In 'A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes,' filmmaker Rodrigo Garcia writes about losing both parents — and the one event his renowned father couldn't record: his own death.
in 1976? Garcia has no idea and wasn’t compelled to investigate. “That happened when I was 15 and it’s such a difficult time,” he says. “When you’re a teen everything is embarrassing. ... It’s almost better not to know.”Instead, this slender, 176-page memoir functions more as a moving meditation on the end of life and its aftermath, both physical and psychological.
His father’s death, seven years ago, had practically been an affair of state in Mexico — complete with public processions and tributes by presidents. “In some ways, it was exciting and moving to see how many people he could sway to come to him and stand for hours under the rain just to walk by,” Garcia says. “But it extends the crazy period of — not mourning, but that transitional period into mourning.
His mother’s death was quieter, though trying. Barcha died of respiratory problems last August in Mexico City , at a time in which COVID-19 seemed intent on harvesting life all around. Though she didn’t contract the disease, the pandemic nonetheless limited Garcia’s ability to see her. He witnessed the moments preceding and proceeding her death on a cracked smartphone screen. In her case, there would be no space to begin the process of mourning — no funeral, no family gathering.
If his father’s death had been momentous for its public nature, his mother’s was perhaps more so for the ways in which it put an end to the family unit as he knew it. Garcia describes his family as the “club of four” in conversation, a club that included him, his parents and his younger brother, Gonzalo García Barcha, who works as a graphic designer in Mexico. Last August, he says, the club of four came to an end.
“The death of the second parent,” he writes in the book, “is like looking through a telescope one night and no longer finding a planet that has always been there.”In writing this memoir, Garcia was intent on creating something that wasn’t “too detached” or “too sentimental.” Nor was he aiming to be comprehensive.