Alex and Pancho - Ektachrome - Curtis Daily

Rosa 'Betsy Sinclair'

La Santa Muerte 

The Horror of Death - the Philosopher Opines 

A few days ago I read a terrific review of Julian Barnes’s latest and not quite novel. It is called Departures(s). Barnes says this will be his 15^th and last book. While he is a tad younger than I am he has Parkinson’s and a cancer that is not quite terminal.

I know that while I have promised myself not to buy more books, I know I will have to buy and read it.

In other blogs I have written about my favourite Barnes novel Nothing to Be Afraid Of. Because I lived in Mexico for many years I don’t avoid thinking about death as so many do in our Anglo USA and Canada. I have taken photographs of a Mexican friend where both of us explored the patron saint of Mexican drug traffickers called La Santa Muerte.

As a little boy of 8 in Buenos Aires my mother took me (definitely with a purpose) to the open casket funeral of a neighbour. He was a teenage son who had run into a train in his motor scooter. I remember seeing his bandaged face. A few weeks later a neighbour across the street won the lottery. For about a year I thought that only neighbours died or won the lottery.  A year later my mother went to the Philippine Embassy on Caller Florida which was in the same building as the American Embassy. Next to it was the Lincoln Library that had a novel surprise for Argentines. If you became a member you could borrow and take a book home. I looked a book or magazine called American Heritage. In it I saw bodies of dead soldiers (mostly Confederate) taken by Timothy O’Sullivan during the American Civil War. It was then that I really had my first glimpse of the inevitability of death. I marveled how those dead soldiers looked no different from the men walking outside on Calle Florida.

My next exposure to death happened in 1966. My uncle (a pleasant fake one) Leo Mahdjubian called me at my office at the Argentine Navy and said, “Alexander your father kicked the bucket yesterday. He was taken to the hospital by a police sergeant so you will have to go to the police station to sign some documents.” I was called by that sergeant who told me he had been a friend of my father and that he knew that he had been working hard at a laundry to save money so he could bribe an army general so that I could be sent back to my mother’s in Veracruz. He further told me that he had emptied my father’s pockets as they would have been emptied at the hospital. With the money that my father had been saving, this penniless conscript paid a cheap funeral for his father.

Rosemary and I were there at my mother’s bed in 1972 when she was dying. I was able to watch and hear her breath in and then die. We could not find a local doctor to sign a death certificate. This was done by a vet who said, “Tu mamá está muertita.”

But my most devastating witness to death happened 6 minutes before Rosemary died in bed on December 9, 2020. She asked, “Am I dying?”

How does one answer? I did not.

Somehow the little yellow rose in this blog brings me a pleasant memory of Rosemary even though I purchased the rose after she died.