May her memory be a blessing

Month's mind. A grief observed. My wife's sudden passing away. זכרונה לברכה

I’ve delayed this for practical reasons. Bills must be paid. Business demands debts met. Boys need a father's fumbling love. Bureaucrats in two lands/languages glare.

And I've delayed this for emotional reasons. Given both the immense difficulty of dealing with my loved one, who after 35 1/2 years together, died rapidly and with nearly no ability to express her thoughts coherently to me during a baffling and inexplicable decline in health within twelve hours of our return to Casa Quinde from our hometown Los Angeles, some of what I convey will incorporate or synthesize what I’ve expressed in letters to particular friends and family. After a few days in pre-and postmortem sorrow, the tears recede, at least for an exhausted me, and eerily, not even a week passes before consolations in person or online fade, as life must go on. Below you can see who's our neighbors, those in the town cemetery, next wall over.

In Catholic custom once, a Mass was said “for the intentions of the departed soul” thirty days after death. While she'd both been bemused at purgatory as the subject of my dissertation, pursued when we first met, and distanced from any countenance towards “organized religion,” especially as the older she got, we’d early bonded over our longing to know “is that all there is?” Two weeks after she died, I noticed in my midnight bedroom a firefly’s flash. Inside? It hovered. I now recall that wonderful phrase as Genesis opens, the divine spirit hovering over the face of the “tohu-bohu”—the void. The deep. The abyss. The firefly came near me, circled, and vanished from sight. I've never felt the uncanny except once in Hawai’i when with my older son, then barely out of Pampers, I sensed a doubled encounter in passing, literally, Pele the goddess. Which that toddler’s mom would've scoffed at. More in my follow-up post.

Here's the gist of events, culled from a couple of correspondences. A part of what aloof me dreads is having to repeat the tale, like a bedraggled Ancient Mariner, after surviving the wreck and stumbling ashore, leaving the boat as if a Viking sea-burial.

….I must prepare you for a message that I never wanted to write. I'm sending it, as right now it's difficult for me to compose words aloud, so writing this is a more coherent way to convey this news. It's not easy to express this. [30 days later, ditto.]

We were delayed in our return to Ecuador. Once more, the lawyer did not fulfill his promises to get our visas. After over a year, we languished, now technically illegals.

She had to get an emergency tourist visa to get back from Los Angeles last autumn, and when the same lawyer whom we were stuck with as he had the physical documents sent from the U.S. and California state departments and the FBI background checks in his possession failed to come through, she had to go to the Ecuadorian consulate in Los Angeles. She found out one of the head staff was also a dog lover, and somehow her appeal to be able to get back to Ecuador to see our 13-year-old canine won over the bureaucrat, who pulled some strings. A departure date delayed considerably as she lacked legal permission to reenter Ecuador without a visa.

Well, this scenario played out again. For both of us this time last month. So, after four trips to the Consulate, the second time with her home-baked cookies, the same official pulled more strings, and jerked those of our errant lawyer with an "official call" she made in front of us, which eventually got him to deliver paperwork pending.

We got the visas at 6:15 pm. The next morning before dawn, we finally flew back. About twelve hours after our much-delayed flights south, which we had to keep cancelling and rebooking, she felt a brief, sharp pain in her lower side. Then difficulty in breathing, and eventually some difficulty in speaking. We guessed she'd gotten COVID, or an embolism from clotting during the flight. (Not to mention the man who coughed the entire first leg of the flight, five hours-plus, next to me, and behind her seat in the row ahead.) She soon worsened, and we called 911. This took a while to arrive here in Ecuador, so there was a gap between this and her admission to the ER. The first hospital, in the small city of 40,000 about 10 kilometers away, could not figure out where or what her infection was. A dire place, McMurphy's Cuckoo's Nest.

She was transferred again by ambulance, which even on PanAmerican highway is quite a jolt, to a provincial public hospital in the city about 30 kilometers away from our home. In Latin America, unknown to me beforehand, a family member must stay by the patient, or within earshot, as any medication or supplies must be purchased by him or her, outside the gates, at a 24-hour pharmacy. [I bracket edits done which I didn't want to include in the original notes to loved ones…For a still relatively strapping lanky lad, palely standing out among the locals, for me added duties as required included gurney lifting, transfers to scan and x-ray contraptions, and shifting up a patient who in delirium kept working down. Plus trying to keep her oxygen mask on and her tube feeds in place. No discreetly drawn curtain kept me out, but rather within this encounter, night and day.] So I had to stay by her side, or very near, the entire time. It was explained to me later that the culture here is still traditional, oriented to the family caring for the loved one up to the time of death, and the aftermath, within the community, rather than this process happening out of one's sight in an institution. What it must have been like in Ireland until very recently too. [Her snapshot from our very adjacent pueblo cemetery, Dia de Los Muertos, 2023.]

[Perhaps, my Irish fatalistic mindset ponders on a lonely midnight as I revise this, the price exacted for the luck of living thirteen months amidst great beauty is the loss accelerated by the dire conditions of public hospitals, which fuels more fatalism in a more stoic culture where both native and Catholic influences witness death unflinchingly. Where pets become dinner, where KFC=haute cuisine, and guinea pigs upended baring rodent teeth and grasping claws decorate markets among meat without cellophane. And graveyards fill with frolicking kids and lunching elders.]

I was able only to go by bus back home to grab clothes and change, for I had not any idea I'd be gone for not hours, but two nights and three days in the waiting room or sitting by bedside in ER. I had to find the housekeeper's niece to stay two hours in my stead. They'd told me that my wife would move to a better facility in Quito, but this never happened, as I found out on my return to the provincial hospital by bus, suitcase and backpack full of her clothes and snacks. Doctors told me her condition was "very grave." They didn’t prevaricate with false hopes. No bedside manner. No euphemism.

She passed away in the middle of the night. I wasn't permitted inside the intensive care unit at this last stage. However, I'd been able to kiss her forehead, as she was finally sedated. Her heart had gone into tachyocardiac arrest and she was not able to have her body calmed for three days. She basically wore her heart out as apparently she reacted to a side effect of her prescribed medication. Luckily the last coherent exchange we had was she expressing via gestures and attempts at speaking that she loved me, and I returned the message best as I could. I kept assuring her that Sons #1 and #2 were flying down. They did arrive, but twenty-four or so hours after she'd departed this life. I wasn't allowed any contact. The last encounter I had was kissing her tired brow, while whispering near a Christ-crucified statue the Shema in Hebrew.

[Her coffin was brought back for an overnight vigil in the faux-capilla (above) on the grounds of the hacienda. This setup was arranged by the kind folks here, so those who worked here and who she taught English to could pay their respects. As the only cremation services are far off in Quito, she ironically was able to be driven there and back after all. Her cremains rest in a wooden box behind me as I tap these words out.]

They helped me cope with complications that demanded our immediate attention. Payments for services rendered, certification to be verified and signed, meals paid, drivers and dog-feeders compensated. We called on [our sons' respective helpmeets “Terrie” and “Cailin” and] a few friends in our close circle back in California to assist with matters that could be done remotely. And we had a few local people she and I knew who stepped in to help with Ecuadorian bureaucracy, translation, paperwork.

My sons had to fly back two nights ago. I've now been tasked with trying to unravel her current film business status, but lacking insider knowledge, even with assistance, this remains a challenge, as well as my having to stay behind to pet-sit. Our old dog has to wait, it could be one month or three, for official certification to go on a flight back to the U.S. The other two street dogs we inevitably "adopted" I hope to put up for the same, but in a nation full of strays, finding a home for them both as a pair is likely impossible, but I have to arrange their care. The cat goes airborne, no prob.

[Update: Plan B: trio traipse off to Imbabura’s take on Snoopy’s Daisy Hill Puppy Farm to live out alloted spans with a family, alongside three smaller mutts, two cats, but outside, a triplex dog house, funded by me doubtless decades to come, along with a food allowance stipend c/o Western Union, to the couple who kept vigil with me.]

[This was carved out of a 300-year old toppled tree at the hacienda (founded 1609), as an indigenous portrayal of the life-forces surrounding this place, under the gaze of Mama and Taita (daddy, papa) Imbabura, in a charged space between them and Cotopaxi. While it looks as if Ma and Pa are two separate peaks, this belies their unity. It’s just that in their last flare-up ca. 7000 BCE, their pyroclastic pique shattered the caldera, spewing out the water that filled the laguna, once fed by no fluid quebradas.]

This delays my own return to Los Angeles, but we plan later this spring a memorial there. I hope in a nice park. Part of her ashes will stay here in our house in Ecuador, which we're keeping for our sons. But likely I will be longer term in Los Angeles at the little place that she’d spent years [in retrospect, a big chunk of our retirement funds, go figure. If you want to make the forces around and beyond us laugh, make plans for “tercer edad.”] remodelling from the studs up which we called The Owl House, where we first lived as a pair, nestled among trees, within nearly batting range of Dodger Stadium where the Big Blue Wrecking Crew was winning the ‘88 Series. Part of her ashes will be there. The remaining third in the redwood forest near Santa Cruz, where our close friends live, a haven and its dwellers which we've long loved.

That is a sad story, never-ending for us all when we must add to its terrible iterations like the hundred billion humans who've preceded us, of those awful few but long hours. It's inexplicable why she had to fall ill here when a day or two before, she could have had Kaiser care in L.A. There must be a cosmic pull that drew her back to our adopted home, amidst splendor, as her resting place, instead. Indeed, the more I stay here, the more convinced that whatever power emanates within and without us resonates from rocks, rivers, winds, wuthering. The sacred surrounds us, inextricably rather than penned within a ritual, a sanctuary, a definition. No barrier between sky, soil, depth. Only transition. Neither punishment nor reward follows. Only return. As those persisting longest beneath this 15,000 foot peak affirm, despite centuries of guile, resignation, inspiration, and/or persuasion, the new Mormon temple down the road notwithstanding, or the giant Catholic church built upon an indigenous mass “tola” tomb, itself vacant since a massive quake 150 years ago. Look at these photos, and let them simmer. For those of you lucky enough to have known her in person, and those who read this never yet having had the fun of dining off her splendid repasts, I hope that your love for her eases her passage from this restive earth…Peace upon her.

[Photos with the exceptions from the hacienda across the “quebrada” arroyo, Dia de Los Muertos, three dog night, Thanks-Hanukkah in Cascadian Son #1’s Portland, 2021, were taken by me on our first day, first jetlagged hour visiting what would soon become our Casa Quinde, hummingbird house, three miles high, under Imbabura.]