I have few memories of the last month.
My sister called me on a Monday evening, I was alone, I was rereading the revisions of one of my translations, she told me dad is dead, I said what, she told me he was dead. It was unexpected. I texted a few people. My friend called me, I have no idea what I said, I hung up. I couldn’t leave immediately for Montreal, there were delays in the delivery of my medication, a special and completely unaffordable medication, paid for, my great luck, by my insurance company. job, which is delivered to me from a specialized pharmacy. When it finally arrived, I injected it and the next day, because I was not functional, the side effects were too intense, the only thing I did was write emails to postpone discounts texts or cancel my contribution to projects. I posted on my class forums, sorry, session canceled, my father died. My girlfriend arrived in the meantime from the city where she lives, I found someone to look after the cats, I left for Montreal, the medicine had been too late so despite the injection, because of the emotions and Everything, I was in such an attack of arthritis that I had difficulty going down the stairs. My hands were blue and pink.
I went to my father’s house, to see my brothers, we started cleaning, I spent time with my sister. The days were blurry, dense. I got food poisoning and vomited for 72 hours: the autoimmune disease and shock made me vulnerable to anything. After not teaching for a week and a half, I felt compelled to return to work. I became obsessed with the question, which turned nonstop in my head, how long can an employee be absent from work when her father dies. Around fifteen students wrote me emails to offer me their condolences, sometimes telling me about their own bereavement. People live with so much death. My father died in his bed, all alone, his sons downstairs, in a house where I spent no more than a few hours, in total, maybe fifteen, well, in the last ten years, because it was too difficult. My father was a brilliant man, he died young, as racialized men die young whose bodies have seen too much, suffered too much, worn too much. In the meantime, despite all odds, I became a university professor, and I couldn’t save anything, even though I tried. Everyone knows: you can’t save your father.
When I came back to class, just before I started class, some students gave me a bouquet of flowers, and they told me they would understand if I couldn’t teach. I tried to start the session, my voice cracked, I took a few breaths, and I regained my train of thought. Later, back in my office, the administrator of my department came to bring me a second bouquet of flowers, from students from my other group that I was seeing later in the day. This session focused on Emma’s book, by Marie-Célie Agnant, a novel which speaks of transmission, of testimony, of the role of black women who have to speak for other black women who have disappeared, swallowed up by the system, whose lives and bodies bear the marks of violence of the health system, the legal system and the legal system. Several came to me before class to offer their condolences, others waited until class ended to do so.
I thought a lot about their gestures, their flowers. To their concern, to their empathy. At their age, I know I wouldn’t have done that, giving a teacher flowers because she was sad. I’m happy to appear human enough to them so that they want to be human, too. Their flowers were for me, for my father who they will never know and about whom I have not spoken to them. His name was Joel.