this, because I was doing the best I could, I have a family, Iâm not rich, everybody who comes in contact with this disease knows how costly it is to deal with properly; she in her position as leader of workshops would have known so, how could she just say things without asking about my circumstances, without wondering what taking my brother into my life would mean to me. I said, Oh, I am sure they wouldnât let him in, and I didnât know if what I was saying was true, I was not familiar really with immigration policies and HIV, but what I really meant was, no, I canât do what you are suggestingâtake this strange, careless person into the hard-earned order of my life: my life of children and husband, and they love me and love me again, and I love them. And then she said, Oh yes, racism. And I thought then, with more bitterness than I would have otherwise, how unlucky people are who cannot blame the wrong, disastrous turns life can sometimes take on racism; because the hardness of living, the strange turns in it, the luck of it, the good chance missed of it, the there-but-for-the-grace-of-God part of it is so impossible to accept and it must be, in some way, very nice to have the all too real evil of racism to blame. But it was not racism that made my brother lie dying of an incurable disease in a hospital in the country in which he was born; it was the sheer accident of life, it was his own fault, his not caring about himself and his not being able to carefully weigh and adjust to and accept the to-and-fro of life, the feasting and the famine of life or the times in between, it was the fact that he lived in a place in which a government, made up of people with his own complexion, his own race, was corrupt and did not care whether he or other people like him lived or died.
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I returned to my home safely, and my family was glad to see me. I called my mother. It was the middle of winter and I missed the warm sun and I missed my brother, being with him, being in the presence of his suffering and the feeling that somewhere in it was the possibility of redemption of some kind, though what form it could take I did not know and did not care, only that redemption of some kind would be possible and that we would all emerge from it better in some way and would love each other more. Love always feels much better than not-love, and that is why everybody always talks about love and that is why everybody always wants to have love: because it feels much better, so much better. I missed him sometimes when I took my children to the school bus, sometimes when the snow fell; I talked about him, his life, to my husband, I talked about him to people I knew well and to people I did not know very well. But I did not think I loved him; then, when I was no longer in his presence, I did not think I loved him. Whatever made me talk about him, whatever made me think of him, was not love, just something else, but not love; love being the thing I felt for my family, the one I have now, but not for him, or the people I am from, not love, but a powerful feeling all the same, only not love. My talk was full of pain, it was full of misery, it was full of anger, there was no peace to it, there was much sorrow, but there was no peace to it. How did I feel? I did not know how I felt. I was a combustion of feelings.
My brother grew better and better; the AZT must have worked, he grew stronger, his clogged lungs cleared up, the sores in his throat began to disappear. One day, still in hospital, he rejected the food served to him and the food my mother brought to him, and asked for a serving of Kentucky Fried Chicken, that was the thing he most wanted to eat then. A franchise of this restaurant is in Antigua and it is a fashionable place to go, to be able to afford to buy and eat a meal purchased there. Dr. Ramsey was visiting him at the time he had this craving, and so he drove my mother to the restaurant, where