Those of you in the know about movies will immediately recognize where my header originates though as it will be, I hope, clear enough to everybody, there is no tragedy implicit in my tale: mostly joy and a celebration of life, even when is the end of life itself — in short, the death of loved ones — what makes these recollections burst to the proscenium.
Will certainly expand later on that explanatory sentence though in a very broad sense understanding death does not necessarily require the act of somebody´s passing.
By the time I was born, both my father’s and mother’s fathers had ceased to exist.
When and why and how abuelo Eduardo or papá Lucio died is not the point.
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| Building gone — not the memories |
The fact is that I never knew either one.
And yet, I did.
My early visual memories of each one of my grandfathers are confined to the black-and-white portrait hanging on a wall of a maternal aunt’s home or alike images pasted on family photo albums of one of my paternal uncles. That the eldest son of my paternal grandfather — born, as my own father was, out of wedlock — looked so much like him, to judge by the picture shared over the years, made my “knowledge” of abuelo Eduardo easier.
In both their cases (don’t know if the explanation will be clear) for me death was not an end to existence: more like, rather, an intangible presence in our — mine, and my brothers’ and cousins’ — lives.
Here, and yet, away. Present in thought and deed, by the retelling of my elders, their progeny, absent in flesh.
At the same time there, wherever there may be, and here, next to us all but not quite by our side.
The terrifying, soul-tearing understanding that at a certain point in our lives we all come to associate with death came to me when I was a bit older than eight years, on two separate occasions.
Can’t really say which preceded the other but each impacted me deeply, even if only one of the two had the needed nearness to make it, in a way, personal.
Idle curiosity more than morbid intent attracted me one day at around noon to the large gathering of people in front of the town’s city hall. Relatives of the victims of a fire that incinerated their thatch lodging, a few kilometers outside the urban limits, wailed inconsolably, their laments as searing as the smell of charred human flesh that permeated the portico.
And it was so that death, tragic death, became a reality for me.
I was then in my third year of elementary school and a clearer understanding of how devastating death can be for a person came via the demise of the mother of one of my classmates.
Even at that early age my classmate’s calligraphy was something to envy and he was (is), by anybody’s standard, quite intelligent. Living in a semi-rural, small town of perhaps less than a thousand inhabitants in the urban area, most of their residents were known to everybody.
It was then more than just formal solidarity for us, third graders to accompany him at the funeral. I can still remember his stoic demeanor as the eldest in his family, trying hard for his sorrow not to overwhelm the strength that his siblings needed from him.
This rather long preamble including the abrupt entrance into early adulthood by my classmate or the still traumatic memory of unknowns perished in a fiery conflagration relates, somehow marginally, to the fact that, in my case, death has — slowly, gradually, constantly, undeterred, and unavoidably — chipped away at my childhood … not with the force to erase it into oblivion but damaging enough to say, as in the title, Au revoir, mon enfance.
Atop this post is the photo of the Baptist Church in my father’s hometown that I, my two younger brothers, and his paternal siblings and respective families attended during our childhood. Talking about the 1950s and part of the 60s.
I have taken if from a facebook post of one of the descendants of the pastor leading the congregation at the time. Met him and his wife last sometime in the early 1990s, and family connections — one of my cousins married one of his daughters — allowed me to somehow keep in touch. Both don Venancio and his wife, as well as my cousin’s wife, are now deceased.
The photo, as far as my knowledge goes, dates from around the early 80s and there is a new structure in place, as the one you see in the picture was irreparably damaged in one of the most destructive earthquakes in history in my country.
The point I am trying to make is this: the building may be gone and a new one, better and perhaps more sound and solid, has replaced it. In my mind, the old pine tree just inside of the wall to the right of the iron gate still raises proudly into the sky. And just under its shade both me and my cousins, hands on the masonry wall, are waiting on the right for other members to join in the Sunday celebration.
Back in 2009 when I first created this blog I reminisced about my father.
Just a few months before the first post in the Father’s Day series it had been five years since my father’s death. If was around the mid-70s that the slow threshing of my childhood began. To my recollection, the passing of tío Roberto was the first of one of my father’s paternal siblings — he may have been the second one, as the eldest of them all, tío Paco, probably preceded it — that really impacted me, mostly because of the memories of my father wracked by sorrow that I got to see at my uncle´s funeral and the shared times with him, with both of them.
Though some 20 years passed before tío Armando died, there were along the way other deaths in the family that again, added to the shelling off of the family group, on both sides.
At different times and not necessarily in order, both my grandmothers died, maternal uncles and aunts and cousins on both my father’s and mother’s side — Marina, Atilio, Napoleon, Andrés Atilio —, as well as others.
As is probably fitting — time runs inexorable and the longer you live the closer you are to dying — the toll has grown considerably during the last eight years.
My maternal sister’s death in November 2012 was then followed by that of my oldest maternal brother, Alfredo, within the last two years.
In just over the last 18 months or so more of those kin that nurtured my infancy, adolescence and young adulthood, my whole life, in fact, have also gone away to meet the Creator.
One, my uncle Eduardo (my paternal grandfather’s namesake), was a happy-go-lucky sort of a man who always had a smile and a joke to share with me, with us all.
The youngest of my father’s paternal brothers, Noé, has been the last on the male side to leave us and not a moment passes that my heart does not hang heavy and sorrowful for my inability to keep in touch with either one of them.
Neither of my maternal-only siblings grew up with me and two young brothers, for reasons irrelevant to this telling, which is probably why the recent death of one of the cousins (twin to my other beloved one) I grew up with, impacted me as much as if another sister had gone away.
Mischievous and intrepid as a girl — had the scar left by a heavy missile she once launched upwards a mango tree, unlucky enough for the projectile to rebound smack on her forehead — was God’s dedicated servant and eulogized my mother at her funeral.
Latest in this long list is tío Armando’s wife, Carmen, whom we all loved as our own mother.
One thing I hope you will not find in reading about this long, and yet somehow abbreviated list, is sadness. That is because of the one thing they all inherited us with: belief in a Creator and on the eternal life awaiting us someday.
Though grace surely originates in God having family remind you of it sure helps.
So, to my brothers, my cousins and their families, here is the final note: Au revoir, mon enfance. Not adieu. This is a, See you again, my childhood. Not goodbye.
Because no one can erase the memories, our childhood, and those who nurtured it, survive.
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