God Wanted Him More Than We Did

Juan Ricardo 'Ricky' Colombo in Los Angeles

I am safe with my family in Los Angeles. Yes, I went from one disaster to another, from Asheville to LA. That's how things have been in my life lately. But I'm glad to be here with family, supporting my people in evacuating and managing life during and after the fires.

This message is about going through a different kind of fire, the fire of losing someone you love.

If you don't want to remember right now and be potentially triggered, please don't read it.

But if you know me or you knew my father, I would love for you to share this experience with me.

. . .

Our last real conversation was on the morning I was headed to the airport in Asheville. We spoke for half an hour. It flowed sweetly and was one of the best conversations we'd had in recent months. We spoke of some of my troubles with the hurricane and the aftermath, as it's been a true shitshow.

He always wanted to do whatever he could to help. Unfortunately, there was only so much that he could do.

He professed his love for his new housekeeper, "Ugh I love her so much."

Yes, of course he did, we laughed together. He said something along the lines of "Women, they are so crazy but my God, what would we do without them...?"

It was a natural closing to the conversation. I told him we'd be speaking soon because I was heading back home to visit.

"You're coming home??"

He was so excited. He had forgotten. Or the truth is that maybe I forgot to tell him because I didn't want to get his hopes up and then change plans again for the tenth time.

On the morning we were scheduled to meet for lunch in LA, I called to confirm. He said he had a terrible fever all night and could barely move. We agreed to check in the next day.

The next morning he told me he was feeling better and was all set to come out and meet me but I could tell by his cough that he just wanted to believe he was better. I insisted that he rest.

That night he fell in the parking lot outside his home. He had gone shopping and lost his balance on the way out of his vehicle. He lay outside in the cold wind for over an hour because he couldn't get up but he didn't call anyone for help. He refused to ask for help because he was that kind of guy.

And he hated hospitals.

The next morning his housekeeper insisted he go to the ER. He had a bad case of pneumonia. I saw him in the ICU and he could hardly move or speak. His face was scraped and bruised from falling but he was still putting on a brave one underneath the oxygen mask.

The nurses were bustling about the room, checking the IVs, inputting information on their screens. In the hopes of providing some sort of comfort, I attempted to translate and explain what was happening.

"They're going to move you to a room upstairs, Dad. It will be more comfortable there."

"Vanessa is here waiting to see you, they only allow one person at a time."

"They're going to change your bedding now and get you ready to move."

He nodded sternly with wide eyes and tried to respond in-between breaths but I couldn't hear most of what he was saying. We stayed with him until one o'clock in the morning when he was finally settled into his room for the night.

Over the next few days, I went to visit him daily. The first day after he was admitted he cried out in desperation when he saw me. "Agua...agua!"

He was so thirsty but they wouldn't give him water because he hadn't passed the swallow test.

Even after seeing the speech pathologist, they wouldn't administer the thickened water they were supposed to give him. So I gave him some of my water anyway. I poured it slowly from my water bottle until I felt he had enough. It was never going to be enough.

I went to ask the nurses for help and eventually, they showed up with what he needed. They always seemed to put on a good show and move into action when I arrived.

I was skeptical of the care he received in between visits. But at least he had visitors. Me and my sister and mother, and some of his friends, too. We each tried to comfort him in our way.

Dad seemed to be improving a little bit every day. But he was struggling too. He was having night terrors ("sundowning," they call it), trying to get out of bed or rip off his oxygen at night. They restrained his arms at night and gave him more medicine. Morphine and an antipsychotic, along with all his other meds, antibiotics, bronchodilators...

Too much medicine.

On the morning of the fifth day, his heart gave out. The nurse told me they tried to resuscitate him for a half hour.

"We have about ten different methods to bring a person back and we tried every one," she explained to us. "It's rare that someone doesn't respond to any of them. When that happens you have to believe that God wanted him more than we did."*

Yes, my Dad was an old-fashioned man with values from an older generation and a different culture but he was a good man who continually tried to improve himself and be a better man. At least in his stubbornly independent, quirky way.

Ricky was a passionate intellectual who would spin wild meandering stories weaving the atrocities of our collective history with humanity's search for a better existence and the stories of our ancestors, with anecdotal sidelines about people he had known sprinkled in. Every conversation was like a complex maze we had to find our way through. And each one led us somewhere more wild and mysterious or whimsical and bizarre.

Sometimes we struggled to find our way out again.

He was friends with famed author Jorge Luis Borges and would meet him for coffee in Buenos Aires, he spent wild afternoons with Ray Bradbury in Los Angeles after picking him up in his taxi one day, he was obsessed with an author whom he'd befriended, Richard Trexler, and later translated his entire book, "Sex and Conquest" into Spanish.

He had so many unbelievable stories that were (mostly) true, this was all normal for him.

Ricky spent years painstakingly translating numerous books and other texts from English simply because he loved the process and thought that they deserved to be in Spanish. Because they needed to be read by his fellow Argentineans and other Spanish-speakers. Then he would give out copies directly to people that he felt needed them and move on to the next project.

He wanted to give a copy of his most important work to Pope Francis. We spoke about making a trip to the Vatican to hand it to him directly. It was just one of many unfulfilled dreams, hatched as they were from a wildly creative mind.

Dad was himself a voracious reader and introduced me to some of the greats like Kafka, Camus, Dostoevsky, and Alan Watts via "The Way of Zen" as a teen. He was highly spiritual and taught me how to meditate for real, in the simplest terms possible on the phone, when I was desperate from the overwhelm of freshman year in college.

While I'd learned to meditate from Mom when I was five, my first actual session as an adult was in my dorm room at 17. I felt my whole spirit expand to fill the room until I left my body and was watching myself from above.
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That kind of thing can only happen through the guidance of someone who's had such experiences themselves. Yes, he was an astral traveler. I recall a time in childhood when he was living across the country and I was lying awake at night in bed. I felt a tap on my shoulder. My skin crawled as I peeked up to see his image floating cross-legged in front of me with a loving smile. It scared the hell out of me and I hid under the covers shivering for hours.

Years later, when I asked him about it, he said that he learned that from his beloved mentor Misha Cotler, a man who would often visit him in spirit. This was the person he spoke about most from his younger years, the man who introduced him to Jiddu Krishnamurti, the spiritual teacher who changed his life. The man who stopped him from committing suicide on the day he was headed to the country with his revolver to do the job and put an end to his suffering.

Not long after, he met my mother, supporting her meditation center and eventually becoming a teacher of Transcendental Meditation alongside her.

Like me, his spiritual path saved his life.

And not unlike me, he was a moody, passionate lover of beauty and music, good food, and the deeper things of life. He was an incredibly hard worker. And he was deeply loyal to his family.

When I asked him recently about his favorite memories of his life, he said, "Spending time with you and Ananda and Vanessa as children. Going out to eat together and letting you order whatever you wanted."

Me and my sisters certainly enjoyed a lot of good meals with him. That was probably what we did the most when we went out together. Cuban food in Miami, American diners, Argentinean and Japanese restaurants in LA—those were his favorites.

Our last meal out this past summer was at his favorite Argentinean cafe, where we shared an amazing 'parrillada.' Our next meeting was supposed to be at the same place.

Now, every time I go out to a restaurant or sit in a cafe to write like I am now, I think about him and wish we could share a coffee. Or I remember his essence and it brings a strange sort of quiet comfort.

I don't know if it's true that God wanted him more than we did. But I do know that we're all a little crazy. And a lot complicated.

But what in God's name would we do without each other?

It's all these little experiences together with the ones we love that weave us into who we are, ultimately something greater than the sum of our parts. They are everything we have.

Please don't forget.

Love,

Satya

*Juan Ricardo 'Ricky' Colombo was born June 26th, 1942, in Santa Fe, Argentina, and died in Palmdale, California, on December 15th, 2024. He was a teacher of English as a second language and Transcendental Meditation, as well as a professional driver for more than 30 years, and spent the majority of his life in Los Angeles County. A private memorial will be held for family and close friends on the afternoon of Saturday, January 25th in LA. Message me directly for the info to attend.