Writers of Color 50 Books Challenge

Brother, I'm Dying was one of the most beautiful and wrenching books I read the last time I did the 50 books challenge, so when my writing teacher recommended Danticat's The Art of Death I fell upon it with glad cries.

Now that my father and mother and many other people I love have died, I want to both better understand death and offload my fear of it, and I believe reading and writing can help.

Like Danticat (and Alexander Hamilton), I spent the first months of adult orphanhood burying myself in books. Danticat and I read a lot of the same bereavement classics: Lewis's A Grief Observed, de Beauvoir's A Very Easy Death. When she discusses her reading, she's a little dry and academic. That distance vanishes when she dives into her particular and visceral experience of losing her mother.

It is, I learned over the course of my mother’s gradual decline, impossible to watch someone you love die and not feel the encroaching brush of death upon yourself. It’s as if death had entered the room, paused, then moved past you before laying its hands on your loved one.

Maybe not the place to start with Danticat, but a moving essay nonetheless.