Kathleen parker A beloved friend passes on as gracefully as he lived
We shall gather for one more margarita and a boat ride to celebrate a life well lived and a passing we all hoped for — without drama, with family, friends, a bowl of ice cream.
Ihadhoped he would wait until I got here, but he was in a rush to go. “I’m dead,” he said a couple of days before he was. “I died yesterday,” he said a few minutes later. Several times, exasperated upon realizing he wasn’t in fact dead, he would chuckle and say, “This is a helluva mess.”
Mauricio Rubio, my stepfather of several decades, was humorous to the end — an end he very much wanted sooner than it finally arrived. At 91, his body was tuckered out; his mind had already been made.
When it’s time, it’s time. No heroic measures, no medicine, just minimal maintenance. He was a doctor after all — a psychiatrist — and he recognized the exit signs before others noticed them. Despite his self-diagnosis — “old” — he wasn’t quite able to coax his vessel out the door. He wanted to depart with the same precision he had lived his life: Disciplined and without bother to others.
Even though Mauricio was my stepfather once removed — meaning he married my stepmother after she and my father divorced (you’ll need a thick sketch pad if you’re serious about tracing my family tree) — he had been part of my life since high school.
He wasn’t so much a father figure as a friend who offered as much as I was willing to receive. He was also a model of how to live — and how to die. Small in stature, huge in spirit, he was in medical school by age 16 and came to the U.S. from Mexico at 21. I wrote about him once before 11 years ago when he decided to return to work at 80. Retirement bored him.
He was a well-known figure in the Tampa Bay area, not only for having treated many in the angst-filled population but also for having married the belle of any ball — Sarah Jane.
She came into my life when I was 4ish, following my mother’s death, and became “Mama” soon thereafter. For her wedding trousseau (women still did that then), she bought matching dresses for me. She was and remains the light that brightens rooms, the party that materializes with her presence.
An interior designer with a knack for transforming the mundane into the sublime, she has made her own mark in Tampa as a member of “The Chislers Inc.,” a group of women dedicated to the historical restoration of the 1891 Tampa Bay Hotel, more recently part of the University of Tampa. She also was featured brilliantly in a book, “A Place Called Canterbury,” by former New York Times writer Dudley Clendinen.
His mother, now deceased, and mine
Ross Douthat
Ramesh Ponnuru both called Canterbury Tower home, and Clendinen lovingly recorded the retirement center’s characters and culture. It was not possible to exclude so colorful a denizen as “Fiesta Jane,” my preferred nickname of many that also include “Mama Jane” and “Toots,” the latter her suggestion when a son-in-law once asked what he should call her.
Together, she and Mauricio made a point of celebrating life. I never heard either complain. When they moved to Canterbury, I asked if they were going there to grow old.
“No, we’re going there to young up!” said Fiesta.
For years they hosted a huge February birthday party for their fellow Aquariuses and assorted Pisces. They served Mauricio’s famous margaritas for full moon parties on their balcony overlooking Tampa Bay. The same balcony brought them a new family member, a cockatiel named “Pepe” who landed there one day. He and Mauricio kept each other close company for 27 years.
“They’re staying alive for each other,” Sarah Jane told me several weeks ago. Pepe visited Mauricio in the health center. They said their goodbyes.
Upon his departure, Mauricio wanted no fuss, no service, no anything — just a brief visit with the Neptune Society, a cremation company that also will spread one’s ashes in the surrounding salt waters. He urged Sarah Jane to heed his wishes but said he knew she wouldn’t. “Well, just have one of your parties, then.”
And so we shall gather for one more margarita and a boat ride to celebrate a life well lived and a passing we all hope for — without drama, with family, friends, a bowl of ice cream (his last meal) and, if you’re lucky, a loyal bird — at peace with one’s time on Earth.
Gracias, salud y hasta luego, amigo.
Amity Shlaes Charles Krauthammer
George Will
TheTodd Akin controversy over “legitimate rape” and faux biology has done more than just give the Republican Party an acute case of campaign collywobbles.
It has also pulled back a flap to provide a revealing peek into the party’s “big tent.” Surely you remember that time-honored rhetorical tarp; it was supposed to be roomy enough for a variety of different viewpoints on abortion.
Now, truth be told, the big tent was always something of an artificial construct. What it really seemed to signal was not a party-wide recognition and acceptance of differing viewpoints on abortion, but an uneasy accommodation: Pro-choice Republicans would be welcome in the GOP as long they didn’t put up too much of a fuss about the party’s anti-abortion stance.
Still, there at least used to be discussion of the different points of view. Some past GOP platforms made a nod to disagreement among Republicans on the subject, and past conventions certainly saw dissent on the issue.
Then-Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld, for example, spoke out for abortion rights at the 1992 convention and even pushed for a floor debate on the platform’s anti-abortion language.
Weld wasn’t allowed to speak about abortion rights at the 1996 convention. But as a concession to dissenters, the GOP platform that year did include an appendix including the views of prochoice Republicans.
But this year, as in the past several cycles, the GOP’s platform position is for a complete ban on abortion. Under the “human life amendment” it supports, there would be no exceptions for rape, incest, or the life of the mother.
In other words, for the exceptions nominee Mitt Romney says he favors.
It’s unclear whether Romney made any effort to have his position become the GOP platform stance. And certainly one can make too much of a party platform. It’s a symbolic statement, not a binding policy document.
And yet, that document and the Akin controversy do show just how farright Republican thinking has evolved on abortion. The GOP has expressed outrage over his notion of “legitimate rape” and his assertion that women seldom become pregnant as a result of rape.
But the party has not disavowed the notion that a woman pregnant from a rape should be compelled to carry the pregnancy to term. Quite the contrary.
It has been easy to dismiss that kind of thinking as confined to extreme social conservatives.
Dana Milbank
Maureen Dowd
the party has not disavowed the notion that a woman pregnant from a rape should be compelled to carry the pregnancy to term.
And yet, consider: In January, Rick Santorum, the former Pennsylvania senator, opined that a pregnancy that results from a rape, though horribly created, is nevertheless “the gift of human life,” that a woman should “accept what God has given to you,” and that the “right” thing to do is to carry the pregnancy to term. Santorum, let’s not forget, emerged as Romney’s main rival for the GOP nomination.
Now Romney has as his running mate a man who also thinks a woman pregnant as a result of a rape (or incest) should not have access to abortion. Thus we now have the interesting spectacle of Paul Ryan trying to distance himself from ... well, himself, by arguing that regardless of his position, Romney’s view would determine policy.
Perhaps. Yet on abortion, Romney has been a weather vane, not a lighthouse. Longtime Romney observers no doubt recall watching Romney rebuke Ted Kennedy for calling him “multiple choice” on abortion during a 1994 debate.
An indignant Romney declared that he had favored abortion rights since 1970 and vowed that “you will not see me wavering on that.” But as soon as Romney caught Potomac fever, he executed a politically opportunistic flipflop.
Faced with the unexpected attention to abortion, Romney has done what he usually does when his position conflicts with that of the GOP’s right wing: He has tried to change the subject. But as House Republicans have demonstrated in the past two years, changing the subject doesn’t mean changing the conservative policy-making focus.
Thus the question becomes: If voters deem the abortion exceptions important, is it realistic to think that a President Romney would stand up for them? And the best answer is that anyone depending on Romney to uphold the last remaining corner of a collapsing big tent is putting hope over history.
Gail Collins
John Young
Leonard Pitts