An open letter to my parents on the occasion of their 30th anniversary

It makes sense that such a puzzling couple would be celebrating such a momentous milestone in this year2020

Mama y Papa,

I have had you in my life (though, like in the lyrics to Norwegian Wood, it might be more appropriate to say you’ve had me in your lives) for 9,316 days, as of the day I’m writing this first draft. And I’m sure it’s one of the rules of life that children are not supposed to truly understand their parents, yet I’ve come to realize, or, rather feel, like you puzzle me?

You got married mid-December in Colombia and left for the States two weeks later. You’d met only eight months before and now you were leaving your family, your language, your loneliness, because now it was the two of you, strangers who would only have each other. But you carried love with you, and I assume that makes love not a given but a responsibility.

One couldn’t think up a more foreign and challenging situation to throw you both into, so soon into your lives together (new country, language, culture, job, y ese bendito clima tan berraco, por dios, because when had we ever felt sub-zero December temperatures below the equator?). But you made it, four years, and I assume that, though there had to be stumbling blocks along the way, you both managed it in a way that suggested that the two of you were always a given.

Though, on second thought, scratch that comment on how your move to the U.S as newlyweds was the most foreign and challenging of scenarios someone could ever be thrown into. Those four brief years are nothing compared to accepting — and willingly embracing — a lifetime of hardships, when you learn in 1996 that your eighteen-month old son Pablo (whom you named after the nom de guerre of Jaime Bateman, because you are both romantics through and through) has a rare disease, APS Type 1, a chronic thing which will hobble him personally and by extension chain you to him until he dies, or you die, and I’m sure you didn’t know which would be worse, to lose your firstborn before he was even able to speak, or to rob him of the only thing that would force him to stay alive, which was these two parents who would stay to give him their all.

And give your all you have indeed. You have been more selfless with my sister (whom you welcomed in 1997) and me, more than is fair. You have both stayed with each other not out of a sense of duty, but out of love (or is it in love?), true love; out of shared passions in books, in art, in music and movies; belief and faith in liberalism, fairness, truth, decency, the inherent goodness in a hopeless world like your Colombia was.

You are both smart, driven, loved, respected. You could’ve had so much more.

But like Kahlil Gibran’s Prophet when he speaks On Children, you fashioned yourselves into the most perfect of bows, one from which we, your only two arrows, could be nurtured and sent out, firing true, arrows made of the same strong and enduring material as the bow that birthed them, arrows that reap from the vibrancy of a bow whose only purpose became seeing those arrows disappear into the House of Tomorrow. This gift me and my sister can never pay you back for in full.

I guess the thing is that, thirty years into what started as the end of your ‘I’ and continues as the being of your ‘we’, you puzzle me. It’s only when we lose the ability to breathe that we realize the blessings that life endowed us with, and it’s only as I’ve grown up and I’ve seen how things are fiction, that what we call a ‘family’ is different from what we have.

But I can say honestly, I cannot imagine myself here, alive, with a future, had it not been for you two (and my sister as well, of course).

And I can prove it, because you are something that exists and you are something that exists for me, in this year, in this 2020, which happened to be the year in which I found many ways to feel shame at work and fear showing up only for it to be truncated by the pandemic, you saw me get into my longest relationship and break it off with the emotional devastation it involves, you saw what it meant for my long-term therapist to have to no longer see me just when I most needed someone like that, you saw how all of this translated into days of unexplained fasting and nights in which I slept and didn’t want to wake up, into me not taking my medications because what was the point if people outside could kill me because they didn’t want to wear a mask…

And each time, every time you saw me, you both forced me with the (I’ll admit, at times traumatizing) tenacity and fury and fire that only those from Santander speak, to get the hell back up because this is not how I was going to go, how I was going to go out, not yet, not this year.

I’ve been thinking that, if there is a god, she’s been working overtime every day of this year to keep me away from a hospital. And yet I’ve seen and felt death. My faith and understanding in people, in reason, in matters of race and this country’s Original Sin, in this fairy tale we call democracy in that it’s a fairy tale because of how easy it has been for the President to rewrite, have all made my foundations crumble and their importance evaporate, leaving me parched for meaning, for hope.

But I can’t go, not yet, because though this year feels like it’s becoming my understanding of the way the universe works — has always worked — you two are an anomaly, and anomalies, as they are things that puzzle us, are worth living for.

Like I said, it’s been 9,316 days since we met, properly. Your anniversary will be a week from today. Two weeks later, when this annus horribilis ends, it’ll be the 30 year anniversary of the strange way in which you started your lives together, cursing at the inhuman sub-zero temperatures of January in this country. ‘Thankful’ is an empty word, because it is impossible to thank you for 9,316 days and a further 1,825 days before you heard my first cry.

Ricardo, who has the words and helped me edit this, (whose book Historia Oficial del Amor, I should say here, it’s a travesty how it hasn’t been translated into English) reminds us of how there never was a husband and wife who loved each other so, how it was that “nunca unos padres quisieron tanto a sus hijos”, how it is that you both exist and have done so for a third of a century.

Feliz aniversario. No sabré mucho sobre la vida, pero sí se que son una bendición que me gané.

- Pablo

Pablo Ramírez Uribe is a Colombian educator, activist, and writer, who teaches High School English in the United States. He was named by the magazine Semana as one of Colombia’s Top 20 Leaders of 2018 and works for the rare disease community among others. Most importantly, for us all, he still hasn’t grown up. Follow him on Twitter or Instagram.