Mi querido papi

Many, many years ago, I knew that something ineffable had changed in my life when first my sister and then my brother got married. I have a vivid childhood memory of this book my parents had around the house, Passages, about the different stages of life, and how to handle them. While I've never read the book, more than ever now I understand why such guides might have been useful to them.

That same sense of the inevitable passages of life struck me again more than a decade ago when my sister had her first child, and then my brother had his family, and, of course, almost 15 years ago when it came my time to marry. More recently, this past December, I was forcibly struck by the fact that my nephews and nieces are either teenagers (the eldest a junior in high school), or on the brink of leaving childhood behind.

But the greatest change that faces me and my family now is my father's passing. This week, he was diagnosed with inoperable, terminal cancer, a diagnosis that my bruja sense had already warned me about but that comes on with the force of a blow to the stomach, nonetheless. We never know how long we have on this Earth, and my father didn't want to know his prognosis so all is like before: we know he will leave us, but we don't know exactly when.

My father, a brave man all his life, is taking the news (quite literally) in stride, one day at a time, and enjoying being out of the hospital and re-settling into his routines, now divested of any extraneous work other than what he wants to engage in. If he is being so brave, we can and will do no less. We will follow his example and handle the very worst of news with aplomb and courage and good humor.

These past few days I've been thinking a lot about when my father is no longer among us, and I derive some consolation from the fact that he will forever remain with me because there is so much of him in me. This most complicated and maddening of men was the one who helped raise me (along with my lioness of a mother) to be a person to be reckoned with.

A man who mused about the difficulty birds faced in flying because of the exertion on their wings, my father was born with the soul of a poet. But while he was still a boy in school, a famous Spanish poet read his verses and recommended that he pursue a non-literary career, so my father put away his poetry and a little piece of his soul went with it. I wish I could travel to that moment in the past and tell that young man not to listen to the arrogant son of colonial conquerors who had no way of appreciating his Puerto Rican sensibilities.

My father taught me by example to be (or at least to aim to be) uncompromising in my standards, demanding of myself and others, fierce and loyal as a friend but fearful as an enemy, unabiding in maintaining my integrity, honest and ethical to a fault, loving to and protective of my own, and, most of all, dedicated to making a difference in the lives of others, specifically for those less fortunate.

My father is also a true patriota, like no other man I know, past or present. He has dedicated all of his life to working ceaselessly through education, through his books, through advocacy, through mediation, and through his pen (well, more like his typewriter and then his desktop), his only weapon, or fusil, to envision and reform a patria that would not kneel before the United States. While his dream of our patria's freedom will not be realized during his lifetime, he can rest assured that in a country where more than 100 years of U.S. colonialism (on top of 400 years of Spanish colonial rule) have fostered widespread corruption and lies told shamefacedly and internecine violence, he has stood as a model of truth and of not ever selling out. His example lives now and will continue to live on in the future, passed on by those of us who have been shaped by it.

In the two years or so when I was in the midst of creating my Monster, my father was a tireless research assistant, who flagged books and articles and read nearly every leaf of my 345-page creature with enthusiasm and interest and who engaged and debated my ideas in his unique and greatly appreciated way.

My father is and has been a warrior all his life, and this space is too short to tell of all the things he has taught me, of the humor, of the love, of the stories, of the kindness, of the strength, of the sacrifice, of the beauty, of the ideas, of the sights, of the opinions, of the certainties and uncertainties that we have shared and that I have seen through him and because of him.

In my life, he is and will always be a pillar of strength and love. We have more days to come, days to make the most of, especially because we don't know how many. As I ready myself for one more passage, admittedly one of the most difficult of all, I am again inspired by his example, and pray to God that just like my father has lived mostly on his own terms, let Death be kind and allow him to walk through this last threshold on his own terms, too.