An Obituary for my Abuelo

As part of my job for CNN, I write and produce obituaries. Today I am sharing my obituary for someone I fiercely loved: my Abuelo Arsenio. My grandfather died last night in his sleep, surrounded by the people who most loved him, in the home he built for his family. It is my deepest honor to share this glimpse into his life.

Arsenio Nazario Mendez was an Island man, a steward of the land, a lettuce farmer with little wants or needs who loved music as much as he loved sweets.

He was born in Puerto Rico in 1929, a child of the Great Depression which would last another decade. It was also the year when flights began from San Juan to Miami, and when literate women secured the right to vote.  

Twenty-two years later, in the early 1950s, he would be on a military ship headed to the Korean War as part of the 65th Infantry, nicknamed the Borinqueneers. Several medals of honor hang from a glass case on my grandparent’s living room. Over the years, in moments of unguarded honesty, I saw glimpses of the horrors lived during that war. In the middle of a memory, his eyes would turn glassy and distant. He would shake his head as if trying to ward off old demons.  

A year after the end of the Korean War, on June 23, 1954, he married my grandmother, Neida Velez Vega, our Abuela Cuqui. She was a friend of his family who lived in town but somehow had found her way into his rural barrio. At nineteen, Neida had deep expressive eyes, full lips and a stunning gaze. At heart she was generous and kind, with the inner strength of an ox.

They built a humble home around their rural community in the town of Sabana Grande, where they would spend the rest of their lives. As far as I know, they only left the Island once, so Abuelo Arsenio could undergo heart surgery in Miami.

Abuelo Arsenio always said, that after the war, he was done with travel. He had seen the world and realized that everywhere he went was much of the same. No matter the country, people had the exact same problems. He was right, of course. I later learned this from my own travels.

As a farmer he was dedicated and skilled. A man who woke up daily before dawn to tend seedlings, pull out weeds, package crops and make deliveries in his shinny Ford 150 truck.

As a kid, sometimes I walked the land with him, wondering how he and my grandmother managed to grow perfect rows of crispy green, Puerto Rican variety lettuce month after month, year after year. I’m pretty sure it had something to do with the cow patties of fresh manure he collected in the back of his pick-up. At times, he would let my cousins and I tag a long on these expeditions. There was an absurd kind of joy in running wild through fields, calling out the location of the patties and watching our grandpa shovel cow shit into the back of his truck, knowing we were helping the family business.

When he wasn’t working, you could find him swaying in his rocking chair or the hammock hanging from the front porch, listening to old boleros and trovas on a battery radio. He once tried his hand at making piraguas—Puerto Rican shaved ice—and to this day, I have no clue where he procured the giant block of ice that he gingerly dropped on my grandmother’s dining room table along with multiple bottles of sticky sweet syrup and a real cast iron ice shaver. With the same gusto, he tried his hand at the harmonica, the Spanish guitar and the cuatro—which last May he passed on to me and now hangs proudly in my living room.  

Those were the good times—the happy memories. But my Abuelo was a beautifully complicated man. There were many years of watching him struggle with alcoholism. Of playing the “find-the-bottle” game, in which, as kids, my cousins and I would search the house for hidden bottles of rum. It was usually up to me to either swap the rum with tap water or toss the bottles into the sugar cane field behind their house. I never knew which pissed him off more, and frankly I didn’t care. I didn’t want to lose him to this sickness.

There were also stories of women. At one point, there was a mistress in the next town over and talks among the women in the family of what should be done about it. And yet somehow—against all modern relationship thinking—they held onto their marriage vows. They saw past all the pain and eventually found love again. The “secret” for staying married 67 years: a hell of a lot of forgiving and forgetting. Together, they raised two daughters, four granddaughters and a gaggle of great-grandchildren.

My grandparents were a rock in which we could anchor ourselves. They were a home to always come back to.

The last time I saw my Abuelo Arsenio back in November, I left him sitting on his favorite rocking chair, listening to an oldies radio station. We took pictures and he held my hand, even though he wasn’t exactly sure who I was or why I was standing in his living room. Me, I just felt lucky. Lucky to have known him, lucky to have been loved by him, lucky to have been his first-born nieta. Lucky to have a part of him always live in me and in everything I do, never forgotten.

He lived to be 92 years old.

On Monday, his body will be buried in the Masons cemetery in Sabana Grande, where he was born, where he lived and died. He will be wearing a guayabera—nothing too fancy. Just something simple and practical, something he would’ve liked.