What We Lose(29)

Then one day, he has another heart attack. It isn’t a large one, but it is enough to push him over the edge. He dies quickly, before he is able to feel much pain, in a manner totally opposite from my mother’s death. Aminah calls me crying from the hospital and I take the bus down to Philadelphia a few hours later to be with her. We are part of the same grim club.

I begin to feel a mortal disadvantage. Aminah and I are well-off. We both come from the same neighborhood. Our loved ones aren’t likely to die unexpectedly from gun violence, or to perish from diabetes or obesity, those side effects of poverty with which we are familiar. We never became accustomed to worrying that, because of where we lived, like that postal worker on the television, one of our loved ones would go out one day and not come home.

But the numbers are what they are: Out of all the people my age whom I know, one white friend has lost a parent. Out of Aminah’s friends, who are mostly black, four. Aminah is my closest black friend, and each of us has lost a parent. After the death of Aminah’s father, I begin to awaken to those statistics, knowing them to be more real than they have ever been in the past.





Figure 1. Life expectancy at birth, by race and sex and Hispanic origin: United States, 1980–2008



The gap in life expectancy at birth between white persons and black persons persists but has narrowed since 1990.

Life expectancy is a measure often used to gauge the overall health of a population. From 1980 to 2008, life expectancy at birth in the United States increased from 70 years to 76 years for males and from 77 years to 81 years for females. Racial disparities in life expectancy at birth persisted for both males and females in 2008 but had narrowed since 1990. In 2008, Hispanic males and females had longer life expectancy at birth than non-Hispanic white or non-Hispanic black males and females.

SOURCE: CDC/NCHS, Health, United States, 2011, Table 22. Data from the National Vital Statistics System (NVSS).



As soon as I got the news, I called Aminah. She told me about the hospital, the smells, and the stages and the compassionate-but-removed care and it was all too familiar. I heard Aminah’s voice break. Dammit! I said into the phone. M got into the cupboard under the sink. I have to go. I’ll call you right when I’m done, I promise. I hung up the phone. Peter and M were on a walk. Only the television in the living room looked back at me. I told the television that it couldn’t possibly know the pain in my belly, which began to resemble that of losing my mother, not so long ago.





Love and marriage are completely unrelated enterprises. Marriage bears as little resemblance to love as competing in the Olympics does to your afternoon jog. Sometimes I think with regret of how our love might have grown if we hadn’t driven a pregnancy, then a marriage—like two speeding 18-wheelers—straight into it.



Peter tells me he wants to lose weight. I accuse him of fishing. What he really wants is for me to say that he doesn’t need to lose weight. I have noticed the extra ring of skin around his chin, the ring of flesh that hangs over his belt when he bends down. It’s like the man I married has been swallowed by another man who seems embarrassed by this fact. I have put on the extra pound or so, but I don’t let it change the way I walk, the things I wear. As so many self-help books have said, I wear the fat; it doesn’t wear me. I can’t bring myself to say that he still looks the same to me. He doesn’t. “I still love you,” I say, with all the sincerity I can muster.

The next morning, a Sunday, I awaken to the sound of metal on wood; in the backyard, Peter is splitting firewood with the ax that I gave him for Christmas, which had lain unopened for months next to our fireplace. Peter’s Blazers sweatshirt is ringed with sweat under the armpits, his hair wet, his brow glinting, the unmistakable look of fury on his face.



Peter wakes me in the middle of the night. His face hangs over me and he is snarling, baby bottle in one hand, M in the other. He’s shaken me awake, and from the look on his face, it’s taken him a while to do so.

“You take him for fucking once!” he screams as he pulls my hands from under the blankets and wraps the baby in them. I struggle to sit up before the baby can fall. The bottle rolls to the floor and M’s head falls out of my grasp. He starts screaming.

“What are you doing?” I scream. “You’ll hurt him!”

“He’s not made of china,” Peter says, sniffing as he lies back down in bed, pulling the covers over his shoulder and switching off his bedside lamp.

I place M on my lap so that he’s looking at me and mime some funny faces at him. Soon he stops screaming. I hold him in the air so that his feet bounce on my legs, his favorite game. He starts to coo softly.

“I can’t do anything right,” I hear Peter grumble from underneath the covers.

I gather M, his bottle, and his blanket, and move to the armchair in the living room, where we watch the sunrise together. Peter snores from the bedroom.



Peter, M, and I attend the funeral of Aminah’s father, which is held at the small Episcopalian chapel on the college’s campus. The entire administration is there, plus students, and work colleagues of Aminah’s mother, and our fathers’ mutual friends.

We dress M in little black trousers and a navy blue polo shirt. He wrestles out of his tiny socks and shoes and lies sideways in his carrier during the service, but he doesn’t cry and he doesn’t fall out, so we leave him there, cooing and smiling like a drunk uncle about to fall out of his chair.