Looking back on a life well-lived
So much to do before time runs out. Give away the fine china. Get rid of the jewelry and a ton of books with split bindings and yellowed pages.
"I don't expect to live long," Nancy Tovar says as she surveys the paintings, knickknacks and other faded treasures in her living room. "I'm getting rid of a lot of things."
In her 70s, Tovar is where we all will one day be -- suspended between memories and mystery, taking stock of a life that seemed but a flash.
A colleague had told me a year or so ago about Tovar and her husband, both of them longtime activists and neighborhood historians. He told me about the amazing cactus garden at their 100-year-old Lincoln Heights home.
I'd always meant to go see Nancy and Rudy Tovar, sit on the front porch and hear their stories.
But I almost waited too long.
The cactus is still there, towering scarecrow stalks of it, and Nancy is feeling a little better after the last round of chemotherapy for ovarian cancer. But Rudy has had to move into a home in Rosemead, his thoughts fogged over, his life a trick of broken timelines.
"He thinks he's in a hotel," Nancy says. "He asks, 'Why am I here? Why don't you take me home?' "
Nothing in her life was harder, Tovar says, than moving Rudy out of the home they shared. Learning of her cancer 2 1/2 years ago didn't compare. Being told recently that it had spread to her lymph nodes didn't compare.
Losing Rudy was everything.
"He's going deaf," she says, wishing she could share her hopes and fears with him. "You don't know whether he hears you or not."
They called themselves El Chicano y La Gringa on their blog, Rudy and Nancy's Barrio Newsletter. He was born in Mexico and did hard labor for the DWP; she was from Indiana, a graphic artist. They met as kindred spirits in the 1960s at the rabble-rousing Church of the Epiphany in Lincoln Heights. It was a time of brown berets, farmworker strikes and the Chicano movement.
He had his life, though, and she had hers. Until 1979, when they began dating.
The dating went on and on and on, the most cautious courtship in the history of love.
Mayors and presidents came and went, revolutions flared and faded, the Berlin Wall came down, Russia broke into pieces, and they were still dating. Until one day, when, almost on a whim, they decided to walk through a shower of rice.
