This story begins with a photograph, as most of my memories do. This one belongs not to me but to the times, these times.

The photograph was taken in Bergamo, Italy, at the very beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic. In the middle of the frame is a casket. To its left, about six feet away, stands a priest. To its right stands a man, at the same distance, his head down, clad in mourning black. He wears dark sunglasses and a blue surgical mask, arms clasped against his chest. In the casket between them is the body of the man’s mother, or perhaps her ashes. This is her funeral. There will be no large gathering of family or familiars. The son was not with her when she died, could not be present.

Taken by Italian photographer Piero Cruciatti, who carefully documented the ravages of Covid-19 in his native Italy, the photograph appeared the world over through Getty Images, going viral via news outlets and on Twitter. That is how I came across it. By mid-March 2020, when this photograph began to circulate, Italy was the hardest hit city in Europe. As the world watched, the country implemented sobering protocols to prevent further infections, including barring family members from the bedsides of patients who were dying from Covid-19. Large funeral gatherings were banned.

More images like this were to come, of course, but this one has stayed with me. It made me think of my own mother’s death, only a year earlier. Her decline from double pneumonia resembled the plight of those with severe Covid-19, with an important difference: I was there by her side as she took her dying breath. That image from Italy made me think of the difference a year can make — of how lucky I was, even on that most unlucky of days. Because while the pandemic made distance mourning a novel sadness for many, for immigrants and refugees, the inability to be present when our loved ones die is a familiar kind of sorrow.

My mother, newly emigrated from Haiti to France, learned her own mother had died a few weeks after her mother’s passing on January 6, 1962. At the time, she was anticipating a visit from her mother, my grandmother. The trip to visit my mother in Paris would have been the first time my grandmother would venture out of Haiti, and the first time she would board an airplane. The idea of plane travel was so foreign to my grandmother that she was still writing letters to my mother that mentioned “the boat” — as it was common, even after transatlantic flights were available, for Caribbean travelers to book passage on passenger and freight ships, which were time-consuming and less convenient, but cheaper. My grandmother, a seamstress, did not have much money, and my mother sent part of each of her paychecks, earned working as an accountant, to cover the fare.

The time of my grandmother’s voyage was nearing when a large manila envelope arrived for my mother at the maid’s room she had rented on a posh street in the 7th arrondissement, close to her place of work. When my mother opened the envelope, she saw a photograph of my grandmother inside an open casket. The picture was accompanied by letters from my mother’s older sister and family friends who had been present in my grandmother’s last moments and had witnessed the death. As my mother would tell me years later, while the letters were intended to soften the blow, they instead only compounded the pain of absence, the disarray of having to replace expectation with grief. The letters explained that my grandmother had been heartbroken by my mother’s departure, and that after fretting for days about being short the needed funds for travel, she died of a heart attack on the day of Epiphany in the Catholic calendar. For my mother in 1962, like that son in Bergamo just last year, there would be no in-person goodbyes, only a belated farewell.

My mother died on January 5, 2019, in a hospital room that had seen better days. It was clean, as most Canadian hospital rooms are, but still, I could see the cheap aluminum blinds that hung sideways from the window, the pulley meant to raise and lower them, broken. The broken blinds meant that there was no way to control daylight; occupants of this room were deemed not to need such controls. This is what told me it was a room designated for the dying. It was where my mother lay during her last hours, as her lungs shut down, too weak to fight any virus, already infected by a condition that resembles COPD and is known as MAI or MAC — put simply, a condition that resembles but is not tuberculosis, for which she was awaiting treatment promised but never received, for over six months. She had also asked for but never received supplementary oxygen she could have taken at home to relieve her labored breathing. Instead, she essentially drowned in lungs overfilled with fluids while her brain shut down, overwhelmed with carbon dioxide her lungs could no longer clear. In the year since her death, as I read of COVID-19 patients on ventilators, unable to breathe on their own, dying alone, I think of her.

Unlike so many COVID-19 patients, and others in hospitals for other reasons, dying in isolation due to health and safety protocols, my mother did not die alone. Unlike her, I did not have to learn of my mother’s passing via airmail, nor did I have to wonder how or when she died, or what it was like. I was there.

The physician looking after her in her final days had predicted, as she slipped into a carbon dioxide coma, that she would expire in the mid-evening of the next day. Once I had this information, a feeling of calm overtook me. As I walked in the hospital on my own that afternoon, there was a moment when I felt my mother’s presence so strongly that it was as if she was standing next to me, or wafting through me.

The next day, waiting by her bedside as the afternoon turned into night, her breathing grew labored. As the night grew longer, I saw that one of her eyes was weeping and got a wet cloth from the bathroom to wipe her face. My father decided to sing one of her favorite songs, a Latin version of Ave Maria. I joined him and as the intake between my mother’s breaths grew longer, we assured her that she could go, that we loved her, that we would be all right. It felt like she was listening. Her final breath sounded like a deep, relieved sigh.

A few years prior, in the summer of 2016, my parents accompanied me to Paris where I was attending a conference about James Baldwin. My Uncle Félix, who had relocated from Haiti to France for the last of his retirement years, was hospitalized on the outskirts of the city: he had a cancer and, with treatment, was expected to live somewhat longer, but he didn’t have the desire to hold on. We thought a visit might cheer him up. During one visit, as I sat nearby, my mother, sitting bedside, told her brother that he needed to make more of an effort. He cackled and responded, “I’d like to see you in this bed in my place.” It was a joke, but only weeks later, back in Canada, my mother was placed in a medically induced coma after her bowel burst unexpectedly, an undetected tumor having descended from her upper colon and obstructed her intestines.

Months later, in rehabilitation, she would laugh wryly with me, remind me of that moment with her brother. By then, there were other things that had not gone as expected: Félix had died while my mother was still in ICU, and two days after that, their brother suffered sudden, terminal heart failure. Toggling as she was between life and death, no one in my immediate family was able to attend those wakes — one held in Paris, the other in Florida. We received the news by telephone, sent condolence cards, delayed telling my mother until she was more lucid. By then, she already sensed that her brothers were gone because we had stopped relaying their greetings and news.

The weekend my mother lost her brothers, the copies of pictures I had taped up on her walls to help my mother with the disorientation of being in the ICU, as had been recommended by a seasoned ICU nurse — photos of loved ones, of our recent trip to Paris — fell down from the wall to the floor. All of them, but one: a photograph of her mother as an older woman, a few years before she had died. That was the only one my mother wanted to remain in her sight, so she could see her every day.

My mother’s death, two-and-a-half years after that, was not entirely unexpected. She had outwitted death several times since the onset of this last protracted battle. Certainly, it was not as unexpected as the three hundred thousand deaths that occurred within forty-five seconds on January 12, 2010, at 4:54 pm EST, just as the sun was about to set — when a magnitude 7.0 earthquake rocked the capital of Port-au-Prince, the place of my mother’s birth and mine, bringing modest shanty-town homes tumbling down from their mountain perches, alongside national symbols like the Notre Dame Cathedral, the national palace, and most houses of parliament sitting alongside it. It was not as unexpected as the sudden loss of safe dwelling would be to the close to two million Haitians left without electricity and potable water, if they’d had either in the first place, if they’d had some place to dwell.

At the time of my mother’s rushed, emergency surgery, I was still working out the terms of collective and personal grieving for the cataclysm that had seen my home country torn down from what remained of a fragile post-colonial infrastructure that was always already on the verge of collapse. I was still working out what could be said of and for the dead, whom so many had had to bury, in haste, in mass graves on the outskirts of town, many others never to be found and properly — or should I say, ceremoniously — laid to rest. In the Caribbean, it is said that if a spirit is not laid to rest properly after a bad death — an accidental or even an intended death — that that spirit will continue to walk the earth to haunt the living. Only appeasement, by ritual or offering, can free that spirit, free the living from the haunting. After the earthquake, the “proper” of it all had to be reconfigured, reclad, redefined, as Haitians were seen dancing in the streets, dressed in white, in the weeks of the aftermath, as if celebrating. But they were mourning. They danced to lay the dead to rest.

A decade later — the first three years of which I spent giving talks on the earthquake’s aftereffects on the most vulnerable classes of Haitians, especially women and children, and the next seven working on a novel that told the story of the earthquake through the lives of three intertwined families — when the pandemic began, my mother had been gone for just a little over a year. I was still working out how to live in the shadow of her absence, just as I had learned to live with all that had been lost of our homeland and that we would never see again, re-learning the rituals of dancing the dead to rest whether by movement or by metaphor.

There is a photograph I took of my mother, propped up on her walking cane, next to the rotisserie where she used to buy fully cooked chickens (she had never learned to cook) opposite the apartment building where she had lived in Paris, the same apartment where she had received that envelope with the picture of her mother in the casket. It was one of the photographs I had taped to her ICU walls those early days when we awaited her coming out of the coma. When I think of it, I remember our final day in Paris, on that trip to visit her brother, only days before my family’s world, as we knew it then, was to come to an irrevocable end. After a long afternoon by her brother’s bedside, my mother decided that we should hop on a bus tour of the city, though we were all exhausted and it was raining.

My mother listened enraptured through her earphones to the guide’s descriptions of the city she had loved for so much of her life. She followed the map as the bus passed each landmark, our windows streaked with raindrops, remarking as we glimpsed the sullen statues on the Trocadero how she had not seen these places in over fifty years, and had thought she would never see them in person again. The photographs from that trip were lost in the frenzied days and weeks that turned into months after my mother’s first operation, but I like to remember her this way: alive to the possibility of new encounters and renewal, alive to the possibility of what might lay, unseen, just around the corner.

The day my mother was admitted to the hospital for the last time was New Year’s Eve. Still she asked repeatedly for the date, aware that the anniversary of her mother’s passing was near. Moved from emergency to another floor within a day or two by a Guyanese internist who believed that my mother still had some fight in her, my mother contemplated her mortality. “Either I’ll make it past that date, or I’ll be seeing my mother again,” she said. My mother passed away on the eve of the anniversary of her mother’s death, January 5th, 2019, almost fifty-seven years to the day.

It has been some comfort to me that despite being twice displaced from the country of my birth, and living in a country different from her last resting place, I was able to be there for my mother’s last breath as she had been there for my first — that she died what, in the Caribbean, we would call a “good death,” surrounded by love even if not by all her loved ones, dispersed as we all are. For them, and for her, these words are my wake, dancing my dead to sleep.