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A Puerto Rican couple starting a family in New York City in the late 1960’s was full of challenges that are foreign to the next generation. Most would say that is a good thing. That is as it should be but what are we to think of what our parents endured for us to have a better life? My parents arrived in New York following the third great wave of domestic migration (la gran migracion) of Puerto Ricans who moved to New York from 1952-1953. By this time, New York had established Puerto Rican neighborhoods but jobs were scarce, especially for the uneducated. My mother worked as a seamstress and my father could not initially find a job so he was sent by his aunt to the Job Corp. in Kentucky after working on a farm in Tampa , Florida for a summer. My father, who had 27 brothers and sisters from two mothers had been abandoned by his father at an early age and had lived with his step-father who was a life-time alcoholic.
He did share with my mother his regret for having hit his step-father when he was a teenager, but most of his regrets were kept to himself, festering inside to be revealed later as unrestrained anger towards us. He also had a second life but we were never to learn about it. It did not matter after he contracted HIV. I wondered how he got the disease. He was vehemently anti-drugs and alcohol, a trait that I am sure he acquired after seeing the damage that it did to many family members. He said he believed he acquired the disease through a blood transfusion. We had no reason to doubt him and how he got the disease became less and less important as we watched him valiantly endure its barrage.
Everything changed for my father the moment he was diagnosed. He was a humiliated man that had no choice but to face the prospect of an unhappy life cut short. He was always a man of prayer but now it was prayer without pride. He was losing his strength daily and with it his care of whether he impressed others. He began to apologize for all the wrong he did to us.
“Dennis, I just could not admit to my family that I was wrong. I was so wrong.”
He had nothing left to cling to and we watched as his ego dissolved into nothing. There was nowhere for him to stand that gave him security. He could not be attached to the life that he created because that life was coming to an end. After his ego and his past had left him, he began to show his true nature- a caring, loving, sincere man whose only work in life was to be present, here and now. The present moment was all he had. The masks were gone, the anger was gone, the fight was over, all he could do is show up every day until he didn’t. He became the most beautiful human being I have ever known.
Could the moment have come sooner? Could I have gotten to know that beautiful human being earlier?
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