A Son’s Farewell

How do you write about the death of someone so exceptional, someone who was a legend in its truest sense? Especially when you are someone very close to the person, that you might question yourself as to why you are doing it. Rodrigo Garcia doesn’t hide his emotions as he grapples with this dilemma, his intent itself,

“What makes matters emotionally turbulent is the fact that my father is a famous person. Beneath the need to write may lurk the temptation to advance one’s own fame in the age of vulgarity. Perhaps it might be better to resist the call and stay humble. Humility is, after all, my favorite form of vanity. But as with most writing, the subject matter choses you, and so resistance could be futile.”

The subject matter in this case is the last days of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, his funeral and a few days thereafter. The tale, if I may call it so, is poignant, tender and stark in its telling. Its grandeur is in its simplicity, the honesty of the emotions and thoughts touch you deeply. At times you feel the writer is detached from what is happening around him. Then you realize that too is a coping mechanism, else how do you deal with something intensely personal,  the loss of someone who has had such an impact on not just his family.

Dementia had affected Marquez in his last years and the memoir starts where the family has come to accept the inevitable, that he has but a few weeks or even days or hours left with them. There are no hospital stays anymore, it is at home that he will breathe his last. While chronicling the happenings during those days, the son in the writer gives us rare glimpses of the person that his father was, the life they had in Columbia, Spain and in Mexico City. He has mostly avoided the obvious and well-known aspects of his father’s life and rightfully so. At the same time he has not failed to acknowledge the stature that Marquez had commanded by mentioning the dignitaries at his funeral and the memorial service as well as the innumerous messages and calls they had received.

“The death of the second parent is like looking through a telescope one night and no longer finding a planet that has always been there. It has vanished, with its religion, its customs, its own peculiar habits and rituals, big and small. The echo remains.”

While a good part of the book is about Marquez, the last few pages is devoted to Mercedes, his mother, the love of his father’s life from when they were 14 and 10 respectively. The book is a tribute to a woman who had stood as tall as her illustrious and much acclaimed husband, she had in fact carved her own space right beside him. There is a picture of hers at the end of the book that says it all.

The sensitive way he has laid out the events and the honesty of his thoughts caught me by surprise. Here was something that could easily have turned self-aggrandizing, but he has converted it into something beautiful.

Rodrigo Garcia was a name that was alien to me, I didn’t even know Marquez had two sons. With a personality so overwhelming, you tend to ignore those around them, I suppose. Garcia alludes to this while talking about his decision to move to another city and country, maybe it was a subconscious way of making himself distant from and independent of, his father’s fame.

Talking about the subconscious, sometime in the twilight zone between being awake and falling into sleep yesterday, I was thinking of a beautiful Annette Benning movie that I had watched last year. A girl that was made to pay for an accidental teenage pregnancy all her life, the child that was given up for adoption, her own child getting adopted and the grandmother finally finding the grandchild. I couldn’t remember the name of the movie and I wondered why this memory had come up suddenly.

That Rodrigo Garcia was in the movie business was clear from the book. Google came to the rescue and imagine my surprise when I realized the very same movie that I was thinking about – ‘Mother and Child’ – was written and directed by him. Not just that, another woman centric movie that I’d watched a few months ago was also his – ‘Things You Can Tell Just By Looking At Her’.

It made complete sense now. The delicate way in which he handles emotions, how his writing is devoid of all embellishments and cuts straight to the core, his deep respect for the women in his life, is a legacy, and also something that he has nurtured carefully and with deep passion.

Don’t miss this, whether you have read the maestro or not.