My brother and I have always been distant. When I heard he contracted HIV/AIDS I flew down to Antigua to comfort him at his bedside, he looked awful. My mother’s love for her children was brought into light as my brother lay dying in the filthy hospital. In Antigua the medicine was a little scarce; one could only find something that was applicable to many diseases so when my brother wanted medicine for his virus he couldn’t find any. So I used my American citizenship to get my brother a prescription for medicine that would help slow the process and relieve some of the pain. It wasn’t too long before he was healthy enough to leave the hospital, and sadly indulge in some of his vices. His death however was sure to come, and when it did it wasn’t easy. The funeral was cheap and when I visited his body at the morgue all my feelings swelled up. I was upset at my mother and I was even upset at him, the position he put me in. after his death and his funeral I started to reflect on life or rather death and I still kept thinking of my brother. My first experience with death was not at all the same as my experience with my brother’s death. I still felt sad only more so, but why? Death is all around us and has always been happening why every time are we filled with such grief? His death brought such emotion yet I knew him so little, only later did I find out he was homosexual or that he did not love me the same as others in the family.
Gems:
“They must go, but it is so hard, so hard for the people left behind; it’s so hard to see them go, as if it had never happened before, and so hard but you can survive this kind of loss, seeing someone go, seeing them leave you behind; you don’t want to go with them, you only don’t want them to go” (138) Jamaica analyzes the mentality of losing someone, the conflict between the ill and not ill and the conflict with one’s own self.
“They did not know that I had suffered a great loss: someone I did not know I loved had died, someone I did not want to love had died, and that dying had a closed-door quality to it, a falling off the horizon quality” (156) Jamaica is approached by people who have read her work and she feels an almost resentment to these people because they are unaware to how she feels, that someone she wasn’t very close to had suddenly disappeared from the earth, and they were completely unaware.
“People in the place that I am from are quite comfortable with the shame of sex, the inexplicable need for it, an enjoyment of it that seems beyond the ordinary the actual peculiarity; only then when you die from it, sex, does the shame become, well, shame” (184) interesting that the consequence of this action which is apparently very accepted in Antigua is shameful. Perhaps because it is known but very scary, a taboo subject that no one really likes to bring up, kind of like that your parents had to have sex for you to be brought into this world.
Gems:
“They must go, but it is so hard, so hard for the people left behind; it’s so hard to see them go, as if it had never happened before, and so hard but you can survive this kind of loss, seeing someone go, seeing them leave you behind; you don’t want to go with them, you only don’t want them to go” (138) Jamaica analyzes the mentality of losing someone, the conflict between the ill and not ill and the conflict with one’s own self.
“They did not know that I had suffered a great loss: someone I did not know I loved had died, someone I did not want to love had died, and that dying had a closed-door quality to it, a falling off the horizon quality” (156) Jamaica is approached by people who have read her work and she feels an almost resentment to these people because they are unaware to how she feels, that someone she wasn’t very close to had suddenly disappeared from the earth, and they were completely unaware.
“People in the place that I am from are quite comfortable with the shame of sex, the inexplicable need for it, an enjoyment of it that seems beyond the ordinary the actual peculiarity; only then when you die from it, sex, does the shame become, well, shame” (184) interesting that the consequence of this action which is apparently very accepted in Antigua is shameful. Perhaps because it is known but very scary, a taboo subject that no one really likes to bring up, kind of like that your parents had to have sex for you to be brought into this world.
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