We Must Remember for There Will Be an Afterwards

My mother lives overlooking the ocean on a hill in Portland, Maine in a small two-bedroom house my grandparents bought decades and decades ago, when the neighborhood was a tough gritty working-class hill called Munjoy Hill. Now it is mostly posh, and the property taxes are driving the last working people who lived there for decades. My parents live far away from me. There are seven hundred miles between us. We may as well live in different nations. I live in a small working class city, one on a great lake. I rarely get to see my parents as none of us are rich and can afford to travel.  I can’t remember the last time I had a vacation. I rarely can take time off for work in a country when one must work so hard to eat.  The overtime and labor takes so much out of us.  My mother and father are close to eighty. Now I am an old man with an older mother and father.

I thought of distance as I watched the faceless men of this regime round up immigrants and haul them away in unmarked vans to unmarked places. And how so many of them had mothers and cousins in villages much closer than I am to my parents, some only the distance of a state and across a barbed wire fence. What is a border, but something made by men who hate the other? Those mothers who may never see their daughters taken to the camps. Or will they be returned to places of murder they fought hard to leave.

My mother calls me when she can, and I call her. We talk of cousins, and the property taxes, how city council is full of fools, and new books she’s read, maybe a foreign novel the librarian found for her, always of the weather, too hot, too cold, too muggy. And we talk about the disappeared.

My daughter’s girlfriend had a friend, thirteen years old, who self-deported. She was a small Mexican girl who had lived here for a decade. Her parents pulled her out of school and loaded up their truck and drove away. She is lucky. They had relatives they could return to and not be sent to the camps. Now she texts from the Northwest border of Mexico to say she is ok. She says her Spanish is terrible as her parents would not let her speak it. My daughter keeps a photo of her friend on her phone. 

I think of the photos immigrants keep, the ones from Dublin, or Lagos, or Port O Prince. I think of the photos my friend Garry growing up had of Haiti all around the house. Black framed photos of his father dressed in white pants and shirt high on a hill overlooking the sea.

They take everything from us the men with guns and money. They take our friends. They take our neighborhoods and give them to the posh. My mother says she can no longer see the bay from her house. The city lets the builders built tall condominiums for the rich to live in that block her view. 
Soon she will die or be priced out too.

I read about a mother whose daughter was taken by the secret police. She was sent home to Ecuador, and no one knows where they took her daughter. A thousand children taken. This is not Argentina. This was in Miami  Or was it San Diego? Or Tulsa? Which could be as far away as Belfast. As far away as Azerbaijan. As far away as Angola

State Prison in Louisiana, where the men walk out in chains to work the roads. The roads they laid decades ago on the burial grounds of human bones. 

What is distance to the dead? They come and say, this way you might find your children.
The weather is heavy at the camps. There is no air conditioning the Guardian reporter says, no place to piss with privacy. There are no cameras at the camps to record abuse.

My mother says I am glad your grandfather is dead so he cannot see what is happening here. But he does see, I tell my mother, the dead are our best witnesses. They are near as our memory. We must remember every story. We must hear them. We must be their eyes. Their ears. Their tears.




Sean Thomas Dougherty's most recent book is the autobiography in prose and prose poems Death Prefers the Minor Keys from BOA Editions. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Brevity, Barnstorm, and the Kenyon Review. He works as a long-term Carer and Medtech for folks with traumatic brain injuries along Lake Erie.