In memoriam, 2012

The following words comprise the eulogy I shared with family and friends who came to my dad's funeral on June 17, 2012.


My father loved stories.     The long and adventure filled life that he lived gave him ample material for the telling of stories that brought to life the mid 20th century world of Paranday, Trujillo, and Lima that had shaped him and defined him.    To everyone and everywhere my father went in his life, down to his last days in convalescence in Montebello, he brought a bygone Peru with him.  

As a child I loved to listen to his stories.   They were sometimes ironic, occasionally shocking, often hilarious, and always very human.   As an adult, I learned to understand that for my father telling stories was how he made his way  in this world.   He befriended people from all walks of life through his stories and every friend he made could both learn his old stories and experience the chance to make new stories with him.

Of course, the greatest story of my father’s life was his relationship to my mother.    During their many years together, my mother brought and sustained a perfect love into this imperfect man’s life.    Her love was transformational:   it softened him, calmed him, challenged him, and changed him.    All his life my father remained a man of his place, time, and circumstances---with all the good and bad that came with that.    But as he told me many many times:  he became a far better, much stronger, and spectacularly luckier man for having my mother in his life.    In acknowledging this fact, my father illustrated to me the redemptive power of my mother’s love for him.  

After his beloved Edo died two years ago, there were related but different things that he in turn taught me.   While he and I lived together my father showed me how much he loved life.    My father’s love of life, that quality that most likely attracted my mother to him fifty years ago, was something he exemplified to me during the last two years of his life in ways I had not seen before.

My father faced his terminal illness and his death with a quiet and resilient courage.    During his last three months, when he was hospitalized and while he was still lucid, he told his life stories to his nurses, his rehab therapists, and all who visited him.    Even while profoundly ill, he still loved to laugh, he still loved to make people laugh, and he still thought of a better future.   

One of the last things he ever said to me, in a moment of clarity that broke through the cruel confusion that his illness had trapped his mind in, was a simple word:   hijito, spoken in happy recognition.   To me, whether coming from my mother or my father, hijito was and will always be most beautiful word in the Spanish language.   

Even though my father is now gone, I will cherish forever the memory that I was his and my mother’s hijito.

The love they expressed in this word is the love I will carry in my heart for the rest of my life.