Memoir Writing Class First Assignment: List places to which you have traveled, things you want to let go, activities where you feel the greatest joy and questions you often ask yourself. Connect them in a 2-3 page narrative using dialogue.
I have become a tourist in my own country, Jamaica, traveling with an American passport, which
elicit derision or envy from the immigration officers who look at me side-eyed as they ask, ‘How long are you staying?”
“Ah week,” in an accent which I haven’t lost over the forty years in my adopted country, but it’s
more pronounced when I speak with fellow Jamaicans.
The immigration officer, invariably, is not impressed. I can hear them thinking, “How as a true
Jamaican, you allow yourself to have an American passport.” or “Is how you soh lucky fi have American
citizenship in the land of milk and honey.” I want to tell them I haven’t yet tasted that milk or honey.
“Where yuh staying?” as if I hadn’t already entered it on the immigration papers.
“Palladium,” “Jewel of the Sea,” “Rose Hall,” giving the name of any of the hotels I would be
staying in as I visit the country of my birth. I don’t like it. I don’t like how it makes me feel each time I
go back. I know it’s my imagination and guilt seeing and hearing things I believe are being said or not,
especially with the immigration officers.
Strange how you learn so much about your country as a visitor. You explore more. You see
more. You realize just how special and beautiful the place you used to call home, still call home, is.
Take my mother for example. At age seventy-eight, she visited Dunns River Falls for the first time and
with arms in the air to the azure laden, sunlit, cloudless heavens, she proclaimed, “I can die now.”
This is the country that birth and bred me. It educated me, fed me, sunned me, gave me the
best twenty-four years. It was/is my safe space. It is where I found pure perfect love.
When I missed my period in January of 1978, I felt a joy I couldn’t explain or understand, not
having planned the pregnancy. I started counting up. I told my sister, “I am one day pregnant.”
“Gal, who knows they are one day pregnant! Yuh too fool fool”
“I do. You watch an see.”
Next day, “I am two days pregnant,” and so it continued as I proclaimed to any and everyone
who would listen, even though no one believed because I didn’t start showing until my sixth month.
I had nine months of bliss, not one moment of morning sickness. I did have cravings for young,
green, sour plums which hung outside my window, and everything cooked in coconut. Everything!
When I delivered in September and they laid the baby on my chest, my heart swelled, I felt a love so
pure from the pit of my stomach, the top of my head, the tip of my toes. My heart. And when I took her
home, I kept her on my lap for most days and most of the day, her head on my knees with my legs raised
so I could stare upon her face in wonder.
It’s that child, now grown woman. with no medical training, who would come to be my savior,
when she, two hundred and twenty-five miles away, nursed me back to health when I got COVID - this
child who had chosen friends over me as early as age 10; this woman child whose calls to me got less
and less, one sided actually; the one whose trips “home” grew far and few in between; the one who was
no longer my plus one for vacations. We weren’t estranged, far from it, however, I felt a distance, and
questioned in my mind her love for me and wondered if she even liked me.
March 2020 and COVID changed all that.
“What’s wrong?” she had called me on that fateful morning on March 16, 2020. “You don’t
sound good.”
“I don’t feel well. I was shaking and shivering all night,” in a voice not mine, low and guttural.
“What’s your temperature?"
“I don’t know.”
“Go take it.”
“I can’t, I can’t get up. I am so weak.”
“Get up and go take it.”
“Ah.” breathing heavily.
“Ma! Get up! Get up!”
And this happened every three to four hours every day for the next eleven days.
“I am going to come get you,” she said on day two. By then we had diagnosed that it was the corona virus, later to be identified as COVID. My doctor wouldn't/couldn't see me. I couldn't get tested. By this time, almost everything was shut down in New York. Hospitals were overrun with COVID afflicted patients. In New Rochelle, five miles from where I lived, was the epicenter. From one man who contracted the virus, it spread like wildfire in a New Rochelle community.
“New Rochelle is too close for comfort. You need to get to a hospital.”
“No baby, you can’t put yourself at risk to come get me.”
After much convincing, she settled on second best, mailing me Tylenol, and supplements including Zinc and Elderberry, coconut
water, a jigsaw puzzle for me to work on the few hours I wasn’t in bed. She had me make an elixir
based on our Jamaican “cure-all,” rum, honey, lemon. When my temperature spiked and
the lethargy heightened and I refused, not really refused, but couldn’t, she forced me to get up. I
started to keep the Tylenol, water and the thermometer in the bed, along with pen and paper. I had to
record my temperature so that when she called, I could give it to her. She saved me. I lived because she loved me and
loved me hard.
The one thing she hasn’t been able to love away, is my fear. COVID has given me a fear that
hasn’t debilitated me totally, but has come close enough to it. It has an unhealthy grip on me. It took
me the better part of a year to go out to a restaurant, and just as I was about to let COVID lose its grip,
Delta came, then Omicron, and I am back to living hermit-like. I had just gotten over long-COVID which
had impacted my breathing. How does one unpack this deep fear of being re-infected? I fear a repeat of
the experience of being the sickest I have ever been in life. I know that if I ever get COVID again, I am
going to have phantom symptoms, which the fear will generate. I need to let go of fear.
I want to go to
my happy place, my place of comfort, my safe space.
My daughter is ready to go with me. Sadly, that will be no time soon.
