I WISH I COULD HEAR HIS VOICE ONCE MORE
Thirteen minutes and 49 seconds. That is the length of the only audio recording I have on my phone of my greatgrandfather’s voice, from two years ago, and I had been meaning for quite a while to make it back to the tiny condo on the country club outside of Holtville my Nana and Tata lived in and interview them again.
I’m not sure why, but I just always thought I would have more time. First, it was “I’ll make sure to go see them after I graduate.” Then, “once I get settled into my new job.” And finally, “once COVID is over.”
I thought I would have more time, but I didn’t. On Feb. 26, my Tata, Ed Valencia, died at the age of 86, another victim of the coronavirus. He and my great-grandmother, my Nana, Mary Valencia, along with their youngest son, my uncle Richie Valencia, 60, were all taken to El Centro Regional Medical Center with COVID-19 in the middle of January. My uncle succumbed to the coronavirus on Jan. 30, and even though Nana and Tata survived, and were able to leave the hospital, the virus hit Tata hard, and he passed soon after that as well.
Before I can even be sad, I feel like I first need to be grateful — how many people get to not only meet their greatgrandparents, but to know them well into their 20s?
Acknowledging this makes it that much harder to let him go. He was an entire living link to my family’s past and to my culture. With my decidedly Germanic name belying my Mexican ancestry, I often feel like a walking symbol of cultural erasure, and yet here I still had my Tata, singing along to “El Rey” and gleefully teasing all manner of relatives in a mix of Spanish and English.
When I heard Tata wasn’t doing well after he and my Nana had been released from the hospital and gone to stay with my uncle in Arizona, I got in the car and headed out there. I knew I would regret not seeing him one last time, especially since I was already vaccinated in one of the trials.
That’s the other thing, though — how fair is it that I got a vaccine first that could have saved Tata?
By the time I got there, Tata was in and out of consciousness, mostly unable to interact. But I guess it’s OK, because I know what he would have said, probably with a Bud Light in his hand and a mischievous smirk splashed across his face: something along the lines of “you only come and visit me when I’m dying?” with one or two Spanish curse words thrown in for effect.
He wasn’t just larger than life in terms of how we knew him as a family. As a kid, I remember hearing his stories about working with the Kennedys; I knew he once ran a cement company in El Centro that had first belonged to his father, and I’d seen the name of his business on sidewalks. But it wasn’t until I was 20 that I understood his stories had significance and that
I needed to get more information.
He told me, in that single interview I did with him, that he met John F. Kennedy in 1959, early in his campaign, at a California Democratic Party event in Fresno. He told me about organizing rallies for the Kennedy campaign around the valley, attending the 1960 Democratic National Convention, my Nana cooking for the Kennedys when they were in town, and how he finally exited political work after Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination.
“Ted Kennedy used to love tacos and Mexican food and he used to come to my house just to eat tacos. She used to feed him,” he said then, turning to my Nana. “Isn’t that right, chata?”
Nana, prone to rolling her eyes at Tata when he got to exaggerating, confirms all of these stories.
Tata “always wanted to be somebody,” she told me on the phone two weeks ago when I decided I had to make it a priority to interview her, too.
It wasn’t until the last couple of weeks, after Tata died, that I decided to scour archives of local newspapers to find mentions of him.
Sure enough, there he was. He’d been in old issues of the Calexico Chronicle the whole time: mentions of him organizing dinners and rallies, his name alongside those of Thomas Lynch, Alan Cranston, and, indeed, John and Robert Kennedy.
He didn’t do it without help, of course. Also among the newspaper clippings I found was a 1965 photo of him at a dinner for a City Council member with my Nana, the woman he married at 18 and who would, a lifetime later, hold his hand as he lay dying.
“I spent my life taking care of Tata, mijo,” she told me. “I would have gone to prison for your Tata. I loved him so much.”
He wanted to be somebody, but clearly he already was — to her. May we all be so lucky to find that kind of love in our lifetimes.
And he was somebody to me, too. It seems like maybe no one is left to remember his story. But I know I will. I just wish I had known it sooner.
On Feb. 26, my Tata, Ed Valencia, died at the age of 86, another victim of the coronavirus.