On Friday, March 29th at 5:21pm I received a call at work from Miki. She told me that my father had been diagnosed with leukemia and that he was checking in to Sloan Kettering. It was a shock because although I was vaguely aware that he had been having some health problems (bouts of dizziness) he had driven to and from Vermont the weekend before and I abruptly came to terms with the fact that my father was dying, and even if he survived the disease, he would be a shell of the vibrant man he had always been. I went and met him and my mother at the hospital. Dad’s breathing was very labored and he just wanted to get in bed. He had had massive diarrhea over the past week and he had blood coming out of his ass and nose. He had completely lost his appetite and hadn’t really eaten for about a week. Although, he had gone to the Park Ridge Diner that week and managed to finish off a chocolate milkshake. The diarrhea resulted in massive hemorrhoids. He said that every time he sneezed the pain generated by his hemorrhoids would hurt so much that he would “see stars”. Dad had been experiencing some of these symptoms for a while but had decided to push through the symptoms without seeing a doctor. He finally broke down and went to the doctor the week before. When I got to the waiting room of the emergency unit I saw that he was in his last days. He told me as much, but he said that he agreed to undergo an intensive 21 day chemotherapy plan to appease Mom because the doctors said that there was “still a chance” although they refused to give any probability of success. When he first learned that he had leukemia he had said that he didn’t want any treatment, that he just wanted to be left alone to die, so this was a reversal of that original decision. I asked him what he would miss most after he were dead. He responded, “Birch Island”.

Carlos, Katie and Lucy showed up at the hospital, but as we were still in the emergency unit, one of the nurses told us that Lucy was not allowed to stay in the waiting area of the emergency unit because people with cancer have very weakened immune systems and a simple cold can kill them and two-year-olds have lots of germs on them, however, there was an outer waiting area where Lucy was allowed. We moved into the outer waiting area and the receptionist told us that when Dad was called they would come out to the outer area to get us. While we waited for Dad’s turn we were playing with Lucy. Lucy had found some informational cards about blood transfusions on one of the short tables next to the seats and she was pulling the cards out one-by-one and passing them out to each of us. At one point I had about fifteen cards which I made into a large fan and started playing peek-a-boo with her. Then Katie handed Lucy a card and told her to bring it to Aurelio. Lucy did it even though Aurelio looked kind of scary with his face mask, latex gloves and labored breathing. Then each of us took turns calling Lucy over, handing her a card, and asking her to bring it to another person in the room which she promptly did about ten times in a row. On some level it was a bittersweet contrast focusing my attention on the youngest member of our family, while waiting for one of the oldest members of our family to be admitted to a hospital bed at Memorial Sloan Kettering. Out with the old and in with the new. The nurse finally came out and informed Dad that it was his turn. He was relieved to get into a bed, but his labored breathing didn’t calm down after he laid down. He told me to leave. He was being considerate to the very end.

I called Carlos, my brother, on Saturday morning. He was at the hospital with Dad. Mom hadn’t arrived yet. I asked Carlos to ask Dad if he minded having visitors come to the hospital. Dad said that anyone who wanted to come and see him could come. He didn’t care. This statement was consistent with the open door policy at 105 Maple Terrace. Everyone was invited to 105 Maple Terrace for Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter. I mean everyone. If you were coming over and you had a friend in town, if you had six or eight people with nowhere to go for the holidays, you could bring them over. People from outside the family used to stay over for extended periods of time. One summer, Jason Angelotti spent 3 months which coincided with Cathy Bartholome’s stay. In those days, Cathy’s friend Christine Santoro came over every day and her dog Frankie stayed too (Frankie wound up staying until he died many years later). Keith Snow moved in with us because his parents moved away and he wanted to stay and finish out the school year. The same thing happened with Mark Gagnon. Ani once brought home two strays from the airport that she met on the plane. We named them Ula 1 and Ula 2. After four days I noticed they were taking my beer so I yelled to Ani from my room to hers, “Ani, when are the fuckin Ula’s leaving?” One of the Ula’s overheard me and they were gone the next day. Some visitors, Bradley and Allison, Roberto and Esperanza, George Romney came to see Dad, and in a way, they were honored for their initiative because Dad had two days left to live. After Saturday, Mom became a stricter gatekeeper and only the immediate family were allowed to visit. Although Mayi Barrera and Donna Jones showed up on Sunday night at the waiting room of the ICU but they didn’t get to see him, they only made it as far as the waiting room.

I then asked Carlos if I could speak to Dad. He put Dad on the phone. I said, “Dad, I have a silver spoon that has been damaged. It has a jagged edge that makes it feel like it’s cutting your lip as you pull the spoon out of your mouth. He said, “I have some 500 grit sandpaper in the basement. You take it and you wet it with water and sand down the jagged edge, but don’t sand too hard because you don’t want to mess up the finish too much.” I thanked him and told him I would come to see him later in the day. You see, Dad was good at fixing things. I realized long ago that the day that Dad passed away, I would not only be losing my Father and friend, but also my electrician, my plumber, my carpenter, my painter, my car mechanic. Anytime I had any sort of question in any of these areas, I would run it by him first. He once took apart his motorcycle so that it was just a bunch of random parts spread across the garage floor and then re-assembled it so well that it ran fine and he sold it a few years later. It was not uncommon for him to visit someone and wind up springing into action in a project to fix the septic tank. I got the spoon instructions on the last day that he was able to fix stuff. I wasn’t just using him for his service; it was part of our relationship. He enjoyed a good puzzle. We worked well together. I was his apprentice. He was transferring his skills to me. He was passing along information while fixing my problem and it gave him satisfaction and pleasure. Being useful and helpful was what delighted him. He was a problem solver and as a result he was an upper—someone who raised your spirits every time you came into contact with him. If you split everyone up into people who add anxiety and people who remove anxiety he was definitely part of the latter group. He had right livelihood too. Helping people to travel vertically in elevators is environmentally beneficial because it counteracts the tendency to sprawl out which is having a detrimental impact on our society today.

I went to visit him that Saturday. After parking on the street I ran into George Romney on the street corner. He was waiting for one of his students who was a doctor at Memorial Sloan Kettering. As I spoke to him the student arrived and the three of us went up to the hospital room. Mom, Ani and Ricky were there. Carlos had been there all morning. George’s student spent 20 minutes answering our questions. Ever since Dad had become fatally ill everyone was extremely kind and supportive to each other. All quarreling and bickering had stopped. I told Dad that I noticed that he had not bickered with Mom since he had been admitted to the hospital. He made some crack about how he should get sick like this more often. I told him I was planning to bring the kids, Victor, Sophia, Serena and Camilla to see him. It was going to be their last chance to see their grandfather. He said he preferred that they didn't come to visit. He wanted them to remember him with happy memories, not memories of him struggling for air in the hospital bed. I agreed that it would be best not to bring the children. When I left, I said goodbye to Dad. He thanked me for coming to visit him. I then said, “Thanks for everything”, but that was all I could blurt out without breaking into sobbing. Mom and I went to The Mansion Restaurant and Eatery on the Northeast corner of York and 86th Street for dinner and had a pleasant time. Neither of us had been there since before Abuelo had died. Every time she brought up the idea that there was a chance that he could pull through, I told her to hope for the best, but prepare for the worst. Mom went back to Sloan Kettering after dinner and slept in two chairs with a couple of pillows and a blanket that Katie & Carlos had brought her that evening. Mom didn't return to Park Ridge until very late on Sunday. The head of the ICU wouldn’t let her stay telling her that she needed to be strong for the month-long chemo therapy.

On Easter Sunday, plans to go to Park Ridge were cancelled so we relocated to Carlos’s apartment on 16th Street. I dropped off my kids there and Miki, Ani and I went to visit Dad. His breathing was just as labored as it had been the night before which confirmed my belief that he wasn’t going to live very long if the respiratory issue remained unresolved. Carlos was there and Ricky visited later. Dad was extremely handy and many people had come to rely upon him for various things over the years. We related the following story to him: Yiyina had a safe in her apartment that required special batteries for the door of the safe to function. The last time Dad was in Miami, Yiyina discovered that the safe’s batteries had gone dead and she was unable to open the safe. Dad helped her by getting new batteries and installing them in the safe. A few months ago Yiyina discovered that the safe’s batteries had died again. She bought new batteries and was waiting for Dad’s next trip to Miami so that he could replace the batteries, she was concerned because if Dad died, no one else knew how to replace the batteries and she would never be able to open the safe. When Dad heard the story he laughed and asked me to repeat it to Mom when she returned to the hospital room.

After returning to 16th Street, Mom called us and told us that Dad had been transferred to the ICU so my siblings and I returned to the hospital because there was a good chance that he was going to die that night. The oxygen level in his blood was rapidly deteriorating and the doctors were trying to figure out if there was a clot in his lungs. That night was the last time I was able to engage in verbal communication with him. We were only supposed to ask him Yes or No questions. I tried to keep it lighthearted by asking him if I was allowed to fart in his ICU room. He said, “no”, but I farted anyway.

As I lay in bed fitfully sleeping that night, we received a call at 4:30am from Mom. His kidneys had failed, his breathing was so labored that he was at the point where the doctors would have put him on a respirator. I was the last of my siblings to arrive at the hospital that morning. It was 7:00am when I walked in. Mom told me that he waited for me to die. Not likely, because he was lying with his eyes closed seemingly unconscious and he couldn’t speak, but a pleasant thought nevertheless.

Dad had a Healthcare proxy which gives his wife the sole power to make healthcare decisions for him if he is unable to do so and a Do Not Resuscitate/Do Not Intubate (DNR) in place which prohibited them from doing so. And it was a good thing he did because if they would have shoved a respirator down his throat, he possibly would have lived like that for months, even years, suffering, conscious, artificially kept alive. Trapped in his failed body with failed kidneys and leukemia slowly consuming him with little prospect of recovery. Eventually people would have stopped coming to visit. Meanwhile the hospital cashes in on the insurance payments for the technology. But Dad was too responsible and organized to let that happen to him or to us. I asked everyone in the room if they had a healthcare proxy and DNR. Ricky, Carlos and Ani didn’t have one, but Mom and I and the ICU nurse did have one. Everyone who works at an ICU has one because they know first-hand what can happen if they don’t.

Mom told me "Gordo, he is still with us, just give him a kiss and talk to him." I said in a sad, angry and almost combative attitude, “He’s unconscious, he’s totally unaware of what’s going on around him and he can’t feel a thing.” As soon as I finished saying that, Dad raised his right arm straight up with his elbow still on the bed and his index finger pointing straight up (as if to say “no, no, no” waiving his finger back and forth in disapproval) and then lowered it. The room burst out laughing and crying and Ani said, “you see, you were wrong.” I walked over to Dad, grabbed the hand that he had just raised and said, “Dad, I was wrong, and you were right,” and then fighting to control my tears and to collect myself in order to be able to speak, I said, “and since you can hear us, I wanted to tell you that we will honor your memory when you are gone, and I want to thank you for everything that you’ve done for us.”

Mom held his left hand and would squeeze it every so often and he would squeeze back even though he wasn’t showing any other signs of life. The hand squeezing continued until just before he died. Carlos was next to Mom touching his leg or his foot and Ani was on the other side holding his right hand. A nurse came in and told us that we should talk to him because he could still hear us and then Mom began telling stories of Cuba, stories of Dad’s life, stories of the people he was close to, his cousins, his aunts and uncles, his parents and grandparents. The hope was that he could still hear us. We asked Mom questions clarifying certain parts and defining certain Spanish words. We laughed when we heard the story of Anton de Carolla in Spain and how they crashed the wedding in Samoa. We learned about his mother’s branch of the family in Germany, about her brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews.

At 11:00am Miki appeared outside the door of the ICU room. We invited her in. At this point they had taken the oxygen out and the only drugs they were giving him were a morphine-like drug to ease the pain and a valium-like drug to settle him down. The nurse wiped the dried blood from his nose. His eyes were closed and his breathing was so labored that his chest was heaving and he was making an audible wheezing noise with every breath. He was using so much energy to breath. Dad made a snoring sound which reminded me of a story that I told the others about how Miki had been in St. Mark's church in New Canaan the previous week to hear a speech by Mother Anne Richards on the eucharist. During this speech a very old parishioner, Joe Kelly, had fallen asleep in his chair. When his wife tried to wake him he didn’t respond. Others witnessed this and became concerned. After a few more attempts to rouse him they thought he might be dead and they called 911. When the ambulance was on the way Joe let out a loud snore and then woke up. The ambulance arrived and the EMS people tried to examine the man but he was embarrassed and didn’t want to be examined, he was fine. At that moment in the hospital room everyone including Mom laughed at this story. Just as everyone was laughing, Dad made a soft snore sound and then died. The time of death was 11:35am. We thought that he was going to die on Easter Sunday, the day that marks Christ’s resurrection, the holiest day of the year, but instead he died a day later on April Fools’ Day in the middle of a laughter session; a little more characteristic of the levity of his style.

Soon after his death we started calling people in order of importance. His side of the family took precedence. His sister was the first call, then his nephew, and cousins, then we moved to Mom’s side of the family, then friends of the family. Later in the day there were hundreds of people in New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Florida, Latin America, and Europe that received the news that my father had died. People were calling my mother, my siblings and me expressing their condolences. It was as if the energy that had left his body had been transformed into the consciousness of his friends and family dispersed over a vast geographic territory. People were remembering deeds that he had done and things that he had said.

One of the calls that I made announcing the death was to his sister’s son, Jason. We got to the part of the call where Jason said, “Please let me know if there is anything that I can do for you and for the family.” I responded, “There is one thing you can do. You knew him well enough to know his virtues, his principles, his ethics, his values. He wasn’t a good communicator, but through his deeds you could understand these favorable qualities. Take that information, and pass it along to your children.”

My mother, sister, brothers and I went to JG Mellons for lunch. Katie emailed my brother a poem by Mary Oliver called "In Blackwater Woods" and Carlos read it out loud at the table. A woman at the restaurant overheard the poem and said that Mary Oliver was her favorite poet and that she lived in the Adirondacks at Brant Lake and that her husband was a 46er.

When I got home that day I was looking out the window and saw a bird hovering just outside my living room window. I took a closer look and discovered a male and female house finch. It was an unusual sighting because I had never seen a finch from the apartment. They stayed long enough that I was able to show them to Lucas. He got a good look of the red hues on the head and body of the male. I thought perhaps that it was some sort of mysterious sign from nature regarding my Dad. Ricky’s bird experience after the death was that he was golfing, and a crow hopped into his golf cart and flew off with his snicker bar. Later on he saw the crow and the snicker bar on the ground nearby. As he walked up he scared off the bird. He took the wrapper but left the snicker bar. The crow returned to finish the snicker bar. Mom was driving down the Palisades Parkway with Ani. They got to a part where Dad had been accustomed to point out the red tailed hawks when he had been alive. A red tailed hawk swooped down right in front of the car as they passed that spot. Mom, also had accidentally touched Dad’s Ipad that was in the top drawer of his chest of drawers. When she touched it the screen turned on and there was a big face shot of Dad looking at her. When Mom got back to Park Ridge the day he died she was unable to get into the house. She thought Dad was playing a joke on her. These were interpreted as signs that he was still with us in some way.

Dad was considerate to the end of his days, even in his death. It was a graceful death because it was relatively quick, he didn’t complain much. It was easy on his family because he had his Healthcare proxy and DNR in place. It was a beautiful death and there was something peaceful about it. There was no anger expressed between any of the family members from the point that he checked into the hospital to the point that he died and for awhile afterwards.

This is the obituary that we ran in the Pascack Review, Community Life, New Canaan Advertiser:

Aurelio Alvarez, Engineer and New York “Elevator Man”, Dies at 71

Aurelio Juan Alvarez, a longtime resident of Park Ridge, New Jersey, died Monday, April 1st, after a brief struggle with leukemia at Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital. He is survived by his wife of 48 years, Ana Maria Castellanos Alvarez, four children, and six grandchildren.

A self-proclaimed “elevator man” devoted to vertical travel in the vertical city of New York, Mr. Alvarez was the focus of the 2001 documentary Vertical Traveler, a film that interweaves the history of the elevator with Mr. Alvarez’s own life and fascination with the subject.

Born in Havana, Cuba on September 9, 1941, Mr. Alvarez arrived in the United States via Spain in 1961, seeking exile from the Cuban Revolution. When the teenage Mr. Alvarez arrived at the Port of Newark bearing one suitcase, no money, and the responsibility of caring for himself and his young sister, he was met by a cousin who provided him with bus fare and a copy of The New York Times classifieds.

A gifted mechanical engineer, he was employed as an office boy at GAL Manufacturing Corporation in New York City, where he rose to become a Senior Engineer. He authored several patents, including the Rope Gripper, a device that prevents an elevator from free falling and that was subsequently adopted as standard code for new elevators in North America and Europe. Widely regarded as the leading expert in elevator mechanics in New York City, Mr. Alvarez was often consulted to solve problems that others could not.

Mr. Alvarez met Ana Maria Castellanos in 1961 on the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral, where Cuban exiles often gathered to socialize following Sunday Mass. They were married in 1964 in Manhattan, and in 1969 Mr. Alvarez moved his growing family to Park Ridge. A devoted husband and father, Mr. Alvarez loved spending time with family and friends above all else. Known for his great wit and generous spirit, he was a friend and helper to all, as well as a passionate sailor, traveler, and collector of Cuban memorabilia.

Mr. Alvarez is predeceased by his parents, Aurelio Cesar Alvarez and Berta Martens Alvarez, and is survived by his wife and children: daughter Ana Maria Nappa of Park Ridge, New Jersey; son Aurelio Victor (Micaela Porta) of New Canaan, Connecticut; son Ricardo Juan of Park Ridge, New Jersey; son Carlos Alberto (Katie Lyman) of New York, New York; and by six grandchildren: Camilla Nappa, Sophia Nappa, Serena Nappa, Aurelio Victor Alvarez, Lucas Alvarez, and Lucy Alvarez.