On July 23, 1993, my mom came home from work early with tears in her eyes. She had been crying in a corner on the floor of the hospital for some time before her employer finally told her to please go home. With her eyes welled up, my mom gently said, “Tata has died.” My Tata, the first male figure I ever had in my life, was no longer with us. My mom sobbed in my arms after she told me the terrible news. I was in shock. It was the first major death I had experienced as a kid. It was a lot to process. Plus, I had been secretly suffering from anxiety attacks at the time. I pondered death an awful lot. Perhaps it was because I was an only child and had a lot of free time on my hands. I was overthinking eternity and then freaking myself out pondering the idea of nonexistence. I now realize I was dealing with a death anxiety. The idea of knowing that one day I would no longer be on this earth—that I no longer would have my family around me—was a lot for my young mind to grasp. It kept me up at night. In that vulnerable moment between being awake and asleep, I frightened myself by pondering what nonbeing would feel like. My grandfather’s passing forced me to zero in on this anxiety.
The shock of losing my grandfather was nothing compared to what my mom was going through. My mom always saw the positive side of things. When the car broke down, she thought it was great that we got to walk and burn off the big lunch we just had. If we were low on money for groceries, she took it as a fun challenge to make a feast with what little ingredients we had left in the fridge. But the death of her father caused this joyful woman’s flame to dim. I had never seen my mom like this. Death is natural. It is part of our human existence. As a doctor, my mom knows this all too well. But experiencing a death while not being able to leave the country to go bury your loved one was something entirely different. My mom was hurting, and the only thing that could give her peace at that moment was to go back to Ecuador to bury her father. But alas, she told me she could not go. This was the exact moment I realized, there’s no going back.
When I was younger, my parents breezed over explaining why we couldn’t leave the country. I just figured some people could leave and others couldn’t. We simply couldn’t. Plus, we never really wanted to leave. America was our home. Then my grandfather died. Realizing that we couldn’t leave the country at that moment hit me like a sledgehammer to the stomach. Remember, I was anxious about dying at the time. Immigration problems felt minuscule compared to the stress of not being, so I didn’t focus on what it meant that we couldn’t go back! Not being able to leave the country was just a fact of life that I had accepted without asking as a child. Besides, we moved around California an awful lot. I was tired of traveling. I had gone to seven different elementary schools and middle schools before I got to high school. I had no idea why we moved so much—I figured that was just an American way of life. In my eyes, my parents were like indoor campesinos who followed the work. We lived near the beaches of Orange County as well as the inner cities of Los Angeles County. We lived in Walnut, Duarte, San Clemente, Thousand Oaks, Panorama City, Monrovia, and West Covina. I played for the La Puente Warriors and volunteered at the Huntington Memorial Hospital in Pasadena. We never set down roots anywhere and this was something I got accustomed to. I kept up the practice in my adult life. In fact, after high school I lived in Westwood, Alhambra, Monterey Park, Silver Lake, and Altadena. I’m most likely moving as you read this chapter.
It was quite frustrating to learn that we could move freely throughout California but were not allowed to travel internationally. No matter how badly she wanted to accompany all her siblings back to Guayaquil, my mom was not allowed to return to Ecuador. For the first time ever, I wondered if my mom considered going back for good. I wondered if losing her father made her question what this American experiment was all for. At the end of the day, my mom most cherished being around her family. Not being able to leave the country because she would then not be allowed back in was heart-wrenching for her. She later told me she spent the night wondering if there was anything she could do. Was there any way to go and support her mother, bury her father, and then come back? There wasn’t. The immigration problems my mom found herself in did not care about the loss of life. They did not care about a death in the family. Through her pain, my mom knew there was nothing that could be done. This was the life she chose. This was the life she chose for her son. Now as an adult, it’s hard knowing that she was going through this great pain without my support. There was so much I didn’t know then simply because she wanted to protect me.
The very next day, my grandfather had a big funeral. He had requested dueling guitars to be played as he was laid to rest. He also insisted that guests be served Scotch, the same whiskey that took his life prematurely. My grandfather was always larger than life, which was why he died on July 23 and was buried on July 24, the same weekend Guayaquil celebrated its founding 455 years earlier. The local newspaper pointed out that while the city of Guayaquil celebrated, an unlucky few mourned. It stated: “Si, para la mayoria estuvo presente Guayaquil de mis Amores… Para otros, acaso, hubo un Guayaquil de mis Dolores.” To translate that in English would be to bastardize the writer’s poetry. The newspaper writer, by the way, an old friend of my grandfather’s, even referred to him as “El Negro Arrata” in publication.
The days went by and nothing my dad and I did would make my mom feel better. Her inner fire was still dim. Then one evening, desperate, my dad asked my mom and me to get in the car. We started driving east to Riverside, I discovered, and we ended up at a dog kennel. My mom instantly brightened up. We were going to get a dog. Our first dog as a family. My mom looked at the litter of cute German shepherds. One hobbled toward my mom. Her motherly, nurturing instinct kicked in as soon as she saw the crippled canine. “That one,” she said enthusiastically. Not allowing her to have her moment, my dad whispered, “No, we’re paying a lot of money for this dog. Pick a good one.” Fine, she thought. My mom then made eye contact with Monsieur, which was the very pretentious French name my dad gave my mom’s new German shepherd.
My mom loved Monsieur from the moment she laid eyes on him. The two became instant friends. My dad was right. A puppy brought new life to our household. Now mind you that we lived in a condominium with no backyard. Having a German shepherd inside a carpeted house was not a good idea. What’s more, I didn’t ask for the dog but was expected to take care of it. I was in charge of washing it, feeding it, walking it, and picking up after him. I understand why I would do all this if I had asked for the damn dog. I didn’t. And I would have resented this dog if not for seeing how happy he made my mom.
Monsieur and I were cordial. I don’t want to mislead you and pretend that we were close. We weren’t. Our next dog, Sasha, my mom’s black Labrador that she named after her favorite African American coworker (don’t worry we had a long conversation about covert racism immediately after the naming), and I were very close. But not Monsieur. Monsieur and I respected each other. I would feed him and walk him accordingly as long as he didn’t shit on the carpet. That was the deal. I deeply hated dog shit, so it was important that we each kept our end of the bargain.
It was on one of those long walks with Monsieur around the neighborhood that I realized that I was no longer scared of death. I had been very anxious about dying at such a young age, but that’s because I never knew anybody who had gone through it. Now my grandfather was dead. And I felt that if he was brave enough to face his own mortality, then so could I. It’s ironic that it took the first father figure of my life to die for me to overcome my fear of death. My fear of dog shit, however, lived on for quite some time.