#2944: Dorismonds Bury Dreams With Patrick (fwd)

[Robert Corbett <bcorbett@netcom.com>]

From:nozier@tradewind.net

Dorismonds Bury  Dreams With Patrick 
 By LESLIE CASIMIR   Daily News Staff Writer
Original Publication Date: 03/22/2000 

Weary-eyed, Marie and Andre Dorismond got up early yesterday morning to
buy their dead son his burial suit. Patrick Dorismond was their youngest
child. The only  one with the hazel eyes of his Cuban grandfather. The
one who would put his ear to his mother's chest to hear her heartbeat.
 "He worried about my high blood pressure," said Marie Dorismond, a
naturalized U.S. citizen who has lived in Brooklyn for 31 years. "I had
hoped that he would have  buried me."  As the public rhetoric flared
over the 26-year-old's death at the hands of a police bullet, his
tight-knit Haitian-American family began the excruciating process of
arranging his funeral."We just want him to rest in peace," said Andre
Dorismond, a retired custodian and a former vocalist for an old-time
Haitian band led by the late Nemours Jean-Baptiste. "We don't want      
to talk politics anymore." The Dorismonds spent hours Tuesday at Andrew
Torregrossa and Sons Funeral Home at 2265 Flatbush Ave., going over the
details and costs of Friday's wake and Saturday's funeral.Patrick's
sister, Marie A. Dorismond, 28, took over the task of haggling with the
funeral director while her mother, sunk into a chair, repeatedly asked,
"Where's my son?"The body, the funeral director explained, was not
there. It was being embalmed at another location. The family then met
with the priest at Holy Cross Catholic Church who will officiate at
their son's funeral Mass, and afterward they headed back to their
two-bedroom Parkside Ave. apartment, with its wooden crucifix on the
front door.Marie Dorismond is a determined woman who struggled to      
put her two children through Catholic school although they lived across
the street from Public School 92. She worked as a hotel housekeeper with
a side job as a beautician and then  went on to night school to become a
nurse at Kings County  Hospital. Her husband worked long hours as a
custodian at Pace University and then at night would come home and sit
 down at the dining table to write songs, mostly about love.Throughout
the evening a steady stream of visitors, relatives  and neighbors filled
the fourth-flour apartment, bringing gifts  of meat-filled patties,
cake, fresh ginger and cinnamon sticks for soothing tea. Guests spilled
out onto the hallway, sitting on  medal folding chairs. "He grew up in
this building," Patrick's sister Marie A.Dorismond said. "His soul is
right here."