Nineteen years ago, when my daughter Mira was born, my mother, a seamstress, gave me a scarf-length piece of white linen that she’d cut from the fabric she was using to make herself a dress. Calling it a bando—typically a headband in Haitian Creole (bandeau in French)—she wrapped it around my belly to help me regain my posture and reshape my waist. Like many postpartum rituals, including forty days of rest and special leaf baths and teas, this custom was as old as time, she told me. There were trendier belly bands and wraps available online, but I opted for hers because, as she helped me bind and unbind it, I felt that I was being tied to the women in my family, those who had come before and those yet to come. We even joked about my one day having to convince my own daughter that this was something all new mothers had to do.
“There will probably be faster ways to do this in the future,” she’d say.
“There already is one,” I’d say. “It’s called plastic surgery.”
This March, when my brother-in-law died, at fifty-six, I saw his eighty-nine-year-old mother include belly binding as part of her mourning practice. Between the showers that she had to force herself to take, she wrapped a head scarf around her abdomen, which, in her old age, was permanently protruding. Sometimes she needed help tightening it, and, at her request, I would fasten the scarf over the spot where she believed her uterus to be. Other times, we fastened it around her pelvis, closer to the birth canal. For the first time in decades, she said, she was feeling tranche, visceral labor pains, as though her son were being born again. Because she could not fully express her grief in a New York City apartment, at least not in the traditional ways—by wailing or allowing her body to completely contort in the manner we call kriz (convulsions)—she groaned through her body’s memory of pre-labor, crowning, and the final release of birth. She even moaned in her sleep, grunts like the ones I remember emitting during my daughters’ births. After a few weeks, she moved the scarf to her head, using it to cradle her face and occasionally as a mourning veil.
What we wear in both joy and grief can amplify our emotions, serving as an extension of our feelings. Mourning attire is much more than fabric; it is a way of expressing ourselves to those around us and perhaps even to the dead. Funerals, where love and heartbreak are simultaneously on display, are a kind of runway on which we honor our missing loved ones. At a couple of funerals I recently attended in the Haitian diaspora, mourners wore the deceased’s favorite colors, even though those colors were far from the traditional sombre hues. At some homegoing services, people wear memorial T-shirts emblazoned with photographs of the dead that note the span of years between the loved one’s sunrise and sunset.
Recently, a fifteen-year-old girl whom my younger daughter, Leila, knew briefly in middle school died in a tragic accident. It was the first time that someone my daughter knew who was her age had died. After hearing the news, Leila slept in a keepsake sweatshirt that the young woman had given to her guests at a party. After my mother died, I wore many of the black blouses she had worn to mourn her mother, which made me feel as though both of them were with me. Focussing on something touchable, lasting yet still fragile, like clothes, while mourning has allowed me to imagine grief as potentially sheddable one day. This is, of course, not entirely true, but I have found it momentarily comforting, which is perhaps the most one can hope for during the early and most uncertain stages of mourning. I did not, however, wear any of the many flowered skirts that my mother had made, sometimes in as little as five minutes, using pillowcases, elastic, hemming tape, and a pair of scissors. My distaste for those skirts was a running joke between us: I do have my limits.
In “A Grief Observed,” a meditation on bereavement, the writer C. S. Lewis described his wife’s death from cancer as a kind of shroud over his world. “Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything,” he writes. Then, correcting himself, he adds, “But no, that is not quite accurate. There is one place where her absence comes locally home to me, and it is a place I can’t avoid. I mean my own body.” This is perhaps why our bodies require so much cradling in grief. Just as many people call out for their mothers in moments of sorrow and distress, in Haitian Creole we might be urged to brace ourselves for a catastrophic disaster—whether a hurricane or an imminent invasion—with this solemn piece of advice: Manman pitit mare vant nou. Mothers, bind your bellies. ♦