The Demise of Sr Pablo Bautista
as seen through the eyes of another man’s son
It is now 2:18 p.m. the afternoon of Thursday 9 April 2o26; Sr. Bautista died around 3 a.m. in the morning. I know this because Jose Luis Bautista, one of his sons texted me that morning after I had woken; Jose Luis had sat with his father through the night from the time of his death. I am proud to know someone that wise; from what I learned much later, my oldest brother had stayed with our mother throughout the night of her death; Our Pop arranged his parting a little differently. He was with his consort in California; the elder pair of siblings were together in Ithaca, NY; my younger brother and I were in Mt. Vernon, WA; Sr. Pablo Bautista had different ideas still, for his passing having surrounded himself with family - members of which are still arriving 12 hours later. I live over the entrance to the family compound. There is no reason for me to leave; i’ll remain here to witness from a distance the focus each member of his family brings to this process, otherwise i’d try to apply my rubric to a cultural form about which i understand nothing. Sr. Bautista only knew me from a distance or from what his family has shared. He became ill 6 months back from cirrhosis, the same disease which killed my paternal grandfather. Sr. Bautista has deteriorated while enduring greater and greater pain; prior to that, he was a quiet dignified man who did not invite open curiosity; i can only share what i’ve witnessed from his family who have been devoted to him, taking great care that he would not suffer alone.
There is much about where i now live that i do not understand, yet there is much i know about where i am from, but understand no better. My father was a practical fellow who spent his life studying, if it wasn’t books, it was people. He had two wives to my three. He refused to marry his last consort; she was an amicable accountant and from what i could see, good enough company to dance with. However, she like his 2nd wife bailed when his ‘charm’ wore thin, and his gift of the coin collection didn’t muster ‘community property level of concern’ during his demise. He lived for a time in assisted living, then the ‘supervised wing’ in the centrally located convalescent home (against my sister’s better judgement who’d have brought him to the East Coast for precision care). His meander into dementia at the supervised convalescent home was interrupted when while trotting for the toilet, he tumbled hip-first into the ergonomically engineered shower splash and crushed the neck of his trochanter. My deeply loving sister faced the unenviable choice of hip-replacement and the statistical diminution of Pop’s eclectic 86 year old mental acuity or letting him savor what was left of this panoply of suffering we deem a life; she, as only his daughter could, bravely let him suffer cogently.
Pop schooled me brutally on clarity of the written word; i first understood a letter to be part of an alphabet; as part of a word; as part of a sentence . .. now 70+, after 50+ years of honing his writing advocacy and ducking his Jesuit severity: i just began a testimony to one man then conflated that effort with the loss of Pop. If Sr. Bautista suffered such split focus, i didn’t find much discursive behavior in his family’s diligence to his well being. I watched the two sons closely coordinate the 24/7 necessary care cycle, though one a successful business owner, and another son’s relentless, task-oriented demeanor, his daughter’s business-like constancy tracking her daughter; attending her mother; and understanding her brother. Even Sr. Bautista’s widow hunts Chayotes out of the Guaje tree (Leucaena Leucocephala) with a LASER focus; easily 9x her height, the Oaxaca namesake tree towers over her yard draped with Chayote vines, and she, armed with no more than a too-long bamboo lance, defies physics as she plucks fruit from the heavens with her rooted-tripod logic.
Sr. Bautista has left a grieving family who have applied his loving lessons about persistence and quiet resolve to his entry into the mystery of bardo as they’ve attended his battle to live a moment longer during the past 6 months. Our two cultures are so vastly different about funerals, i feel increasingly unable to provide insight or even objective impressions for either. What I don’t understand about Sr. Bautista’s demise has highlighted a blurring of purpose and reason imprinted on the mantle of my supposedly highly rational and informed North American raiment as citizen of ‘civilization’s supposed pinnacle’. I was raised to wear, flaunt, and taunt with ‘exceptionalism/manifest destiny/city-on-the-hill’ invulnerability, including the faux dissent woven into the fabric of my nation’s ‘endstagecapitalist’ mythology. The pompous self-delusion you may or may not be savoring in the forgoing missive is, forgive the “Trumpism”, par for that course.
I’ve contrasted two histories, with a mixture of objectivity, romanticisation and as big a dollop of sympathy as i can dredge from my congenitally solipsistic myopia. Sr Bautista died within the week, and i’ve learned far more about him in those days than some few years of having crossed paths. What i have learned about his life has deepened my sadness for his unnecessary suffering, as well as sharpened my compassion for the weight of difficulty his family has inherited. The process has drawn in high relief the delusion of mitigation as pertains death; nothing i can see will ever alter the inevitable dislocation and confusion left in its wake. I’ve written with a conceit i could relieve some of the Bautista family’s suffering, only to discover i have yet to resolve very much of my own grief about death, much less diminish any grief from my family; it has taken me 15 years just to learn I am not responsible for what they feel, nor believe that assertion enough that i would cease this fatuous endeavor. However i am 1,000 times more grateful to my parents for arming me with the creative tools to explore such confusion. Watching Sr. Pablo Bautista’s family laid low; then to recover, and then to replant, and rejoice in the qualities they have struggled so bravely and lovingly to prolong, has helped me to better understand why to struggle, and for that Sr. Pablo Bautista, I thank you, and wish you God Speed.
solidarność
(˚ㄥ _˚)
jts
9 April 2o26
http://ExtinctionChronicles.blogspot.com
http://JosephTStevens.blogspot.com
http://Stoanartst.blogspot.com
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