DIED 2017
THOUGH MY OLDER SON met the Ecuadoran girl who is now his wife back when they were in college, and has known her parents almost as long, I did not meet her father until just before the wedding.
I first saw his picture the day of the engagement, which was an elaborate scavenger hunt all over Boston, at the end of which my son’s ladylove found him kneeling in the street with a ring. Her mother and I had flown in to take part in this extravaganza, but her father couldn’t make it. He had been formally asked for her hand, and had given his blessing.
My son is very reserved about the fact that his own father died when he was six, which is kind of funny given all my published work on the subject, or perhaps makes perfect sense. It explains why my son’s mother-in-law-to-be saw a picture of The Skater for the first time at the engagement party. She looked at me wide-eyed and found an old photo of her husband in her phone. When they were in their thirties, they could have been brothers.
This resemblance seemed magical to me, especially knowing how much my son admired this man. He was a financier—my son’s field—and a perfect gentleman, a modest introvert who never talked about himself, with a unusual combination of South American Catholic traditionalism and intellectual openness. My son only learned much later the glamorous story of his career before the national financial crisis that inspired the family’s move to the United States.
Immediately after the engagement, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He tried so hard to beat it, it almost seemed he might. It was a feat of pure will that the wedding went off as planned. That day, you might not even have known he was ill, so replete was he with the joy of the occasion that he almost filled out his tailored suit. In his welcoming toast, he spoke warmly of my son. For one short moment, I felt like fate was trying to make it up to us.
After his father’s death, my son developed a phobia of hospitals, but in the last days of El Suegro, he was there all the time. I loved picturing him in the babbling cluster of Spanish speakers at the bedside. And I love seeing him in the fine wool coat he inherited, too, though it breaks my heart.