His cousin Maxo died in Haiti. Life, like death, lasts only a little while.

The New Yorker

A Little While
by Edwidge Danticat
Feb 1, 20120

My cousin Maxo has died. The house that I called home during my visits to Haiti collapsed on top of him.
Maxo was born on November 4, 1948, after three days of agonizing labor. “I felt,” my Aunt Denise used to say, “as though I spent all three days pushing him out of my eyes.” She had a long scar above her right eyebrow, where she had jabbed her nails through her skin during the most painful moments. She never gave birth again.

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When Maxo was a teen-ager, his favorite author was Jean Genet. He read and reread “Les Nègres.” These lines from the play now haunt me: “Your song was very beautiful, and your sadness does me honor. I’m going to start life in a new world. If I ever return, I’ll tell you what it’s like there. Great black country, I bid thee farewell.”
Two days after a 7.0 earthquake struck Haiti, on January 12, 2010, I was still telling my brothers that one night, as we were watching CNN, Maxo would pop up behind Anderson Cooper and take over his job.

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The last time I heard from him was three days before the earthquake. He left a message on my voice mail. He was trying to raise money to rebuild a small school in the mountains of Léogâne, where our family originated. The time before that, someone in the neighborhood had died and money was needed for a coffin. With a voice that blended shouting and laughter, Maxo made each request sound as though it were an investment that the giver would be making in him or herself.


Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/talk/comment/2010/02/01/100201taco_talk_danticat?printable=true#ixzz0erzS6Gdb

There is a lot of suffering in Haiti that will go on a long time, while we turn away and move on, thinking of it as a thing in our collective recent past.