Guest commentary: Death pays a visit and I find the meaning of love

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By Armando Vazquez / Guest contributor

In the past few months, every day increasing in severity, I have been living in a suffocating catatonic panic stricken, very real, world of both drowning by water and suffocation by asphyxiation; I cannot for the life of me catch my breath. Death, much like a dying flickering candle that has consumed all of its energy has made an unsolicited courtesy call. In this ever darkening world I came to terms with my life long struggle with love.

I have come to understand in my soul what love is. I am now 65 years of age and I am dying. The onset of death sobers up a hard headed bother like me righteously. So my truths, along with my many sins are now scripted boldly in a concise unedited historical narrative before the vision of my mind in verses that both weep and bleed liberation.

I believe now that you learn to love, or to hate. We are not born a loving child, no more that we born savage and evil. A fortunate child suckles early on the sweet breast of love and life. I was very lucky (what other word can you use, when birth is undeniably the ultimate celestial crapshoot?) as a child. The acts of love were all around me.

My mother and father, both orphans, suffered in stoic resignation together in the cruel caste system of caciques and peons of turn of the twentieth century Mexico. A man made powder keg world of poverty, ignorance, violence and repression that would soon be engulfed in a cataclysmic civil war. In this hell there was love, the forces of evil could not kill the love that my parents had for their beloved parents; but that revolution would kill my two grandfathers.

Somehow my parents’ widowed majestic mothers would not be broken by the deaths that haunted almost every family, the unrelenting cruelty and violence of the day. These two Adelitas, understood to the marrow of their souls that love was total unremitted sacrifice to the children they brought into the world. Sacrifice for these two guerillera women was an unequivocal, non-negotiable sacred responsibility to their children for the rest of their lives. So my two grandmothers bore and endured with unwavering dignity the scarlet mark of “v” viudas for the rest of their lives as their children all grew up as lowly poverty stricken, “leprous”  and fatherless Huerfano. Love is what my abuelitas gave to their children; it infected my mother and father.

I have written before about how I never saw my father buy, not one single material item, in his life. I checked him out real close from the time I was maybe 7 or 8 years of age, we were doing purgatory time in Tijuana, waiting the slow processing of our immigration documents

(“Micas Verdes”).  However poor as we were during those three hellish years our huge family of 8 siblings, 6 to 7 uncles, and small army of assorted relatives that my parents were always helping would travel to La Avenida Revolucion in downtown Tijuana on a church going, and Sunday outing. All of us of course would eat at our favorite taco stand, haggle with the vendor and buy junk, my mother would shop at the open air mercado, all the while my father, like a holy sentinel would watch over all of us, silent, vigilant, his love clotted us all.

What I did learn, many years later, being the eighth sibling to marry and getting on with my sacred and independent life of marriage was that my mother and father would provided me with a ten thousand dollar gift to buy my first house. “El hombre no es nada sin su terreno”, my father whispered to me, “cuida tu familia, mijo”. My parents made this ten thousand dollar gift to all eleven of their children. My mother was a full time 24/7 benevolent and loving matriarch of her home, my father worked for over 55 years at minimum salary wages, as a “glasshouse campesino” all of his life, and yet this sacred couple was able to save over one hundred and ten thousand dollars to assure that each of their children would have a tiny piece of God’s earth to call their own. Yes acts of love have always surrounded me!

With all of my early examples of love, given to me by “miss cuatro padres”; which would to a very significant degree be the bed rock foundation of my core being, I must admit that as a young man I failed miserably at love. I was a selfish fool.  I wanted to gorge myself on all manner of vices and worldly pleasures; I was a vain narcissist, a light weight monster. I wanted, I demanded, and I took, and I could never get enough. The two incredible women that came into my life at that precarious, self indulgent and suicidal time were to put it simply, way too much woman for me.

These two modern empowered women were every bit like my mother, with additional cosmic powers; they were both extremely intelligent, highly independent, and like my mother fearless, and I was a punk and a coward. So I ran away to alcohol, to drugs, to ends of the earth; I ran away in shame and in fear. I had dishonored my commitment to my companions, I had dishonored my padres. I hid in the jungles of Mexico, in the streets of Cali. In all the shithole bars of Los Angeles. This went on for many, many years.  My mother and father died and I never had the guts to ask for their forgiveness; I was stranger at both their funerals. I remember wanting to be buried alive with both of them, again the coward’s way.

My children’s’ unconditional love saved me; they gently and lovingly rekindled the extinguishing light of love that I thought that I had lost forever. Love is a work in progress I am here to testify, to shout from the roof tops like a madman that has finally found that shiny celestial glue that binds the universe together. My children’s’ unconditional love was unremitting, no matter the harm that I caused they were there to give a “I love Pops, no matter what” hug, a smile and a Father’s Day card every year always proclaiming “You’re the Best Dad in the World,”and of course I was to them. Their love willed me to act upon love and redeem myself.

Then Miracles begin to happen by the power and in the name of love. Some twenty five years ago an angel came into my life. Yes, folks a real angel! Why me I asked for many years? The answer came back one night as loud as thunder, “Why not you!” it was not a question from the heavens, but a sacred clemency.

If life is like a river with ebbs and flows, then love is surely that shallow warm calm peaceful pocket of water that is always there for our safety and protection, before the storm; our job here on earth is, of course, we must want it, find it and get to it! And so with any real life story, the storm hits! It is inevitable, it is meant to be. It started to rain upon my family, now grown considerably larger, and the heavy rain would not let up. In this driving storm at one time or another my children, my family has been pulled down into the depths of the raging waters and their love that they gave to me now pulls me unconditionally into the raging waters, and I know today that our love will find a way to outlast the storm, to tame the storm, to find that shallow warm clam peaceful pocket of water that only love can create, because today, my dear sisters and brother I know in heart that love is the greatest power in the universe.

I remain humbly a work in progress with unconditional love as my celestial muse.