My Brother by Jamaica Kincaid Page B

bought the plot, most likely by then someone else was buried in it, for a plot was reused if it had not been bought by the family of the dead within seven years’ time. The grave had never had a tombstone; no one in his family had visited his grave since the day of his funeral.
    And so one day during the time when my brother was dying, I insisted that my mother and I pay a visit to the cemetery in which my father had been buried; I had the sentimental notion that perhaps my brother could be buried nearby, as near as possible to his own father. We passed through the door of that Dead House, she and I together, and as we did so, my own complicated and contradictory feelings about the dead came up and lay on the ground before my feet, and each step I took forward they moved forward, too, like a form of shadowing; all my feelings about the dead, determinedly unresolved and beyond me to resolve, lay at my feet, moving forward when I moved forward, again like a form of shadowing. The dead never die, and I now say this—the dead never die—as if it were new, as if no one had ever noticed this before: but death is like that (I can see); it happens every day, but when you see mourners, they behave as if it were so new, this event, dying—someone you love dies—it has never happened before; it is so unexpected, so unfair, unique to you. The dead never die, let me just say it again.
    She and I, I and my mother, walked through the graveyard looking for my father’s, her husband’s, grave, the place he had been buried, the plot, but she could not remember where it might have been. It was not in the place where Anglicans are buried, or the place where Catholics are buried, or the place where Moravians are buried; it might have been in the place where Methodists are buried, for when he was born he had been christened a Methodist, but when he died he was no longer a practicing Methodist (he was no longer a practicing anything, really, by the time he died), and because my mother had no money to pay for a burial, the Methodist minister would not bury him for free. My mother and I walked up and down in the graveyard looking for his grave; she thought it might be near a tree, she remembered a tree, but there were many trees in the graveyard; she stood at many angles trying to remember where it might be, what she could see the moment his coffin was being lowered into the ground, but she could not remember. She did know that he was buried in the part of the cemetery reserved for people who were not Anglicans, not Methodists, not Moravians, not Catholics, just people who belonged to the other Christian sects, only she did not know where. She was wearing a blue skirt, a blue that is the color of seawater, Caribbean seawater when it is seen from far away; I cannot remember the color of her blouse, and this must be why: as we were walking about, going to and fro, looking down at the ground, we could hear lizards scurrying around in the dry brush that surrounded us; the graveyard looked like everything else in a place like that, as soon as you turn your back, everything will collapse into a state of dry decay; she and I stopped walking and we were just standing still when suddenly a lizard came over to my mother and leaped up the front of her skirt and started climbing as if it were bent on scaling all the way up her front. She did not shriek and run away, as I would have done if this had happened to me; instead, she stood there and shook the lizard off her, not in a calm way, not in a frenzy, not with fear, just in her way, she shook the lizard off. As she shook the lizard off, she said that she hoped it wasn’t one of those people, meaning the dead, come to tell her something that would make her want to join them (“Eh-eh, me ah wahrn you, dem people no get me, you know”), and she said this with a laugh. It all happened so quickly that I did not have time to shriek and run away, which is what I feel I want to