They pump him and jump him and IV him. They keep doing it. “Anyone have any other ideas?” shouts the doctor, after they have tried and tried. And then he looks straight and deep into my eyes and says the words they say in the movies that are nonetheless the only words: We did everything we could do for him. Which I saw. Later on I will learn it was seven p.m., Wednesday, April 4, 2012.
The penis, which is mine alone, lies sleeping on his thigh, nestled in its hair, the heart outside his body, and that is what I remember of his body, after the emergency room doctor met my eyes and made his pronouncement. Him, still him, still Ficre, still a him, the last trace of him. The penis with which he actually made the human beings who are our children, is sign and symbol and substance of what I have lost.
I lie atop him and cover his body with my body. After time that cannot be measured someone I do not know comes and puts her arms around my shoulders and gently, gently leads me off and away from Ficre.
My cell phone does not work inside; the emergency room is being renovated. I go outside under a scaffold.
“Can you please bring the children to the emergency room entrance to Yale-New Haven Hospital to see their father, right now,” I say, to Tracey, in a tone that says, Ask no questions, because I cannot lie to her.
And they come, and I am waiting for them at the entrance, and I tell them that Daddy is dead.
Seven
Then it is Solomon, Simon, and me. Where is Daddy, they ask. We go to a room to see his body—not to see him, to see his body, for when we go in, it is his body but not him, in a hospital gown, under covers. We touch and hug and weep over the body that no longer houses him. It is somehow not frightening to see this body. In these moments it still belongs to us. The body is no longer warm. Our wails are one wail. We know when we want to leave the room.
I reach my brother by telephone. He doesn’t understand what I am saying but then he understands enough to say he is getting in the car in New Jersey and driving to Connecticut. Everyone in the emergency room is crying as I make that call, the boys my sentries.
Tracey has called Alondra in New York, who is coming, and she and Mark talk to each other from their cars as they both roar up the highway.
Tracey has called Emilie, who is a reverend, and I have called Lisa, my therapist. They are at the house when we return. Tracey has brought lavender tea. The tomato sauce she began to make for when we came home with Ficre—something practical, something to do with her hands—is in a pot on the stove, reduced to sticky sweetness.
Over and over I dial 202-544-8223, my parents’ phone number for over forty years, but they are out late for dinner in Washington, DC. Finally I reach them. He is their son, and he is dead.
I call his eldest sibling, Tadu, who has just arrived in New York en route to the planned extended Easter celebration. I tell her plainly, Ficre has died, and then I tell her daughter, our niece, to be sure it is understood across our language barrier, and because it makes no sense and needs to be repeated to be true.
I somehow get the boys to bed, together. Alondra and Mark make me take a pill. I fall into a black sleep without images.
Eight
Henry Ford believed the soul of a person is located in their last breath and so captured the last breath of his best friend Thomas Edison in a test tube and kept it evermore. It is on display at the Henry Ford Museum outside Detroit, like Galileo’s finger in the church of Santa Croce, but Edison’s last breath is an invisible relic.
Ficre breathed his last breath into me when I opened his mouth and breathed everything I had into him. He felt like a living person then. I am certain his soul was there. And then in the ambulance, riding the long ride down to the hospital, even as they worked and worked, the first icy-wind blew into me: he was going, or gone.
“I need to call somebody don’t I?” I asked the ambulance driver, a woman.
“Yes you do,” she said.
Nine
Black men die more catastrophically, across class, than anybody else in America.
Toni Morrison: “Not a house in the country ain’t packed to its rafters with some dead negro’s grief.”