The Art of Death by Edwidge Danticat

Author:Edwidge Danticat
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-55597-969-0
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 2017-08-25T04:00:00+00:00

Because her life had been cut short, our brief encounters expanded in my mind. Still, I tried to be careful when speaking about her to the other people who’d spent those weeks with us. They all knew her better than I did. Some were sad. Some were angry.

When a reporter who was writing a long article about the murder-suicide called to interview me, I managed to talk only about her brilliant and beautiful boy and how he had always seemed so happy. We all, students and faculty alike, always wanted to hug him. “Everyone was always reaching for him,” I told the reporter, even as I replayed the poet’s words in my mind: It’s not easy. It’s not easy.

Before it was disconnected, I called the cell phone number she’d given me, yearning to hear her voice. Then I worried that whoever ended up in charge of her phone might wonder why I was stalking a dead woman. Rereading her work after she died, I felt as though every one of her poems needed to be read with her final actions in mind. Wasn’t each word an essential clue to solving the mystery of how both she and her son had ended up dead?

It might not have made a difference, but I now wish I’d had this verse from Nikki Giovanni’s “Poets” to share with her:

Poets shouldn’t commit

Suicide

That would leave the world

To those without imaginations

Or hearts

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