"How do you get up in the morning after that kind of loss?"
NYT: Deborah Solomon interviews Carlos Fuentes.
At 77, do you think much about age and mortality?
I don't think about it at all. What will come will come. I have two children who died before reaching 30, so who am I to complain about being alive?
You've had more than your share of sorrows.
Most of all not having my son around. I was very proud of him. He was a very good painter. He had hemophilia. He died six years ago. Natasha, my daughter, just died last summer.
How do you get up in the morning after that kind of loss?
You go on. You go on. You bring the person you love inside you. That is how you cope. You make him or her live within you. The whole experience I had with my children is in me. It is nowhere else I can see. I can see a photograph, I can feel sad, I can read a poem, but the experience of having them within myself is what matters.
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This is the reverse of some of my feelings about my father, a pleasant and willed flashback.
I wonder if I had died young, would my parents have turned me into some kind of monument, remembering only the good things and not the torments that they inflicted on me?
His experience matches mine. My father, who passed some time ago, remains with me courtesy of all the intangible elements of our relationship - the love, memories made (and our relationship was not always ideal). Looking at things like photographs can evoke some of that I guess but I don't believe they would do so without that internalisation. To illustrate, I lost my eldest sister when I was quite young. There was a huge age gap between us, she was left home before I can remember. I didn't get an opportunity to experience the relationship that would build those elements. When I think of her, it's an emotional void.
I loved this piece. It was so odd coming to visit you and seeing it here again.
~Deb
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