Loss

July 7, 2021. The headlines were filled with the slaughter of a president in his own bedroom. But I doubt my father noticed. By then, he was already somewhere else, drifting beyond the noise of horror.

I wasn’t with him in Haiti that day, but I imagine him out of bed early, lost.

My sister and I called him—she in Canada, me in the US. She took the lead: “Dad, we lost her. Mommy is gone.”

He was in Haiti, but we had to tell him that his wife had died in a place no one should call a hospital in the 21st century. There was no warm touching—only an exchange across oceans, as if grief itself had become a cold transaction outsourced on a hot July day.

No shock—only the surrender of a man stepping from a plane, knowing there was no ground to catch him.

My mother had died that morning, and in that instant, I knew her companion of 56 years was gone too.

October 20, 2024. He landed—nowhere. No one to catch him.

The call came early from Haiti. I didn’t want to answer, as if the phone might burn my hand. My brother’s name flashed on the screen. “Brother, he’s not moving,” he said, his voice trembling, the words heavy. And in that instant, I knew. His agony pressed into me, unguarded. But for my dad, there was finally relief. Pain had walked out.

No blood on my face, but my eyes burned. How long can a man endure the inevitable, as time hangs around, indifferent?

I hung up and called my sister, then my other brother. In the days that followed, I thought of my siblings, each carrying the weight alone. We hold our father’s memory like people on drifting rafts, piecing together something close to whole.

Decades ago, as I prepared to leave Haiti, my father bestowed upon me fourteen words: “Upon climbing a mountain, when you look back, what you see is the journey.” At the time, I took it as advice. Now, I understand it was his narrative, not mine. That was his climb woven into his everyday life, where integrity came at a price few could afford.

In Haiti, sending a child to school is a wager. He took it. If he hadn’t, who would I be?

My own life has been easier. I’ve had my share of setbacks, but nothing like his. His words remind me of a struggle I never had to face: finding my own way at sixteen.

In the days that followed the news of his passing, I thought not only of my siblings but of the singular cruelty of losing someone in a country where even grief itself is muted. When kidnappings are a daily terror and the right to mourn is stolen, tears compete with blood on the street. Gathering at a burial site becomes an act of courage. Love and loyalty persist, but grief is solitary, confined to whispered prayers and distant screens, whether in Port-au-Prince or Paris.

To lose someone is always a tragedy; being denied the chance to honor them only deepens that loss. In his homeland, love and loyalty stand defiant in a world indifferent to grief. Orwell fictionalized it, but Haiti proves that when a mother’s or father’s memory clings to the heart “because they have died loving us… to a conception of loyalty that was private and unalterable,” a society that cannot protect its dead or its mourners has failed its people at the most basic level.

As for my siblings, how do you learn to miss someone you love? Perhaps it’s simpler to believe that each of us bears a piece of his strength. We are all architects of his memory.

For 1,201 days, he drifted in empty space, waiting. His wife was taken by Covid, disappeared without goodbye.

He was eighty, blind, diabetic. Left like a ship cast out to sea, the radio dead, no one coming. Only my youngest brother stayed with him to the end—the one who asked for nothing, yet to whom I owe everything.

My father’s grandchildren knew he existed, but never truly knew him. If shame has a name, it’s mine.

Healthcare? In Haiti, it’s a phantom. For men like him, it might as well be a grain of sand in the desert.

He cared for others, but in the end, there was no breeze left to cool his face or quench his thirst—only the suffocating weight of night, pressing down beneath the cement roof.

He didn’t endure out of strength; he endured because survival, in a room lined only with pictures of his wife, was a habit that wouldn’t die.

I never saw him pray. He wasn’t a man of symbols or ceremony. He wasn’t an athlete, nor a teller of jokes. If he had faith, it lay in hard work.

Work was his only prayer and hygiene, his daily ritual, as if it alone could shield him from the hardships closing in. And I wonder, in the end, if his God—or any god—could truly be so indifferent to a man whose only creed was honest work. Stripped of his wife, his body eaten by poor health, he was a good soul to the end.

If blindness, melancholy, and all his years of work weren’t enough to spare him, then perhaps mercy itself is a lie, meant only to soothe the comfortable.

Haiti is beyond salvation, and perhaps that’s why it treats its children with such hostility. Life sentences are handed down like numbers on unmarked graves. My father bore his punishment all his life—from boyhood, through fatherhood, and through loss. Perhaps he had hope once, yet released it without resentment.

When my mother died, he slipped out of life with her. From that July 7 day, he was simply waiting. He was too weak to move, watching Haiti vanish as he rehearsed his own end.

Sometimes, surviving is its own form of surrender. For men like Herns Lafalaise, once soldiers, there are no parades, no thanks, no honors, no pension.

Only the waiting.

In the end, he and my mother couldn’t be saved by those who loved them. Haiti stepped in, fading with them, as if it knew no other purpose.

I used to fear dying before my parents, but they took that burden from me. Now, grief beside me, I find a resolve I didn’t expect. His kindness isn’t just his own anymore; it’s in me, in all of us, passed down as we climb our own mountains.

I left his house forty years ago for a country that then seemed a haven. Reality has arrived, leaving us immigrants choking on the residue of a welcome long overstayed. My anger points to Haiti, yet here in America—where my daughters were born—I drift like a ghost through streets that may call my name but will never understand it.

On my morning runs, in passing cars, I see faces cloaked in liberty’s veil, yet void of any soul that might recognize their own hypocrisy.

My father will never see, nor hear, the unraveling of this American Project, a nation lost under the weight of its own disillusionment. Perhaps it is a mercy that Fayo, as he’s known to us, is spared the sight of America’s evaporated dreams. But his smile? It fades into the endless smoke, leaving his grandchildren—daughters of immigrants—in a twilight that holds no promise of dawn.

They will endure.