My biological father, Hector Moya Saenz, passed away last night from heart failure.
I didn’t know who he was nor meet him till I was 15; he didn’t know I existed until then. I was a typical teenager, not all that interested in a relationship with my parents at that time and it didn’t help that he was still in Mexico where I was born and I was now in Texas. Still, he tried, calling regularly through my adolescence and early adulthood but I did little more than have courtesy responses. I went out to visit him in Mexico a few times and he came him to visit me once when I was 17 and another time when I was 18, first times in his life that he had traveled more than 100 km further than he was born.
For pretty much all of my 20’s and 30’s, we rarely spoke and I haven’t seen him in person since I was in my late 20’s. I never had the courtesy to feel the need to invite him to meet Kiana or invite him to anything in my adulthood. Somehow in this quarantine I reached out to him and was shocked about how much he knew about my life and the people in it. I am connected on social media with his oldest daughter and youngest daughter, who are also still in Mexico. It turned out every time they saw each other he would borrow their phone just to see what I had posted on social media and keep track of my adventures, jokes, and escapades there. Shortly after our conversations, he created his own Facebook account for the first time and that’s when I started posting stories.
We spoke more in the last year than the previous 25. I knew even as a teenager that we were awfully similar, in looks, in personality, in that we both get far more affectionate when we’ve drank too much but in these conversations I realized some of our quirks and thoughts and instincts and things we were drawn to. I am working hard at nurturing my own child but well interactions with him made me realize the power of the nature we share.
I had scheduled a race in the mountains near my birthplace and was coming to visit him and him to cheer. I tried to get him to visit here but the logistics were complicated these days. He had chest pain last night and went to the hospital, passed out there and never woke up. I met some of his family but only know fragments of his life like that he worked for security at a bank, has 5 daughters but I am his only son, how he met my mother. He taught me how to drive in Mexico in a gigantic pick up truck on a dirt track. All of my cars have been stick shift because of that though I killed the clutch in that first truck. Even if I didn’t have a damaged brain, I didn’t respond enough to his kindness or else we’d have more memories.
He’s had health problems for a while. My last visit to him was over a decade ago because he was in the hospital. He was a boxer in younger days. He’ll be up for viewing today and buried before the weekend. So in the clearing will lay a boxer who was a fighter by his trade, no longer having to carry the reminders of the gloves that laid him down. Today my heart feels cut and I definitely feel some anger and some shame but I’ll do my best to live with some of his nature so that the fighter still remains.
