s age, maybe younger, and had short black hair. Her dress looked about two sizes too big because she looked like she was drowning in it and had bags under her eyes. 

She reminded me of a girl I had met during my first week at university. The girl sat alone in the student union, concentrating while scribbling on paper. She was pressing so hard you could hear her pen scraping the table. Maybe that’s why I approached her. 

“Is everything ok?” I asked as I lightly touched the table, motioning towards the paper on which she was writing. She popped her head up and looked a little surprised. Then she leaned back in her chair while slowly putting down her pen and flipping her paper over. 

“I recognize you. You’re that girl from 3B, right?”

“Umm,” I replied, a little hesitant and slightly weirded out. 

“Yea,” she added, now more sure of herself. “You showed up to moving day with just a backpack when everyone else had like suitcases and boxes and stuff. 

 “Yea. I travel light.” I replied, “What are you working on? Professors giving out homework already?” She let out a light chuckle. 

“Nah, nothing like that. I’m letting someone go.” 

“What?” Admittedly, I was lost. 

“Not literally. I mean, ceremoniously. You see, my grandma used to tell me when I was younger,” she continued, “when someone hurts you, you carry that hurt everywhere you go. Even if time has passed. If you don’t let go of that hurt of that person, you end up carrying it with you forever. You end up damaged. You know? Cuz you’re hurtin’.” 

“So, how do you get rid of the hurt?” I asked her, curiously. 

“You got to set it free. Set the person and the hurt they cause you free.” She leaned forward, turned her paper over again, and picked up her pen. “I do that by writing down everything I feel, everything they did to me, and everything I want to heal from. Then, I set it on fire. I get it out of me and onto the paper and set it on fire.”

“Hmm.” I wasn’t sure what to say. Mostly I was skeptical that something like that would work, much less make sense. 

“What?” She asked, reading something on my face. “You ain’t never have somebody hurt you? You ain’t got nothing you carrying?” 

“That’s not it,” I replied. 

She paused and looked at me for what seemed like forever. “Well,” she finally said, “Don’t knock it until you try it.” she got up, picked up her bag, and left. 

“He touched the lives of so many. Were you one of his students? The woman continued earnestly, pulling me from my thoughts. 

“His student?” I retorted, surprised. I was a little more surprised than I wanted to let on. 

“Yea, he taught engineering at Umass, “she responded. She looked for something in my face. Feeling uneasy, I stuck my hand in my coat pocket and clutched the paper. I shifted my weight from one foot to another. Remember why you’re here, I repeated in my head like a mantra. 

“Is that how you knew him?” 

“No. He is… was my father.”

“Your father?” I was confused. No, I was surprised. Was I hurt?

“Yea, I was-“ someone touched her arm, interrupting her mid-sentence, and whispered something in her ear. 

“Well, it was nice meeting you,” she said, but I must go. “You’re welcomed to the repast,” she said as she started to turn away. Then quietly added, “If you’d like.”

The rain started falling a little harder, and more and more people began to leave. I stared at the hole in the ground and wondered how quickly it would fill up. Two men started removing the metal bars used to lower the casket and the green tarp around the hole. This was my last chance. I walked up to the hole and pulled the paper from my pocket. I had spent the last week writing and dumping all of the broken parts of me into it, praying this would work. There were moments I questioned the whole thing. What’s a dead man going to do with a piece of paper? But then I thought about how much of my life he had already consumed in his absence and how much he had destroyed when he was present; there was no way I could allow him to take up even more space in death. Letting him go was for me, my sanity, and my healing. Not for him. 

I threw the paper in the hole and watched it float down. So heavy and so light. “This is no longer mine to ca