He was an African man, an Eritrean man, and an African American man. He was a black man. He was not the descendant of slaves. He literally walked across his country through killing fields to escape, when he was sixteen years old. He walked into the dust of Khartoum. He was a refugee in Sudan, in Italy, in Germany, and in the United States, where he would end up living in New Haven, Connecticut, for far longer than he had ever lived anywhere. He washed dishes in Italy, attended school before he knew a word of the language in a Germany so racially hostile it almost broke him. He went years without seeing his parents. His parents and his community built him to survive. But it was not without price.
His big heart burst. The autopsy later tells us his arteries were blocked nearly completely, despite the fact that he was slim and energetic and ate yogurt and blueberries and flaxseed, despite the fact that he passed stress tests with flying colors. I learn that severe heart disease is first discovered in one of five sufferers when they drop dead. He could never quit smoking, though he tried and tried, over and over and over. Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the United States.
He was probably dead before he hit the ground, the emergency room doctor and the coroner and a cardiologist I later speak with tell me. That is why there was no blood on the floor, despite his head wound and the scalp’s vascularity. He might have felt strange, the doctors told me, before what they call “the cardiac event,” but not for more than a flash. One tells me he is certain Ficre saw my face as he died. We are meant to take comfort in this knowledge, if knowledge it is.
Ten
Because he was eminently strong of body and spirit, he went to the grocery store despite fatigue and bought supplies to make the Easter Bolognese. It was a busy week ahead and Monday was the night to shop and prep. I pushed him like an Italian wife as I always did: vai, vai, vai, and so he went to the store in preparation for his sauce, and started the cooking.
His last night on earth, I was out of the house, showing films to my students for class. Who could have known, but still, I look back and wish I had known and that we could have stayed up all night together, entwined, saying every single thing to each other and weeping. Like a man waiting for his execution, I think: a maudlin thought, but my fervent, despairing current wish is that we had every single moment, that I could have braved the countdown with him, that we could have walked the gangplank together.
But where would the children have been during this anguished, operatic exit? I could never allow that particular howling agony to touch them. For them I prefer no clue, no lead-up, no mortal dread.
Bill T. Jones choreographed and performed a dance called “Last Night on Earth” that emerged from his loss of his partner, Arnie Zane, to AIDS, and the ravaging of his community by the HIV virus. In the dance, he speaks from the stage to the audience, asking them sharp, direct questions: “What time is it? Can you at this moment look in the mirror and be all right with it?… Are you doing what you want to do right? Have you located your passion as if this was your last night on earth?” He gave his memoir that urgent, encompassing name.
His last night on earth, Ficre waited up for me. Tell me everything, he said. Now I was the one who went out into the world and came back with an armful of flowers, a cabinet of curiosities. He had had too much of the world; he loved hearth above all else. The best and worst of the world were all in his head. He put it on canvas and gave it to us. Because going out into the world can make you tired I couldn’t always share every little thing and now I wish I’d poured a glass of wine and sat with him for hours on the red sofa and told stories like he did, all generosity, Frederick the mouse of Leo Lionni’s classic children’s book, offering his mouse community the sunlight of stories to get them through the long, dark winter. But it was very late after my extended workday, and I could not.
Monday he was deeply fatigued. Monday his mood was peculiar and I tried to snap him out of it. He came home for lunch and felt better; he said so, in his sweet, sunny text messages: Thank you for lunch, and The salad was good!
His body was his same body, his same warmth and weight and smell.
If I go back to that late afternoon, I walked down the sparkling block and as I came up to the house, the boy came running to greet me. I can freeze the moment before we knew, before Simon ran through the basement door and found his father on the floor.
We three found him there on the floor. The big boy named for the wise king knew his father was dead. It never occurred to me he could be dead. The younger boy’s thoughts were all magic, If I had gone to check him, Simon said, and They’ll bring him back.
I breathed into his mouth. He was supple. The 911 operator asked if my husband was breathing and I could not say. The air around him was warm and vaporous. How many times that day and in following days and weeks and months did I say “my husband.” My husband died unexpectedly. I just lost my husband. Lost implies we are looking, he might be found.
I lost my husband. Where is he? I often wonder. As I set out on some small adventure, some new place, somewhere he does not know, I think, I must call him, think, I must tell him, think, What he would think? Think what he thinks. Know what he thinks.
When I held him in the basement, he was himself, Ficre.