Mourning Resonates From Staten Island to Sri Lanka

by Nina Bernstein for New York Times

(March 05, New York, Sri Lanka Guardian) It sounds like a throwback to another century: A healthy, middle-class woman sickens late in her pregnancy, gives birth and dies two and a half weeks later, leaving her young husband to care for their newborn son alone.

Even the new father, Indika S. Arachchige, 34, grieving in their Staten Island home under balloons and streamers that exclaim, “It’s a Boy,” still cannot quite believe that so much everyday American happiness could be swept away so fast.

A pending autopsy may explain the death of his wife, Tai Ling Feng, 36, a Taiwan-born United States citizen who worked in a bank. But to the young widower and the multiethnic circle of friends who had cheered on the couple’s courtship as a uniquely New York love story, immigration law now seems to be compounding a New York tragedy.

Mr. Arachchige, a legal permanent resident from Sri Lanka who manages two Subway sandwich shops on Staten Island, finds himself without a relative in the United States, struggling to adjust to life with a newborn while mourning his wife, who died three weeks ago.

He “desperately needs the support of his family in this time of need,” a social worker at Staten Island University Hospital wrote to the United States Embassy in Sri Lanka, urging American officials to grant Mr. Arachchige’s 24-year-old sister permission to visit to help care for the baby.
But despite pleas from doctors and hospital administrators, beginning before the mother’s death, American officials have denied the sister a tourist visa — apparently because they are not convinced that she would ever return to Sri Lanka, a poor country torn by civil war.

Such denials are routine, said Cyril Ferenchak, a spokesman for the State Department, noting that he could not discuss individual cases because of confidentiality laws. While people with European passports can just get on a plane and expect to be granted a 90-day visit, citizens from less prosperous countries must apply for a visa under rules designed to prevent illegal immigration. And a young, unmarried, unemployed woman responding to her brother’s need would have great difficulty showing she had “compelling ties” to Sri Lanka to guarantee her return, Mr. Ferenchak said.

Moreover, he said, her care for the baby might be construed as working — that is, taking an American’s job — because she would be “filling a void as a caregiver.”

So the father’s buddies from the sandwich shop and the mother’s girlfriends from the bank were trying to fill the void after the infant left the hospital on Feb. 24, the day after his mother’s burial.

While the new father was at prayers for the dead at a Buddhist temple, the mother’s girlfriends, most of them Hispanic, decorated the house with balloons for the baby’s homecoming. The sole female employee at the sandwich shop, an Irish-American mother of three who had sat beside the father at the wake as he sobbed uncontrollably, gave up her days off to baby-sit. And his mostly Sri Lankan male co-workers, knowing that he dreaded being alone, dropped by with food every evening and stayed for hours.

Still, when his son, Brian, began to cry, it was up to the dad to scoop him up from the crib and try to comfort him with a bottle, a fresh diaper or a rocking embrace, as the nurses in the hospital had taught him.

On a Friday at the end of that first week, after a night when the baby had awakened three times and a snowstorm kept friends away, the father seemed dazed by grief and exhaustion.

Softly, he recounted the days and nights since Jan 17, when Ms. Feng was admitted to the hospital with a fever that baffled medical specialists — as a doctor involved in her care confirmed. Hospital officials would not discuss her case, citing privacy laws. Labor was induced on Jan. 24, a month before her due date, and she gave birth to a healthy 6 pound 4 ounce boy.

But her condition worsened. Mr. Arachchige (pronounced ah-rah-TCHIG-ay) told of shuttling from the hospital nursery on Staten Island to his wife’s bedside at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Manhattan, where she was transferred about two weeks after the baby’s birth, and where she died five days later, on Feb. 11, just before she was to undergo an emergency liver transplant. “I was crying, crying,” he recalled. “I told the nurses, ‘Please, do something, I can’t see her like this.’ But nothing they did worked.”

Through the baby monitor, his son’s whimpers grew louder, and Mr. Arachchige loped upstairs, past a framed photo of himself and Ms. Feng beaming in a flower-filled marriage ceremony in Sri Lanka last October, one year after their simple 2006 wedding at Staten Island’s Borough Hall.

Was the baby wet again? Hungry? No. His father cradled him, stroked his cheek and laid him down to sleep.


“When he gets older, how am I going to say to him, ‘Two weeks after you’re born, your mother passed away, maybe because you came to the world?’ ” the father said. “Everybody’s going to ask, ‘Where is your mom?’ ”

His own mother, a retired teacher, is undergoing chemotherapy for colon cancer in Sri Lanka. His mother-in-law, 61, offered to help with the baby, but then said she had to return to work in a Staten Island nursing home so she could qualify for Social Security.

His friends hope that public attention can help his sister to obtain a visa.

“That’s really his only answer,” said Patricia Carroll Owdziej, 55, the sandwich shop co-worker who calls herself “Indika’s American mom.”

“He’s the primary caregiver at night, and then he’s getting up and going to work, and it’s killing him,” she added. “In his culture, the men don’t do anything with the babies. It’s totally a woman’s job.”

Mr. Arachchige, a trained accountant who came here in 1999 and rose from making sandwiches for $5.50 an hour to mastering the sandwich chain’s computer system, seems to have overcome any cultural barrier to hands-on fatherhood. But whether talking about Brian’s first bath, efforts to soothe the infant’s crying fits or his own panicked waking from dreams of loss, he used one phrase again and again: “I’m so afraid.”

Eventually there will be some life insurance and Social Security survivor’s benefits to help raise Brian. For now there is a mortgage to pay, and a baby who shows no signs of sleeping through the night.

Last week, Grace Bello, 31, one of Ms. Feng’s closest friends, enlisted a friend’s mother to pitch in four days a week. Mrs. Owdziej covered two more, and stayed over on Thursday, “so he can at least get one night’s sleep.”

They are mourning, too. Ms. Bello, an American citizen who came from Colombia in 1995, choked up as she spoke of her close friendship with Ms. Feng, who had come here 1985.

“That’s the beauty of New York,” she said, recalling how they traded holidays, with Ms. Feng helping her decorate every Christmas, while she learned to celebrate the Chinese New Year.

On Amboy Road, where the sandwich shop is two doors away from the bank, that was also the beauty of the couple’s romance, both a small-town love story and a global affair. It started five years ago with eye contact and banter. Soon she was learning the names of Sri Lankan dishes, and he mastered a few phrases in Mandarin. But English was the language of their love, and together, they explored a new world.

“He was her life, and she was his life,” Mrs. Owdziej said. “You had to be there to witness it.”

Now his parents tell him to come back to Sri Lanka with the baby, but he does not want to abandon the place that feels like home, he said. He began to name places he and Ms. Feng had been together — restaurants in Queens and Brooklyn, Cape May on their honeymoon, the races at Saratoga Springs.

“I keep everything for the memories,” he said, as his son slept nearby. “I have to explain, ‘You have a great mother.’ ”

(Courtesy – New York Times)