angé

last monday, august 25th, my dear friend angélica burgos maira tapia perished in what is being called an accident. really, she died due to a rather sickeningly cliché and grotesque display of human carelessness behind the steering wheel of a bastard bus. i've personally never had anyone this close to my daily existence die before, but that isn't what makes this so tragic. as her widower (and my favorite chilean) has put it many times over the past week, es la forma or it's the form of death that is so troubling. i know that one is supposed to see some poignancy in death - a certain fulfillment of the inevitable, a chance to remember a great and beautiful life, or perhaps the passing on to a spiritual destiny, but i don't much care for destiny nor do i buy into that fiery place down there and that heavenly place up there. couple that with the fact that angélica's existence was run over and crushed at the tender age of 30 at a time when her and her husband erwin were just beginning to found a future together and all you have is a much bigger mountain of pigshit.

angélica is the reason that i had, up to monday, had a great year in chile. she was a duocUC alumna and had a worldteach english professor last year. come the end of the year he passed out fliers on behalf of worldteach in search of new host families and seeing that she had had a great experience in his class, she decided that having a gringo would be a great addition to her and erwin's recently purchased home. since the day i arrived in this house, erwin and angélica have done their very best for me. though they were expecting a white american they treated their canadian chocolate sauce like family and embodied the cultural interchange (and not financial gain) objective lost upon so many other worldteach host families. even though i was a failure, she taught me how to iron. even though my friends are drunks, they invited all of them over for a barbeque. even though they were explicitly told they didn't have to do my laundry, she asked for my dirty clothes the first day i got here and inadvertently prolonged the rameswaram-men tradition of not doing laundry. when i was going to travel to the south of chile, she called her family who opened up their homes to me. what kills about all this is that these aren't people with a ton of expendable income who decided to do something different. instead, these are the best kind of humans who had some space, thought they could use the meager amount of money sent monthly by world teach, but most of all, just wanted to have a great experience. these are people who struggle because they're still just starting out. these are people who always are so careful to avoid the dangers that lurk in this nice in the daytime/shit at night city. these are people who always look both ways twice before crossing and tell me to do the same.

when i arrived in this house, there were five of us: angélica's grandmother (funny enough, also now MY grandmother), a housemate tamara, erwin, angé, and myself. when i leave chile (on january 30th, 2009) to return to the united states, erwin will be in this house alone. grandma was just visiting to help angélica with the work around the house - she was after all a full time student and a full time housewife - and tamara eventually moved out ostensibly because she found lower rent. though the death of angélica has probably been the cruelest example of human vulnerability that i have personally experienced, i still feel like i haven't had enough time to fully process. what i have processed and what i am living right now is what this death has done not only to her life, but to the life of her husband who pretty much treasured her like a sack of gold bullion. it's hard to wake up and run to the major intersection outside your house and witness a loved one unconscious on the road, but it's harder to watch a conscious loved one break in two. since it's just me and papa bear erwin in this house, my primary preoccupation in life is him now. and i'm good with that. i'm glad i'm here, because if i wasn't he'd be facing all of this pain alone. at the funeral, erwin's father spoke and said that we were all going through a bad time, but a time in which we could also find hope. i scoffed at that statement hard in my head. when it comes to the brutality of the human experience that lurks around every corner we pass every day of our lives, i'm an unabashed cynic. i found nothing about what happened last monday shocking, just plain revolting. as the week passed i realized that perhaps there was some beauty to be seen, but only because i decided to follow her body to temuco in southern chile where she was born and was buried last wednesday.

angelica, erwin, and i were eating recently and the topic of best friends somehow came up. angelica said she only had one friend and that she was her best friend. it seemed like one of those "sympathize for me!" statements, but she really meant it. it didn't bother her, just a statement of fact. oddly enough, during the past week i witnessed her funeral mass fill a sizable church, i witnessed a couple of hundred people freeze themselves into pain to attend her funeral in the rain and icy wind of southern chile, i watched her viewing the day after her death fill a church annex to capacity at least 6 times throughout the day with another 50 or 60 people waiting outside, i saw erwin sign up for a facebook account just to view a group that had been created in her honor - a group that had hundreds of friends, comments and condolences.

at some point i too began to hope. i began to hope that everyone would remember our angel for a very long time.