The Passing of a Generation

Each generation wants new symbols, new people, new names. They want to divorce themselves from their predecessors.
Jim Morrison

Distinguished ancestors shed a powerful light on their descendants, and forbid the concealment either of their merits or of their demerits.
Sallust

I believe that one of the most difficult writing tasks is to attempt to pay tribute to a recently deceased relative, especially one who meant a lot to the writer. Treading on this emotional ground makes it easy to fall into bathos, or overdone sentimentality.

Still, in spite of the danger, I shall try to honor a favorite uncle.

Last month, on June 19, to be exact, in Granada, Nicaragua, Guillermo Sirias, the last surviving member of my father’s immediate clan—four male siblings—died at the age of eighty-three. With my uncle Guillermo’s passing, the generation of Siriases that preceded my own has vanished from this earth.

Of all of my father’s brothers, my uncle Guillermo was the one I knew best—partly because he survived the longest, but also because he was the one with whom I spent the most time. What’s more, the bulk of our relationship took place when I was already an adult, when we were able to converse and deal with each other as equals. And this allowed me to understand—more so than with my other uncles, and perhaps even my father—the man he was.

My uncle Guillermo was a restless spirit. During my Los Angeles childhood, he wasn’t really part of my family’s orbit. At the time he was living in Guadalajara, México, where he attended the university. Related to this, there is a story, I believe, which best illustrates the peculiar way in which my uncle Guillermo lived his life. As a young man, then residing in Panamá—in the 1940’s—my uncle worked as a barber, cutting hair for American servicemen stationed in Fort Clayton. When he migrated—with my grandmother and the rest of his brothers—to the United States, he planned to continue earning a living as a barber. The problem was that, in the States, my uncle Guillermo needed a barber’s license. After a couple of months in barber school, while studying charts depicting the structure of the human cranium, my uncle quit school, saying, “I might as well become a physician if I’m going to have to learn all this.”

And that’s when he packed his bags and left Los Angeles for México, to study medicine at the Universidad Autónoma de Guadalajara.

My earliest memories of my uncle Guillermo are of the medical student whose occasional appearances in Los Angeles were cause for joyous get-togethers with plenty of food, drink, and laughter. And, always, to celebrate my uncle Guillermo’s return, both he and my uncle Eduardo, who did become a licensed barber and operated his own barbershop, would bring out their clippers to give every man and boy in the extended family a haircut.

After completing his medical studies, my uncle Guillermo, who didn’t want to bother obtaining a license to practice medicine in the States, opened a clinic in Tijuana—a decision fueled by his desire to remain somewhat close to the family. But even then he was only a sporadic presence in my life; and at least ten years went by at one stretch, while I spent my adolescence in Nicaragua, where I didn’t see him or hear a word from him.

It wasn’t until 1975, at my grandmother’s funeral, that our relationship truly began. A few years later, by sheer coincidence, we both ended up living in Nicaragua, under the same roof, for a year. It was then that we became close.

But our paths again diverged for nearly two decades—during this time my uncle worked for several years with AIDS patients in Washington, D.C., having at last obtained his license to practice medicine in the States, before eventually returning to Nicaragua—until I moved back in 1998. My wife and I visited him often at his home in Granada, where he lived alone.

Shortly after resuming our relationship, on New Year’s Eve—as 1998 turned into 1999—my uncle Guillermo, my wife, and I were sitting on a bench in Granada’s Parque Central when the bells of the Cathedral began to toll, calling the faithful to midnight mass, an event my uncle insisted we attend. Unexpectedly, as fireworks and other festive sounds engulfed us, my uncle Guillermo—under the influence of alcohol, the bane of the Siriases, with the exception of my father—broke into sobs.

“It’s so terrible being alone. I’ve made some bad choices in my life, and now I’m facing them all.”

And, in all honesty, my uncle Guillermo made many questionable choices that, when I was a boy, the older family members spoke about in whispers. For instance, he married three times. (And these are the marriages that we knew about. My uncle led such a secretive life, disappearing for years at a time, that the things he may have done during these absences are anyone’s guess.) But he did leave behind two children that he loved very much: a daughter, Bruni, from his second marriage, and a son, Salomón, from his third.

Salomón is now a member of the U.S. Air Force. He kept in touch with his father to the end—which is something that I know gave my uncle Guillermo great joy. But as hard as my uncle tried to reconcile with Bruni, his daughter, she could never bring herself to forgive his existential restlessness, and my uncle’s failure to mend the gap was—during the final years of his life, when he sensed the end approaching—his greatest source of anguish.

With my uncle Guillermo’s passing, my generation of Siriases now takes a big step forward to face our own mortality. The buffer he represented between life and death has been removed, and the question of what ultimately becomes of us haunts me now more than ever.

What’s more, I feel as if I my blood ties to Granada, Nicaragua, my second hometown—my first being LA—have been severed. My uncle’s home was the last refuge in this city where I could show up unannounced, suitcase in hand, and know that I’d be well received. Moreover, with my uncle’s death, I’ve lost the consolation of knowing that another voice, not unlike my father’s, still remained on this earth.

I agree with Jim Morrison’s statement that each new generation seeks to establish a separate identity from the previous one. But I’m now at an age where I no longer wish to rebel. On the contrary, today I thrive on continuity.

But as much as I would love to have my father and my uncles back among the living, I find great comfort in knowing that they’ve gone on to a well-deserved rest.