A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes: A Son’s Memoir

By Rodrigo Garcia

Gabriel Garcia Marquez once said the thing he hated most about dying is that he wouldn’t be able to write about it. Fortunately, his son Rodrigo, a filmmaker in his own right, has done a bang-up job of chronicling the last weeks of his father’s life in 2014.

What strikes you most about this short, lucid memoir “A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes” is that what Rodrigo goes through is not unlike what many of us with elderly parents have gone through. First comes the dementia. Then the pneumonia sets in, followed by round-the-clock visits from doctors, and finally the moment of passing. Rodrigo’s description of his first look at his deceased father’s body is not only familiar and free from sentimentality, but devastatingly spot on.

The difference between our parents’ deaths and GGM’s, of course, is that in the case of the latter, one of the greatest novelists on earth has died. So besides the usual challenges of arranging funerals and a memorial service, Rodrigo is faced with the keeping the press and throngs of admirers away from the family home in Mexico City. Rodrigo reports he had to actually disassemble his father’s hospital bed rather than return it so that adoring fans would not somehow find it and keep pieces of the bed for themselves.

The best parts of Rodrigo’s memoir: when he recounts his father’s occasional moments of lucidity—i.e., when he recognizes his wife Mercedes or flirts with his pretty nurse. The saddest are his descriptions of the gradual failings of his father’s bodily functions, one by one, along with his

memory.

The reason we love biographies so much is that they allow us to see how great people lived. The beauty of a memoir like Rodrigo’s is that he has afforded us an intimate, personal look at how people of every stripe—be they Pulitzer Prize novelists or our own family members—face death.