I Want to Live and Die — Differently
- Brainz Magazine
- Jun 8, 2021
- 9 min read
Written by: Monica Pelaez, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
I want to learn. I want to learn to live differently. I want to learn to die. I want to live and die differently from how I have lived and how I have learned to live death. I want to learn.
The Christian belief is that there is a heaven and a hell. You go to heaven or hell, depending on how good you have been. I was raised in that faith, very loosely, by the way. Religious ritual was more of social practice in my family. My parents believed more in rationality. My father’s practice partner was Jewish. In his late years, David, my father’s medical practice partner, grew a beard and looked more and more like a Rabi than a physician. Our house was a place of free-thinking as in the tradition of the Enlightenment. I was 12 or 13 when I first read Voltaire. Seneca was right in front of my bed, on the shelf across from my bed. Lucio Anneo Seneca or Emile Zola or Simone de Beauvoir, all in beautiful leather-bound editions in earthy green or bright red with golden letters lining the walls of my room, which also housed my father’s library. I grew up literally surrounded by books; it was their air and scent that I breathed every night.
Free thinking went beyond the Enlightenment. It included of course, Aristotle, Socrates, Plato. The tragedies by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. Spanish literature by the very rowdy Gabriel Garcia Lorca, medieval Calderon de la Barca, or a beautiful edition of “Don Quixote de la Mancha.” There was the Red Book by Mao. “Mein Kampf” by Hitler. And one of my favorite books from my teenage years, “La Tia Julia y el Escribidor” by Vargas Llosa. Thinking is my thing. I think. I can’t help it. I wish I could not think. And I doubt. I doubt everything. And I read. My first husband once pointed out how I would read back-to-back a flyer! Of course, I write! I collect little half-page, ring-bound notebooks written in pencil. They contain grocery lists, errands, thoughts, projects, financial projections, bills to pay, recipes, a lot of my life.
As privileged as my early life was, it never prepared me for what I had to face as an adult. My earliest “death” was that of my favorite uncle, Jairo, in 1982. (/haeero/) A six-foot-tall man, blond, blue eyes, and temperament, and character honored the legacy of his last name, Pelaez. There is a saying in Medellin that Pelaez is not the last name. It is an illness. Often said with sarcasm, pride, and a smirk, my ancestors were all peculiar, irreverent, and unapologetic. My uncle was grand with a wicked, funny mind. He would claim to bring for us his nieces and nephews from his travels, gas-powered roller skates, which unfortunately were perpetually detained at customs. Or he would ask the maid to get him for breakfast “huevos de avioneta” (plane eggs-plane in Spanish is feminine). The maid would look confused as he played his prank and repeated himself with a straight face.
My great-great-grandfather did not work, lived off his properties and investments, read poetry, and played the violin. Don Abel Pelaez. He supported a staunch liberal politician, Rafael Uribe Uribe, famous in Colombia for his rhetoric and liberal views, who was assassinated in October of 1914.
My grandfather was shot by his neighbor in 1949 while drinking and discussing politics. He was handsome, was sent to Cleveland to attend college but went back to Medellin in the 1930s to marry his sweetheart, my grandmother. He wrote her love letter, sometimes signing them as his “enchanted prince”; this after 5 children and 10 years of marriage.
Then another uncle died. His name was Alvaro. He was a tortured soul who drank in the family tradition in truckloads and was run over by a car leaving his favorite restaurant. Next died my sweet grandmother, my father’s mother, and the recipient of the “enchanted prince” letters; Doña Gabriela Echeverri Botero de Pelaez. She passed away of old age in 1983. In 5 years, I witnessed the deaths and funerals of 3 members of my close family.
My uncles were part of my daily life. We all gathered every weekend either at El Retiro or Santafe de Antioquia. These are towns in the vicinity of Medellin. El Retiro about 45 minutes away, Santafe de Antioquia about 2 hours away. El Retiro in a small valley, at 7,000 feet in the Andes mountains. Cold, very cold, especially back then before climate change and before massive development as a quasi-suburb of Medellin. Santafe de Antioquia, in a large, dry valley at 1,800 feet, hot, very hot at the confluence of the Magdalena river, the largest river in Colombia, and the Tonusco. This town is a colonial remnant of the Spanish Inquisition and the dominance of the Catholic Church, with huge stone houses, one church per block, cobbled stone streets.
The family-owned homes in both places, and we alternated weekends between one or the other. In El Retiro, it was all about horses, singing, and eating. In Antioquia, it was all about the pool, the sun, and eating. Yes, in the best tradition of Latin American families who lived by European traditions. We had three main meals at the table, served and eaten all together from the eldest to the youngest—snacks between meals and lots, lots of alcohol all the time.
Death, food, and spirits were the norm.
After my two uncles and my grandmother, death paused. But not a tragedy. Kidnapping set in. The first kidnapping my family went through was in the 1970s when my father's uncle, Arturo Pelaez Vallejo, was captured and killed by the guerrillas in Monteria, Cordova. This is a beautiful, voluptuous area of about the size of Georgia, frozen in time where cattle farms the size of twice Manhattan still exist. In 1988 my cousin, the eldest of all the cousins, was kidnapped by “The Extraditables.” The ringleader of this group was Pablo Escobar. They were fighting extradition to the U.S. As part of their strategy, they kidnapped and asked for ransom while liberating the kidnappees with “press statements.” My cousin was held for three weeks. I still remember sitting on the steps of the condo where he lived with his parents until the wee hours of the morning, wondering where he could be.
Next, my uncle Juan David. Younger than my father, he was kidnapped at his country house in El Retiro on Saturday early evening in 1994. I was with friends at a dinner party, about 30 minutes away. My family’s old house had been demolished (no architectural loss here), and the development of much smaller weekend homes was built. My father had a home, two homes away from his brother. They were sitting in the living room just before dinner when a group of men stormed the house. They gagged and bound my aunt, my three cousins, and my father and took my uncle. He was held for a year.
And then my brother-in-law in 2001. He was kidnapped by urban delinquents and sold to the guerrilla. Yes, sold. He was held for a year. My father died while my brother-in-law was being held captive. When we buried my father, we did not know if my brother-in-law was alive.
I was broken in 2001.
The 20 years that were to come after that were not easy. Many successes, many failures; divorce, heartbreak, loss, travel, conquer, discoveries. I lived intensely in those 20 years, never afraid to thrive and explore.
And here I am, 2021. I am five months away from turning 50. And I want to learn to live and learn to die differently. I am not dying, but someone I deeply love is, and I want to live that death differently. I want to support that death in a way that is not tragical, broken, dark. We all will die. I want to learn how to die peacefully, acceptingly. To feel that when we die, we don’t die. We transition and let go of the need for control, for the need to know what is in the afterlife, and just let go.
But not only do I want to learn to die differently, but I am also more than ever determined to learn to live differently. I want to be part of my community. I want to care about my neighbors. I want to care about the environment. I want to understand how I can improve those who come in contact with me. I want to be an agent of better, not of my selfish needs, ambition, and trauma.
I want banks to know their customers, care about them individually, support them in their needs. Yes, banks. Money and finances are like the blood that circulates through our bodies. Money needs to flow, and many times it doesn’t because banks blindside us. They are big, impersonal corporations, hard to individualize to get simple help and guidance as a mere mortal customer.
I want call centers to listen to the customer, not repeat a script robotically, and speak to 7 different people before you are actually listened to.
I want traffic to be safe. I want drivers to slow down, be courteous and use manners. I want them not to honk right when the light turns green. I want drivers to focus only on driving and not to text. I want driving to be like a 1950’s advertisement, joyous, elegant, splendid driving. (I would also like flying to go back to what it was, but that for another day)
I want to learn to slow down. I want to take time to prepare my meals. I want to see what I don’t see. Many opportunities escape me just because I don’t “see” them.
I want predatory lending to be banned. I want everyone to make money and be prosperous, but I don’t want the prosperity of one at the expense of the other. I want everyone to be as different as they are yet coexisting peacefully. And by the way, we have, not just in the 21st century, but in all centuries in different parts of the world; we seem to forget.
What is and what we have built, the world we have built is broken. Excess here, lack there—opulence here, misery there.
I am not a communist or a socialist. I don’t believe in that rhetoric. If I work hard, prosper, that which I attained through my dedication, brilliance, and resourcefulness is mine. If I receive from my parents, it is theirs to give and mine to receive. But we know some are less advantaged to no fault of their own. They need help. And there may be an abuse of the help, but the help that has been given has changed lives to improve them and improve our society collectively.
I respect and wonder at the beautiful mind human beings have. And as much as I love philosophizing, some things are simple and need to be simple and must stay simple.
Like predatory lending, it’s inhuman.
Not having access to health services, it’s inhuman.
Forced to cover yourself by law, it's inhuman.
Human trafficking, it’s inhuman.
The mind is powerful and can come up with dangerous rationalizations. Yet, when something is wrong, we see it and know it. We may not be able to explain, but we know it.
I want to learn.
For a very long time, I believed my main goal should be getting credentials by way of degrees. These would give me validity, approval, acceptance. I could then walk into the world with the degrees under my arm and finally do and be who I always wanted. Then life brought into my life a mentor who plainly said to me in our first meeting, “My dear, you have been looking for validation. Here is your validation”, while extending his hand and smiling as if he was bestowing or passing the “thing.” Now I had been initiated and approved. That meeting, moment, event stayed with me for a year. My education had been so deeply ingrained in me that I could not reconcile my mentor’s words that day with my education, which prescribed and demanded degrees to be someone in life.
How could I be “someone” if I had meager degrees; I didn’t have a Ph.D.!
I am not proposing that college is not worthwhile and valuable. Not at all. I am sharing my journey, which has been my journey. And in walking my journey, I want to learn.
I want to learn what my calling is, my path.
Each has different journeys and lessons—each to their own, each to their own.
I face and embrace my journey with gusto. But I want to learn. I want to live differently. I don’t have to live the life I have up to this point. I can learn new ways of thinking, new ways of “seeing,” new ways of working, eating, establishing relationships, of enjoying my existence. I can change. I can.
My path is not a blueprint for my present or future, and I declare that I am open to learning to be humble and change. Change is the only constant in my life. I want to learn.
Monica Pelaez, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Monica Pelaez is a thinker, writer, coach, and instructor. With a background in international law and business, involved in educational projects across continents, she has built a coaching/tutoring private practice to help the ones who are like her, "outliers." Those who do not fit the mold have a hard time with the system but are smart, curious, and intrepid. She combines the spheres of emotions, behavior, and academics in her practice. She views the individual as a complex being with unique talents, challenges, and needs and works to succeed in academics. She writes about any and all topics that interest her, without any claim to expertise, under the liberal principles of freedom of thought.
