GRACIA MARQUEZ

“What matters in life is not what happens to you but what you remember and how you remember it.” Sadly those words take on new meaning, as news has been filtering out that one of our generation's greatest authors, Nobel Prize winning Gabriel Garcia Marquez, is afflicted with dementia, likely meaning an end to production of any new work. This is not unusual for a man in his eighties, but it still is a hard thing to contemplate, the possible stilling of such a wonderful and influential voice. His One Hundred Years of Solitude is a masterpiece that I very much enjoyed and that helped introduce me to Latin American literature and magical realism. Love in the Time of Cholera and My Melancholia Whores also were very good. He once wrote “No medicine cures what happiness cannot,” and now that is quite prescient. They did not say how bad the condition is, and I hope perhaps he can squeeze out some more tales and that it comes on slowly and he retains fairly good health. But watching someone slowly lose their memories is difficult, as my father is struggling with it, so I know firsthand the challenges and affects. God Bless their last years, and those who serve as caretakers, especially, because it is a burdensome task, which in the case of my father is taken up by his wife Sharon.