Contigo - A Verbal Ofrenda for Dad

Contigo

Take in a breath. Suck it in, then blow it out. Feel it pass away on your lips, that wind that your spirit creates. Your inspiration, your aspirations. All here with you in the breath making your chest heave and your heart beat. Breath that makes you live.

Now, sing.

“Recuérdame….”

The Spanish form of “with you” is contigo. In Recuerdame, the Spanish version of the theme song Remember Me from Disney’s Coco, I’m struck by how poetic Contigo is. A single word, containing worlds, as Walt Whitman says.

Lafourcade sings, “Ahora me tenqo que ir mi amor,” - Listen, I have to go, my love.

“Contigo ya estare,” - With you I’ll always be, I shall be, the poetry of Spanish bringing a formality to the -are.

“You contigo siempre voy” - I, with you, shall always go.

Where you go, I’ll go, where you follow, I’ll follow. Your people shall be my people. In death, as in life. To bring in a little bit of Ruth.

I attend a church that does its best to be culturally inclusive. My fellow church member, Mikayla, who is Mexican American, told us that the members of her family let you celebrate someone in the moment, while they were still here with you. At a Dia+Halloween+Samhain event at church, she said this - “If you love someone, do it now. You can make a sugar skull for them now. You can celebrate them in life as well as after they’ve died.”

Her grandfather was ill when she said this; now I can relate.

I think of the bright colors of our altar for that day, a deep orange with black and so much white from bones and cabezas, a mishmash of Halloween and Dia decorations, bringing influences with it from European markers of liminality (witches and cats) to Aztec ancestor celebration (calaveras and cempasulchi marigolds), mine blending with my friends’ and my pastor’s. With one another, poised together, seeming to say, “and also with you,” only in a bit of a cackle instead of a reflexive clap.

The veil is something that the Celts and other Europeans brought with them to the Americas. A veil separating us from our departed loved ones. Two realms, estranged yet connected, thin=close around death times and the annual fall holy days.

Contigo, pregnant. Just like death was before dad passed beyond. His mother waiting beyond the veil, touching him almost, right there in the room with us. I wonder if it was a joyous occasion for her. Pregnant with love, with expectation, pregnant on our side, with grief and curiosity.

Contigo, no breath between words, you and me stuck together as we were in life.

Dad and I were a pair. He was my father, yes, but he was so much more than that. A model of how to live a good life, he tipped a truck driver from his old neighborhood $100 as he drove us back to town after dad’s old Mirage died after a Harry Connick Jr. concert at the Berkeley Bowl. The guy had lived differently, a whole other life, but, my dad, social worker that he was, said that they had lived parallel to each other. Connected by the gauzy threads of a common origin. A veil?

Remember me has “in my arms again,” and as far as I can tell, Contigo suffices in Recuerdame.

Dad and contigo. Dad and me. We combined our travel photos from the Grand Canyon and the Eastern side of the Sierras when I was a young thing, barely 11 or 12. You couldn’t tell them apart, unless you looked hard. Dad’s were better, mine were salvaged from the best of my shiny photo-paper rolls. But in the end, that was our trip: contigo.

Our relationship was a contigo. Even at the very end, he shared his visions of death with me and Geoff intimately, like a contigo. We, or rather I, didn’t realize how family-centered he was until afterwards. Contigo with all of us, contigo with his work friends, contigo with Buddhism and the world.

I remember playing “if it be your will” during a journey, in southern Idaho, to a Tibetan peace garden. My camera turned off on its own, and he and I walked together but apart, a contigo contemplating the fragile and fleeting nature of this realm.

I’ll miss that contigo. Dad was the first great love of my life and I’ve got him to thank for how to live. How to love. I’m not perfect, and my history has pain like anyone else, but the sharing everything and the communion, the contigo, is with me now. As it ever will be.

It’s like the Stockton Rocks painted rock that an Uber driver gave me before he died. Two black palm trees against a deep pink sunset, with white dots like chakra stones, entwined. That’s how I’ll remember dad. In a way it’s going to be hard to find someone to replace him because he’s irreplaceable. I have my pastor-dad, and I have a few male friends. But maybe I’ll always be entwined with dad in some ways, and maybe it’s meant to be.

Contigo ever and always with me, dad. Yes you shall be.