And we’re going to meet our death one day
Going to meet our death one day
Going to judgment after a while
We got to greet death with a smile
Oh we got to meet our death one day
— Blind Willie McTell
The first time I saw Daijha Brown, she was sitting with three other
students at a rectangular, wooden table in the back of a loud classroom,
wearing a pink T-shirt and denim shorts, with a ponytail sprouting from
the side of her head. It was the beginning of the school year in 2004,
and I was starting as a student-teacher at the Brooklyn School for
Collaborative Studies, a middle school on the border of Carroll Gardens
and Red Hook. Eighth graders arrive in many different sizes, but Daijha
stuck out as especially miniature, a cute little kid less than five feet
tall, who was not in any way teen-aged.
A few days later, the class was walking to the library at Grand Army
Plaza, and I was with Daijha and another girl in the back of the line.
“She has cystic fibrosis, so you better be nice to her,” the girl said,
an arm draped protectively around Daijha’s shoulder. I knew enough about
the disease to understand it was a death sentence and, at 23 years old,
it hit me like a sucker punch. Everyone has that moment when they wake
up to mortality as more than an abstraction, and this was mine. Daijha
just smiled and shrugged. We kept walking, and soon were chatting about
something else.
The following year, we both moved over to the adjoining Brooklyn
Collaborative High School — Daijha, to begin her freshman year, and I,
now a rookie teacher. I worked with Daijha during that school year and
the following one, and didn’t see her again after I left teaching in
2007. Sometime later, she friended me on Facebook, and I would see
occasional posts, nothing remarkable, and nothing that indicated that
the end was near. Then, on the morning of Feb. 8 of this year, people
started writing on her wall that she had died at age 24.
Considering how long it had been since I had seen her, the news hit me
unexpectedly hard. Sitting at my kitchen table, I called my wife at work
and started sobbing, so hard I was gasping for air.
For more than half a year, now, I’ve been reflecting on the impact she
had on me, and speaking with people who knew her better. Daijha Brown
wasn’t a celebrity or a star athlete or a newsmaker, or anyone whose
name you’d likely ever hear. She was just a girl from Brooklyn who moved
people by living and dying with quiet grace.
***
Four months after Daijha passed, I visit the apartment in the sprawling
Starrett City complex in East New York, where Daijha lived with her
mother, Teisha Russell. Her father, Kevin Brown, floated in and out of
their lives and hadn’t lived with them since Daijha was 10.
Sitting opposite me on a couch in her living room, Russell, 48,
recounts the final weeks and months of her daughter’s life. She admits
that even she didn’t realize the imminence of her daughter’s death, even
as the trips to NYU Langone Medical Center in Manhattan became more
frequent.
“I was like, I wonder why you keep getting sick,” says Russell, who was
as much a best friend to Daijha as her parent. “I think she knew
something. She knew her body better than anybody.”
Eventually, Daijha started coughing up blood. During one of her
hospital stays, doctors found a malformation in her hip, where the veins
had become gnarled and intertwined. That made it painful to walk, so
they ventured a procedure to fix it, and the surgery caused a lung to
collapse. Her infections were increasingly resistant to antibiotics, and
she had developed a bacteria that made her ineligible for a lung
transplant.
By the second week of January, Daijha’s heart rate had accelerated to
200 beats per minute, more than double what it was supposed to be. This
was usually a sign of infection.
On Jan. 12, Daijha, feverish, weak and coughing, said that she needed
to go to the hospital immediately. Over the next few weeks, doctors gave
her Motrin and aspirin, and her fever would actually rise, from 101 to
102 and beyond — the first time in her life that the medication failed
to knock her temperature down.
Without saying exactly what was happening, the hospital staff began
dropping hints. At some point, the phrase “pain management” became a
common refrain, and the chaplain began appearing.
Still, Daijha was texting and exchanging Facebook messages with her
friends and relatives as always, with the same buoyant and cheerful tone
they had always known.
“Love you Ariel,” she typed to Ariel Jackson on one of her final days,
and her high school friend later told me that she assumed that this
hospital stay was no different than countless others.
By Friday, Feb. 5, Russell had been sleeping by her daughter’s side for
weeks. At one point, she told Daijha that she was going to the
bathroom, and would be right back.
“All right,” Daijha said, grinning. “Well, I’ll be right here.”
Russell smiled and rolled her eyes. This kid, hooked up to machines and unable to move, was still joking around.
When other family friends spoke with Daijha over those days, she
whispered that she worried not about herself, but her mom, and whether
Russell would be able to manage on her own. On Saturday, doctors said
that the lung infection wasn’t clearing, so they would need to sedate
and intubate her. Russell’s sister arrived for support, and Daijha said,
“I’m glad she’s here, because you don’t have to be by yourself, because
you’re always by yourself.”
“I love you,” Russell told Daijha as she was about to go under.
“I love you, and I know y’all love me,” Daijha answered, before uttering her final words. “But God loves me best.”
God loves me best . Where did she get that line? Daijha was a
religious person, but this was nothing she had ever said before, and it
will stay with Russell forever. If anyone had the right to curse God and
die, it was 24-year-old Daijha Brown. But she said, “God loves me
best.” She was terminal from the moment she was born — but you know
what? So are we all. Daijha just knew how to handle it.
Through Sunday and into Monday, as Daijha remained sedated, doctors
tried to suction the mucus from her lungs, but it was too thick. Russell
would talk to her, read the Bible to her, greet her with a cheery, “Hi
Daijha!”
On Monday, the doctors advised her to gather the family. Russell was
praying by her daughter’s side, and then stopped. At the end, she was
just talking:
God, I want her to be here. I don’t want her to go. But I don’t want
to be selfish either. When she’s here she goes through so much. I have
watched her go through so much in her life since she was born.
Then she paused, inhaled, and said, “God, your will be done.”
And that was it. Russell went downstairs to meet some family, rode the
elevator back up, and was putting on her gown to re-enter the room when
the doctor came out. “She passed,” he said.
“I just hugged her and I kissed her,” her mother says. “I was there for
hours, and by the time I got ready to leave she was stiffening already.
What do they say? Rigor mortis sets in? She was stiff on one side.”
***
Daijha’s body was afflicted, but the disease did not touch her spirit.
Any time adults tried to limit her because of her illness, even when she
was a little girl, she refused. “I can do anything!” she would say. “I
can do anything everyone would do!” In high school, she began plotting
an acting career, even as friends found it hard to imagine her shaking
off shyness and fatigue to get on stage.
She convinced her mother to enroll her at Barbizon, an international
acting and modeling school. The classes were held at a hotel in midtown
Manhattan, led by an instructor named Atonia Pettiford. At the end of
the semester, Daijha performed at a showcase in front of 900 people, and
bested 300 others by winning a monologue competition.
“She put intensity into her monologue performance, and she wowed
people,” Pettiford told me. “Every once in awhile, I’ll have a student
whose performances are so” — Pettiford paused and searched for the right
words — “there are some that already have something, and that’s what
she had.”
Pettiford connected Daijha with casting directors, and she contacted
them with the same determination that she once brought to her homework.
She mailed out headshots, hustled to auditions and accepted any
background work she could get. Within a year or two, she was on some
exciting sets, playing a college student on “Law and Order: SVU” and
finding work as an extra on CBS’ “Blue Bloods”, and in a Netflix movie
called “Run.” She can be seen at the 2:14 mark in Mariah Carey’s 2012
music video “Triumphant,” jumping and smiling behind the singer.
Like many others, Pettiford underestimated the impact of Daijha’s
cystic fibrosis, because she acted as if it was no big deal. There were
times when she would cough, and have to go offstage and sit down until
it passed, but no one knew that more than an hour of physical therapy
greeted her at home every evening — wearing a vibrating vest to loosen
the mucus, exercising to build stamina and being pounded on the back by a
nurse, cupping her hand and banging for 15 minutes on the right side,
15 minutes on the left.
And then there were the hospital stays, when Daijha would have to drop
out of the scene altogether, just as her career was beginning to gain
some momentum. But even those did not stop her from performing, or from
finding ways to help others. Her longtime physician, Dr. Robert Giusti,
enlisted Daijha to teach medical students how to work with CF patients.
It turned out that she was a natural, of course, and had a real impact.
“She would stand up in front of groups, and give feedback about the
kinds of things that young people in the hospital experience from young
doctors,” Giusti says. “Explaining to them what hurts, and how to
approach doing interventions like blood tests … and other things like
that, which can be excessive and painful for patients. She really
sensitized them to what a patient experiences.”
***
Even though I’d never heard any of this, the stories reflected the
Daijha I had known as a teenager. She and her friends at Brooklyn
Collaborative High School did hang out with kids who got into real
trouble, but that was virtually impossible to avoid. We had Bloods and
Crips; a boy who was arrested at age 15 for selling crack; another kid
who told me he pistol-whipped a man in the face, a girl who smuggled a
handgun into my classroom in her purse. The school itself was mostly
warm and peaceful, but many of the kids dragged heavy baggage through
its doors. Daijha was wise and mature, and the group of girls who
clustered around her stood out in their willingness to stay late and
seek extra homework help. Then, they might go and blow off some steam: a
few wine coolers and cigarettes, but only after the school work was
done. Her mother didn’t like it, but she knew that there were worse
problems in the neighborhood, and figured that Daijha needed some kind
of escape.
Daijha at an acting showcase, in an undated photo.
(Courtesy Teisha Russell)
Daijha dated a little bit, her friends later told me, but there was
never a serious, long-term relationship. That would have been hard, when
she was always in and out of the hospital.
For months at a time, her life could seem relatively normal, even with
the need for constant medication and physical therapy. But then the
fevers would come, and breathing would grow difficult. She would up her
prescriptions, drink hot tea and rest, but end up in the hospital
anyway.
Her condition was worse than the typical CF patient, whose median life
expectancy is 37 years. “Even when I met her at age 6, she already had a
significant amount of lung disease,” said Giusti, who treated Daijha at
the now-defunct Long Island College Hospital in downtown Brooklyn, and
later at the NYU Langone Medical Center. “She ... developed a fungus in
her lungs and had an allergic reaction to that, and that was causing
some scar tissue in her lungs.”
Daijha remained an excellent student, smart and engaged when she was
able to attend. When she was in 10th grade, she missed more time, and
needed to be excused from several projects. During this time, I was
preparing to make changes in my own life. Three years as a teacher had
helped me to mature, as well, and led me to realize that I wanted to
become a writer. As I prepared to leave, Daijha’s condition seemed to be
worsening. Some days, she would need to keep her head down on the desk,
and I would gently tap her shoulder to signal when it was time to go to
the next class. She’d rub her eyes, thank me and shuffle out of the
room, coughing.
As a teenager, Daijha took acting and modeling classes.
(Courtesy Teisha Russell)
On my last day, she was the only student who thought to bring me a
gift. Walking in the hallway after dismissal, I felt a tap on my back,
and turned around to see Daijha holding a green, plastic-bound planner
book. Inside
“I figured you’d need this to keep organized in graduate school,” she
said, looking up at me with those big, sweet eyes. I thanked her, and
was able to stay composed for the moment. Later that afternoon, thinking
back on it while walking in the neighborhood, I collapsed onto a random
stoop, and sobbed for a long time.
***
That goodbye stayed with me, and I thought of her often. I still keep
the planner on a shelf in my office, with blank pages covering the days
between June 2007 and December 2008. The only writing in the book is
under “B” in the contacts, where she thought to provide her address,
phone number and email, though I never used them. Life flies by.
Daijha (R) and her close friend Ariel Jackson at the prom, 2009.
(Courtesy Ariel Jackson)
The next time I saw her, she was laying in front of an alter at the
Allen A.M.E. Church in Jamaica, Queens, on a bitter cold February
morning. More than 300 people packed the room, and midway through the
service I discovered a kind of comfort and peace that had eluded me
since learning, all those years ago, about Daijha’s struggle.
As a gospel singer pounded out a slow but intense hymn on an electric
keyboard, and two women in a pew in front of me offered a steady stream
of “that’s right” and “praise Jesus,” Daijha seemed to rise from the
casket and look down from the rafters. Believe me or not, but it felt
like she was smiling. Looking back, I have come to see it as a coda to
the first time I heard about Daijha’s illness, when I was young enough
to be deflated by the bleakness of her fate. Everything I learned after
that showed me that I was focusing on the wrong aspect, though I still
didn’t have a way to put it in perspective. But if this moment of
benevolence was possible, perhaps death wasn’t as dark as I’d thought.
Back in the living room, Teisha Russell tells me I wasn’t the only one who felt Daijha’s presence on the day of the funeral.
“After I went home I dreamt, and it was so amazing,” she tells me,
wiping tears from her cheeks with an open palm. “I saw this square. It
was like a box. Like a picture, like a TV screen. And it was a figure
that was coming into focus. But I didn’t know at first what it was. And
then as clear as the day it came up, and it was her face, and she was
smiling. And then I woke up.
She pauses, sniffles, breathes. “It was just so amazing, the peace that
came over me,” she says. “I couldn’t believe the peace.”
No comments:
Post a Comment