​From:

Mario's grandson, Sam Freilich

 

The truth is, wrote Cervantes of his hero Don Quixote, that when his mind was completely gone, he had the strangest thought that any lunatic in the world ever had, which was that it seemed reasonable and necessary to him, both for the sake of his honor and as a service to the nation, to become a knight errant and travel the world with his armor and his horse to seek adventures and engage in everything he had read that knights errant engaged in, righting all manners of wrongs and, by seizing the opportunity and placing himself in danger and ending those wrongs, winning eternal renown and everlasting fame.

 

Since I was young my grandfather told me to read Don Quixote. He would say, stubbornly, that everything there was to learn in life could be found in that very long book. He loved it. Two days ago, when I found out he passed away, I finally went out and bought a copy of it.

 

He collected lots of things. His house was full of different treasures from the trips he and my grandmother took around the world, posters for bullfights in Spain, Russian dolls from Belgium, and geodes from South America. There were, also, the lithographs of the Man of La Mancha that lined their hallway in Des Moines.  Since his death, a number of friends of mine, most who had never even met my grandfather, have expressed their own grief at his passing. I had, not even fully realizing it, told them stories about him. How he had visited Dali in Spain, how his father had owned silver mines and harvested cocaine in Bolivia. I never was fully confident that these stories were true, but I told them anyways. All my friends knew Tata.

 

In the last part of his life, my grandfather was always on one quest or another. After his wife passed away, he traveled around the country visiting family and old friends. He wrote a book about my grandmother and, then, when that wasn’t enough, a sequel. He would hand them out to people like handshakes. He began seeing mediums too. He was desperate to find a way to maintain a connection with his wife, however psychic or astrological the means. His love for her seemed heroic. It had mythic, chivalric dimensions. It seemed to me like a type of model for love, despite the costs. At a certain point it also started to seem delusional. He saw mediums in Los Angeles and in Arizona. Sometimes they told him what he wanted or needed to hear, other times they told him that his wife was “busy with other things.” He only really stopped seeing the mediums – not when they wouldn’t take his money anymore – but when his mind started to go.

 

He crashed a car while driving near his home, and over the next seven or so years my grandfather’s mind capitulated to dementia. At first, I think, he was aware of the ways dementia was overtaking him. He could tell the difference between his own memories and what was missing. Quickly, though, that line disappeared. It was both frustrating and tragic – though tragic doesn’t seem to get at the real sadness of it – to watch this man, who had been so vibrant and charismatic, who had been a great scholar of South American theater, who loved his children, his grandchildren, and his friends, to watch him slowly disappear. (It reminds me of another story my grandfather used to tell me to read, one which I still haven’t read, by Julio Cortazar about a man smoking a cigarette in a plaza in Buenos Aires, and who vanishes a little with each puff.)

 

The mourning was gradual. I had a difficult time reconciling the person I knew the past five years, who couldn’t remember the word “blue,” with the man I had known as a child. He talked to me about visiting a mountain in La Paz, his birthplace. Or about dreaming in Spanish. He painted landscapes, the same mountain over and over again. He would begin stories, but they would fail to make any sense. One night, a few years ago, during dinner at my parents’ house, he rose from the table and began telling us how grateful of us he felt, how he knew that his mind was leaving him and how sorry he was of that – both for himself and for us. It was lucid, epiphanic. His speech quickly trailed off, you could see the thought, like condensation on a window, vanishing. I may be misremembering the moment, though that would also feel true to Tata. What always mattered for him was less the facts and details than the feeling. This was especially true the less and less sense he made. It seemed reasonable and necessary, it seemed heroic.