I “was born” when my son died: Recent Episodes
Josho Campillay
He used his 615 days to show me how I had wasted 13,674 of mine.
[Only 20 chapters available on this channel]
My wife, my children and I were having dinner when, out of the blue, Ezequiel brought to the table the issue of the Magi, Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy. “Daddy, I already know it’s you guys. But I’d like to ask you: Why didn’t you tell us?”
My wife Guadalupe and I exchanged glances and we immediately turned our eyes upon Abril, to see what she’d say or do. Then she added, “I know everything too, and I’m not mad about Santa or the Bunny, but I am mad about the fairy and the wise men.”
Guadalupe was speechless; she looked at me and hinted that I answer them.
“Where to start?” I wondered…
It’s just “constructive criticism”: we have heard this many times and we have repeated it as well. In a world where it may be trendy to expose negativity on social media, mass media, or even in our group of friends; we are always criticizing and complaining. The negative burden prevails. There is nothing good, we always find something negative to highlight.
We can't help it. We read or hear something and we have to give our opinion right away, which will usually be based on destructiveness.
I stopped to think about how long it takes to build something. A drinking-glass comes to mind: hours melting the raw material that will later become glass, and then it will be shaped into a vessel. Destroying it would take the same time it takes to fall off my hand onto the floor.
Sure, destroying is always easier than constructing. But, careful! Because hatred is dangerous: it might grow so much from within that it will eventually destroy us.
We have a place in our house where we can express gratitude. You can sit and hear nothing but the sound of life: The air, the water, the birds, the trees and their leaves stirred by the wind.
I wonder if Faith can be associated to a sound, and immediately this is what I imagine.
I wonder if there’s music at the place from where we came?
I am connected with my essence, as I let time take control. Because we are in those days when the soul gets sad.
But it is not depression. It's anguish combined with many colored feelings. My soul was in the same peaceful state in 2013, before five thirty in the afternoon of October the first.
It is unimaginable for a human being to thank for a misfortune. In fact, we dread it, and that’s why in our prayers, we always request to be able to escape from painful situations. We expect to have lives without suffering because we consider ourselves good people. “If I’m a good son, a good father, why did this or that happen to me?” It’s a recurrent thought of thousands of us. Sometimes we think that nothing bad should ever happen to us and that it should only happen to others. Why? Isn’t life made up of good and bad situations?
If we reflect upon it, we are born with a single certainty: One day, our life will end. For life to end, death is necessary; and death isn’t something we consider ‘good’. Nor does it come attached to a happy moment. People usually die after a tragedy, an illness, or because their bodies wore out or stopped functioning. In any case, what happened is not something good, according to our understanding. But, how else should it be? How can life end without it being something “bad” for us or those who remain?
I woke up and the day gave me its best smile. I took the car out of the garage and, as I was waiting for my wife so that we could go to work, I noticed that the garden was green and full of trees and life.
My wife came out with freshly baked bread she had made with her own hands for breakfast, and sat by my side. We closed our eyes and gave thanks before leaving home, something we do as we start every day. Entrusting the day to Our Father’s hands gives us the guarantee that nothing will go wrong.
Our children Abril and Ezequiel were at home. That morning we let them take the day off, and they didn’t go to school.
We set off to work, where we used to host a radio program every day. It was a show full of life, music, and laughter, where nothing got clouded by the gray shade of the conflicts life may present to us.
What differentiates adults from children is that children are not ashamed, because they haven’t lost their innocence yet. Childhood is one of the most precious gifts of life, and as we grow up, we forget how beautiful it is not to have other responsibilities than being careful so that our little toy car doesn´t break, or changing our doll’s little clothes.
Growing up makes us lose not only our innocence, but also our ability to be amused by anything, any object that shines or makes a funny noise, to wonder at our discoveries. Childhood is being able to feel amazed, because during that period, our lives are clean and are just starting to be written in white sheets of paper. Laughing, playing, singing, doing mischief as if we were children again is what we adults need, if we want to recover our desire to live which, many times, adversity takes away from us.
This morning, my wife and I asked ourselves a question: If we could sum up our experiences on a piece of paper, what would we teach our children? And we realized that we hadn’t given it much thought. We raise our children and as we go, we learn from what we teach them. So I decided to put it in writing.
I had a dream that stirred painful memories. As I wanted to forget the details, I didn’t tell anybody about it and maybe in some way it helped erase a great part of it. When I woke up, almost by an unexplainable chance, I saw a picture from when I was 37 years old and we were with our three little ones, each of them lost in their own thoughts.
I looked at them closely and studied the attitude each of them had on the picture. And even though I had taken the picture myself, at that moment I couldn’t have even remotely imagined that someday—not so faraway—I would look at it again and our reality would be so different.
Abril was seven years old and, true to her dreamy personality, she was playing while gazing into the sky. Agustin was eighteen months old, he was barefoot and his socks were dirty; he was trying to put rocks into a small plastic cup with his chubby little hands. And Ezequiel, who was five years old, was staring off beyond a point I could never see, in love with the silence that only he can find.
I came across a phrase by Benjamin Franklin that speaks about time and it says that if we love life, we should take care of time, “for that’s the stuff life is made of.” So, I kept thinking about that.
It was February 2016, and I stopped by the clinic for a few minutes to see my grandmother Dora, whose time in this world seemed to be coming to an end. In the short time I was there, I couldn’t help but feel the pain of seeing how all her strength ebbed away. I also saw many people worried for the health of their loved ones, so I began to reflect on how uncompromising time is with human beings.
It’s just that everything is measured in time. If you want to buy a TV, you have to devote time of your life to work so that you can earn the money to pay for it...
Today I woke up thinking about a conversation that I had with my wife in the early morning. She had fallen asleep with a fear that caused a lump in her throat: How would our children cope if one of us is gone? As her concern grew, I told her that I had also considered it myself, since I had seen such situations that broke my heart: children who watch how their parents depart, and their departure disrupts the life of entire families.
On October 1st, 2013 at five thirty in the afternoon, we went through the worst tragedy of our lives –our son, who was only a year and eight months old, had drowned and died in our swimming pool. Today our son's time in heaven has been longer than his time here on earth.
Thursdays were our busiest days at work, but on this particular Thursday, when my wife Guadalupe and I were finishing up, Abril and Ezequiel came to visit us in our office after spending all day playing with their cousins. As they were in their school recess, neither of them attended their music lessons. So I seized the opportunity this visit provided, turned on my keyboard and suggested we sang for a while.
I found a picture we took when we had been living in our new home for a few hours. It happened in March 2012, when we were enjoying a nap together. Agustin was only two months old, and he had fallen asleep on my chest. I stared at the photo, trying to understand why sometimes tough things happen in people’s lives.
At first, there may be two answers: One is free will, since we have the ability to make decisions with total freedom; and those decisions always lead us to where we are in this very moment. During the day, we make thousands of decisions: when we wake up, we decide whether to put on our shoes to go to the bathroom or to go barefoot; whether to wash our teeth or our face first; and so forth all day long. Millions of decisions a month... And billions a year.
The other answer to my question is that God has His purposes. And I base that answer on my Faith. But... What are God’s purposes for people? Sometimes we see terrible situations in other people’s lives, and we wonder why...
If I had to create a metaphor with time and space, I would summarize it like this: She is my best moment and my best place.
We were having one of our usual conversations—those profound talks that take us back in time, and then bring us back. In October 2013, when we were at the lowest point a person can be; as we were going through the storm, the need to write emerged.
When my children were six and eight years old, at breakfast, they would throw away half of their cup of milk, claiming they were full. They’d set the vegetables aside from their meals because they didn’t like them. This situation repeated itself every day, and there was no way to avoid that without having to scold them.
When we feel sad, colors get altered. Everything looks faded. Even light disappears. Wherever we go, we perceive people who feel bad, like we do. We only listen to the muffled voices.
We smile, and colors are strong again. The people we look at also smile. They don’t shout at us; they respond with kindness when we talk to them.
When we feel sad, doors close before us. We smile, and we discover new opportunities.
When we feel sad, people only approach us out of pity, and just for a moment.
When we feel happy, people approach us to know the reasons, and maybe, so they can feel the same way.
There are days which for millions of people are normal, for many other people, they're unbeatable, and for others, they are spent with a little discomfort from the memories that cause a stir. Days in which you try to get up with yesterday's strength, when your legs today are weak for the fear of experiencing again the worst of sufferings.
It’s being able to feel without the senses getting involved. It’s being able to speak, knowing that the answer will be understood, and not heard. It’s being able to see, even if your eyes are closed.
It’s the emotion of all emotions. The calm for anguish. The one that recovers the air gone in sighs. It’s the sanity that balances madness. The certainty that danger is over. It’s relief, without the need of medicine.
It’s the main ingredient of happiness. It’s the certainty about the intangible. The one that removes the limits of time. The one that gives out promises no one dares to make. The only one that has the power of turning an end into a beginning.
The day we lost Agustin, my wife, my children and I felt a great disappointment with our Father. Although I think it must be natural because human beings who are faced with the loss of a loved one are frail, I tried to find more answers. Obviously, those answers are hard to find, mainly due to our inadequate capacity to understand issues of such magnitude that, until today, remain almost impossible to explain.
It was eleven in the morning and my son Agustin was even more restless than usual. While I tried to work at my home office, he —being less than two years old— only wanted to play. So I turned on my keyboard, and he started pounding on the keys, singing and moving his body. That’s how we usually spent our mornings.
This book was born after the loss of Agustin, my son, who was nearly two years old.
The name of this work—which unknowingly began to take shape in 2013—may be hard to understand, and the only way you’ll comprehend what you are about to read in these texts is trying to put yourself in my place.
I went through seven years of thoughts that could have led me to live an entire life within the walls of madness. It was hard for me to talk about what I was going through because I felt that nobody could understand my pain, and because it wasn’t fair that the world received the burden of my anguish.