GRIEF SPANS BORDER FOR PASTORS LOST TO COVID-19
Taurino and Silvia Rivera leave behind their ministry and four sons, one barred from U.S. entry
When Taurino and Silvia Rivera were laid to rest beneath a California pepper tree on Friday morning, their white caskets were surrounded by their three sons and daughters-in-law and seven grandchildren, members of the church they founded in San Diego and pastors who had grown close to them during their years of ministry.
The couple, who had grown up together in a small town in Oaxaca and had been inseparable since, were buried together after dying weeks apart from COVID-19. Taurino’s casket was lowered first, and then his wife’s on top of his.
Missing from the scene was their fourth son, Ismael Rivera, who watched the final moments of the ceremony on his phone while standing outside a restaurant in Tijuana. Jesimiel Rivera, the third son, held his phone over the grave as his brother sobbed on the
other end of the Zoom call.
“In that moment, thousands of thoughts just raced through my head, with one question lingering — why?” said Ismael Rivera, who prefers the name Isaac.
The second of the four siblings, Isaac, 35, had not been able to see his parents for almost a decade. He had been counting down to the summer of 2021 when he would no longer be banned from the United States and could request a visa to visit his family. His parents were undocumented immigrants and could not cross south to see him.
At the funeral, the oldest son, Joel, read a letter from Silvia’s father in Oaxaca, who hadn’t seen his daughter since she left roughly 30 years ago. His hands shook as he held the piece of notebook paper.
“I love you forever,” he read in Spanish. “I will carry you in my heart.”
The Rivera family immigrated to the United States in the early 1990s when the four brothers were young children. They made City Heights in San Diego their new home.
Silvia and Taurino began working at a McDonald’s together, rising as early as 3:30 a.m. to arrive on time for their morning shifts.
The family didn’t have much money, but the sons said their parents always found a way to celebrate birthdays and take care of them. And even before the parents shifted to working full time as pastors, faith was a big part of family life.
Jesimiel, 33, remembered sitting on the floor as a child and watching his father play worship songs on a guitar.
“Just seeing dad so big and the song and his voice, and then everybody around, the adults were just clapping and singing — everything was so joyful,” Jesimiel said. “I remember feeling in a magical place at that moment.”
He remembered, too, going as a teen with his father to minister at a rehabilitation center, and the way his father’s words would ease the people there.
Taurino took Daniel Rivera, the youngest of the four sons at 31, to piano classes as a child, and they would play together. Daniel eventually became a pastor as well.
The family home would fill with people who needed help — a couch to sleep on, some food from the refrigerator.
“They left a big legacy for me and my brothers to follow,” Isaac said.
In recalling their mother, each son remembered intimate moments when they were alone with her, and the safety and love they felt in her presence.
Even after Jesimiel became an adult, she could always sense when something was bothering him.
“I could hide things from Dad, but never from Mom,” he said.
And, of course, they remembered her food — her chilaquiles, her atole, her spicy chicken soup and her mole.
“She was always happy, always smiling, always talking to strangers, always telling other people about God, whether it was a coffee shop or her neighbors,” Isaac said.
The brothers cannot cross the border to console with Isaac without also becoming stuck outside of the U.S., though the three are protected for now by the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, or DACA. Created by the Obama administration in 2012, DACA grants work permits and temporary protection from deportation to undocumented immigrants who came to the U.S. as children.
In 2011, the year before the program was created, Isaac was stopped at one of the Border Patrol checkpoints that are scattered across the southwestern United States and ended up voluntarily returning to Mexico. Because of U.S. immigration laws, he was barred from coming back for at least 10 years.
“Tijuana has been a long desert. I’ve gone through a lot down here,” Isaac said, recalling moments of depression. “I’ve lived in my car. I’ve slept in a park.”
He hadn’t told his parents about the toughest experiences because he didn’t want to worry them.
“What hurts me a lot is that for the last 10 years, I wasn’t over there to tell them how much I love them, how much they meant to me, hugging them really tight and telling them, ‘I love you, Dad. I love you, Mom,’ and being there on Mother’s Day and Father’s Day and their wedding anniversary and birthdays,” Isaac said. “And now that will never happen.”
One of the things that brings him comfort now is that even in death, his parents are still together.
“They were two human beings glued together everywhere they went,” Isaac said. “Now they’re in heaven together forever and that’s what makes me happy. That’s the only thing that makes me happy.”
At the funeral service on Thursday evening, Taurino’s brother recalled when he met Silvia. She’d been about 6 years old the first time Taurino brought her to their house, he said.
They used the strength of that lifelong relationship to help their church members through difficulties in their own marriages, many recalled.
In 2011, Taurino and Silvia started a church called Fe Esperanza y Amor — faith, hope and love — and, according to the church members they left behind, they embodied those values in their work.
“[Taurino] was that person who was always there for his people, for any person. I love him a lot,” said Maria de Jesus Pasciencia in Spanish. “I have so much learning that he left me. He changed my life as a person, as a human being.”
Debir Vasquez, 37, of Linda Vista, recalled the way Taurino called him “son.” He’d lost his own father when he was 6 years old, and after joining Fe Esperanza y Amor four years ago, he began to see the pastor as a father figure.
After the holidays, Daniel was the first in the Rivera family to show COVID-19 symptoms. He was hospitalized, followed by his mother and then his father.
Though Daniel recovered, Silvia and Taurino remained on ventilators. Early in the morning, on Feb. 1, Taurino died, and the family began to grieve and to plan for his burial.
Silvia seemed to improve. Doctors took her off the ventilator and moved her to a rehabilitation center.
No one told Silvia about Taurino’s death, but many believe that she figured it out on her own and followed after him.
“I think in a way she did know because my parents’ bond was so strong,” Daniel said.
Early on Feb. 19, Isaac was leaving a gym that he recently joined as a way to cope with his father’s death when he got a call from his brothers across the border.
His mother, too, was now dead from the virus. He sat in his car and wept.
“I was barely dealing with the situation with my dad,” Isaac said. “Deep inside I’m hurting, deep inside I’m broken in so many pieces. I don’t know how I’m going to get myself back together.”
Daniel is now pastor at Fe Esperanza y Amor in addition to his own church in San Marcos. On his first Sunday preaching there after his father’s death, he told the church they would follow the guidance that his father had given them — to serve God and to live in peace.
He urged them to find solace in one of Taurino’s most common refrains. “God is good, all the time.”