Bopp Chapel10610 Manchester Rd.Kirkwood, MO

Nelson Julio Figueroa-Ortega, whose irrepressible charm, sweet soul, loving heart and generous gifts of infinite compassion carried him through 72 years, died on May 14, 2022, during a nap on the couch of the home he shared with his husband, Jeff Truesdell, and their terrier-chihuahua Tico, in St. Louis, Missouri. The cause was suspected myocardial infarction - a heart attack. The death was abrupt and unexpected. A life that already was full had looked ahead to still more love and adventures, and leaves so many other people behind with an overabundance of endearing stories, smiles, laughter and tears. Nelson and Jeff were partnered nearly 34 years, and proudly part of the first generation of men to legally wed in the United States, on Dec. 31, 2015, six months after the Supreme Court made same-sex marriage the law of the land. Retired from an early career in the international freight-forwarding business, and later in information technology, Nelson was born Oct. 5, 1949, in Havana as the only child of Julia Ortega-Figueroa, an educator, and Teofilo Figueroa, a Puerto Rican national who served in the U.S. military in WWII. His parents amicably divorced when Nelson was a young boy, and mother and son relocated to join a large and affectionate Cuban exile community in Miami. His mother died March 4, 1985, and is buried in Miami Memorial Park, where Nelson's ashes will be placed alongside her. His father, who made a surprising and joyous reentry into Nelson's life after 50 years in 2014, died Oct. 13, 2018, and is buried in the South Florida National Cemetery. Nelson had the privilege of laying both of his parents to rest. His husband, Jeff, survives him, along with the dog that Nelson named Chiquitico - little one - when he was co-opted by Jeff's subversive mother acting in defiance of her children's wishes that she NOT get another dog, but which she went ahead and did anyway with Nelson's help, with Nelson not having the wherewithal to stop her. The dog became his, and teased Nelson endlessly, after she died. Nelson also is survived by much-loved in-laws, nephews, nieces, great-nephews and a great-niece, along with a St. Louis Cardinals baseball team that currently is leading the division. Jeff's parents, brother and sister preceded Nelson in death. A precious treasure has remained among us, A treasure with memories of a full life. The treasure of a love that will never cease to exist. My mind still speaks to you And my heart still searches for you. But my soul knows that you are at Peace. -- From Nelson's husband: Snapshots of a love. *** The black-and-white checkered shirt Nelson wore when he first crossed my field of vision still hangs in our closet. I never let him throw it out. He was 39, I was 29, and I was out on a Saturday night at a Fort Lauderdale bar with a guy I'd sort of been dating when I spotted Nelson across the expansive patio and couldn't turn away. A Scotch-with-lime in one hand, a Marlboro in the other, his long sleeves rolled up tight enough on his biceps to serve as a tourniquet, he was the most beautiful man I'd ever seen. I knew in that instant we'd be together for life. For the rest of the night I tracked his movement, and Nelson knew it. He started preening like a peacock, tucking his thumb behind his belt buckle, puffing his chest, softly brushing his dark, full beard with his clenched fist. He thought, who is this guy who keeps staring at me? And then I lost him. My head swiveled. I panicked. Minutes - too many - ticked by. Suddenly Nelson materialized to say hi to my date. They had a passing acquaintance. They chatted in that I'm-not-really-paying-attention-to-you bar way, until my date excused himself to the bathroom. As fast as possible while also being breathlessly casual, I gave up my number in exchange for Nelson's. It was June 25, 1988. Nelson and I spoke on the phone for weeks before seeing each other again. He told me he was Spanish, from the Canary Islands, and in those conversations I sensed the innate kindness and vulnerability that drew me to him further (as if sexy isn't lure enough). The only child of parents who divorced amicably when he was very young, with a father who'd stayed behind and fallen out of Nelson's life after mother and son relocated to Miami, Nelson had lost his mother three years earlier on the operating table during routine surgery after she told him to go to work and not worry. I could still hear the beat of his broken heart. When he finally drove up from Miami to my Palm Beach apartment for our first date, he showed up impressively late bearing a card, an armful of flowers and a box of chocolates, and those four things (LATE being the first) foretold everything that was to come. He evolved, but his generous, open soul on display from the get-go was a constant. Months later, after he left a first shirt hanging in my closet, then a workweek and weekend wardrobe, and my bed became ours, I noticed underneath that bed a small bowl. Had Nelson snuck some ice cream and been too lazy to walk the dish to the kitchen sink? The thing I couldn't figure out was the feathers. Long afterward he confessed that he'd cast a Santaria spell to bond our future. His version was recently confirmed to me by a friend in whom he confided it. "And we're still together," he told her. And now it takes another form. The death certificate says Nelson died at 8:55 pm Saturday, May 14, at home, of suspected acute myocardial infarction - a heart attack. I found him when I returned from a 15-minute run to the grocery for the fruit salad Nelson wanted for dinner. He was laying comfortably on the Pottery Barn couch we bought in 2001 for our first purchased home because he insisted we have one big enough for him to stretch across, wearing the soft pajama bottoms that were his covid-lockdown uniform, under a favorite fleece blanket with a woodland print that we'd picked up in Lake Placid, where he'd already booked an upcoming Dec. 31 stay to celebrate the date we exchanged our vows in 2015. His head was propped on the two pillows he deployed in that spot at that hour almost every evening. Because I know his and the dog's like-clockwork routine, I'm certain Tico was under the blanket with Nelson, resting his chin on Nelson's calf, before greeting my return with insistent barks. Three hours earlier Nelson told me he didn't feel right and ticked off what I realized too late to be warnings of a cardiac event. We considered 911 but both said, let's see - the same thing we'd done on Nov. 10, before an ambulance rushed me to the hospital the next morning with my own cardiac event. But in CASE we might need to go the E.R. later, Nelson said, he wanted to shower and shave first. Classic Nelson. He said it made him feel better. I said, "love you," grabbed my keys, and went out the door. We comfort ourselves by saying someone went peacefully, but nothing betrayed otherwise. He was cozy and asleep to me in the moment until I felt his cold hand and the 911 dispatcher directed me in futile chest compressions. The paramedics could do nothing. In the crook of his neck - when resting, Nelson always positioned his head in ways that made me worry about the horrible things he was doing to his spine - his hand held his cell phone, on which he'd completed a text to a friend, but not yet hit the send button. I choose to believe he simply closed his eyes and was gone. Someday I'll be grateful that's how it went. But a huge part of me is stuck in that moment. What I didn't do. What I could have done. What I should have done. He was 72, and died 76 days before what we would have celebrated as our 34 anniversary. *** A friend said: Nelson gave so much of his heart to others that he forgot to keep enough of it for himself. Another wrote: "Kind, considerate, cranky, amusing. "Thoughtful, lovely, adorable. "Irascible, irreplaceable. "Nelson." When I introduced Nelson over brunch to my best friend and closest confidante - a woman I loved as much as I loved anyone, and to whom I first admitted, "I've been experimenting with alternative lifestyles" - Nelson's innate kindness and charm was such that, when he stepped away from the table for a moment, my friend said, "I'll arm wrestle you for him." *** It had been a delightful, forward-looking day. The new backyard patio was three weeks old. It's where we poured all the money we didn't spend during two years of covid. A week earlier we'd potted bundles of flowers in yellows and whites and purples and reds purchased from roadside stands, filling containers that Nelson picked out. After scouring for hours online and in repeated trips to big box stores, he had the cushioned chairs on order and the new grill and firepit table on hand to assemble. While we put them together in the sun, we made plans. We'd booked a Memorial Day weekend drive with the dog to Memphis to finally see the Triple-A St. Louis Cardinals play, and then we'd cut across the Ozarks of northern Arkansas for two days in cute Bentonville, because we laughed that Tico - our social media scene-stealer -- had not been to either Tennessee or Arkansas. A singer-songwriter we like had resumed touring, and I saw she had a date in Iowa City in July. Every time I had a wild hair about something like going to a concert in Iowa City, I knew to float the idea hesitantly - my ideas were not always prudent - because Nelson instantly jumped on his computer to check hotels or air fares or train schedules to prove how easily we could do it, to make my every whim a reality. He was always game. It's why we have overflowing memories and no money in the bank. Nelson absolutely worked the system. He'd book and cancel and rebook constantly to get the best deals -- his first 30 minutes of every day were spent on travel sites -- and he always knew what hour of the day to find them. So we bought Iowa City concert tickets. He booked the Iowa City hotel rom. From Iowa City we'd detour on the way home through Peoria to hit another minor-league game. Nelson loved baseball, although he didn't come by it naturally. The joy of living in Florida for baseball fans is spring training. I introduced Nelson to spring training by telling him it's when all the men start working on their summer tans by taking their shirts off. He understood that. He came to grasp, and then become obsessed with, the game (but never grasped football). I took him to see "Field of Dreams." He bought me a DVD of "Bull Durham." After we moved in 2007 to my St. Louis hometown, Nelson started taping the pre-games, the games and the post-games. Losses made him grumpy. He hated Cardinals icon Albert Pujols for saying it wasn't about the money, and then quitting the Cardinals to chase the money. "I can forgive but I cannot forget," is a phrase Nelson lived by, to laugh-out-loud recall by great friends who said it in Nelson's accent (as Nelson laughed along). We once saw Albert Pujols hit three home runs during a single game at Wrigley Field. Nelson could not forgive Albert Pujols. We already had tickets to the final Cardinals home game, on Oct. 2, to lend a full-throated cheer for retiring future Hall-of-Fame catcher Yadier Molina. We were a gay couple who traveled for baseball and theater - and we considered the latter a competitive sport as well. A pre-Broadway run? Here we come. Although I did apply brakes when Nelson saw that Dame Beth Leavel of The Muny was taking on the Meryl Streep role in an upcoming Chicago tryout of a new show based on "The Devil Wears Prada," because, honestly, does that really need to be a musical? But even without that, our summer and fall looked ahead to operas and outdoor shows under the stars, a trip to Boston, a conference in Chicago, a wedding in Cincinnati, and a week in our favorite Savannah. It's a last day that is carrying me, and I did not want that last day with Nelson ever to end. *** At Nelson's request I grew a mustache. For him I grew a beard. Not entirely true. Men with mustaches and beards are the ones who turn our heads. But Nelson gave me the confidence to grow them. My relationship with Nelson gave me the confidence to come out. My relationship with Nelson gave me the confidence to do everything. Over many years, and especially as we grew grey together, strangers stopped to ask - as recently as a few days before he died, while we shopped in Home Depot - if we were brothers, because we looked so much alike. (Told no, their fallback question often was, "Father and son?") I always felt so flattered, and told Nelson so. He never stopped being handsome. When he hesitated or grumbled before acquiescing to my never-ending requests to pose him in yet another photo, I'd tell him, "I wish you could see yourself through my eyes." I told him that all the time. *** Young nieces, nephews and greats have always been my excuse to behave like a kid. But Nelson and I were forever playmates. Not that it's obvious in the scowl he projects in several of those late-in-life photos (my current favorite being a stone-faced Nelson, taken last New Year's Eve in Whitefish, Montana, sitting alongside a stone-faced portrait of a moose). I love that a neighbor detects an ongoing theme in my social media posts, of me doing something or enjoying a vista and Nelson refusing to get out of the car. But in the boxes of other photos now spread out at my feet - and across the dining table, and on my desk, and across the futon where Tico would sit at Nelson's shoulder - the evidence is clear: Nelson was silly. Goofy. Mischievous. He'd go anywhere, do almost anything, if I just pulled him up out of the chair. (Although he required at least a half-days' notice. Nelson didn't do impromptu. Instead of taking 30 minutes to get ready and out the door, he'd spend 60 minutes telling me he couldn't POSSIBLY get ready that fast. If we were taking even an overnight trip, he would lay out our socks and underwear two weeks ahead of time.) During my mom's decline, when she spent her final 17 months in a care center with advancing dementia, Nelson helped me bust her out every Saturday or Sunday and the three of us with Tico went cruising in the car for hours. The destination didn't matter. What mattered was the time together, and those drives became our sanity-saving M.O. after mom died and covid descended. I teased Nelson that he was like a puppy: His ideas for outings might be few, but he loved to jump in the car and stick his nose out the window and feel the breeze. It represented his constant bending toward me. When he initially moved into my Palm Beach apartment a block from the ocean, with the constant breezes and the jalousie windows and no insulation whatsoever, Nelson's first establishing influence was to push me to finally ask the landlord to install a window A/C unit in the bedroom so we could close the door and watch TV in bed. That's really all he needed. I've yet to locate a treasured photo of him I took upon arrival in some hotel room, Nelson naked and crossed-legged on the floor, eating from a bag of chips and watching The Weather Channel, which he preferred over the highly overrated weather outside. It delighted me that, with a glorious May in St. Louis before the heat and humidity send him inside until October, Nelson spent as many hours on the new patio as he did. I have a group of photos I call the Nelson Wilderness Collection (see: moose, above) which show him enjoying nature on his terms: indoors, and not involving actual nature. On the night of a lunar eclipse many moons ago, I tried to pull him outside into the backyard for a look up, envisioning a small shared romantic moment in the dark. His response: Why would I go outside if I can see it on television? But as covid wore on, and our habits changed, and the shutdown became a gift as we rediscovered how much we treasured time with just the two of us, we'd lock eyes in bed on Saturday and Sunday mornings, and Nelson's sleepy voice would convey a smile. "What's our adventure for today?" he'd say. *** We held hands watching TV. We sang in the car. We danced in the living room. He wrote checks to St. Jude's Children's Research Hospital each time those unsolicited address labels showed up in the mailbox. He always left generous tips for hotel housekeepers, after engaging them in genuinely interested conversation. He had separate coffee pots to make one cup, four cups, eight cups and 12 cups. I just counted 122 tea packets in 43 flavors in a cookie jar. We don't drink tea. He was the perfect host who wanted to be prepared and provide his guests with options. He never threw away a pill bottle. Or tossed out a short-term prescription. (Expired in 1996? Never know, might need it.) Or discarded a box. Or a bag. Or a piece of colored tissue paper. He had a gel or cream for every condition known to man, and on road trips, he arrayed them all on the bathroom vanity as if he was setting up a Clinique counter. Almost every day he suffered a fit of sneezes that I counted - 17, 18, 19 - as he tried to suppress each one. But if I sneezed even once, he was at my side thrusting a bottle of Zicam cold remedy. He did not love having people in the house unless he thought it looked like it was ready for an Architectural Digest photo shoot. But overnight visitors never failed to marvel at his pampering. He cooked using his mother's recipe book, and ate everything, a complete mismatch for a meat-and-potatoes guy whose Monday-Friday lunch since grade school has been peanut-butter-and-jelly. He accommodated (and complained about) my limited tastes, then broadened them. As much as he tried, he could not wink. After I turned his likeness into a bobblehead, he did a mean impression of it that made me laugh every time. He loved the musical "Mamma Mia!." The first time we saw it, in 2001, was on Nelson's birthday, during Broadway previews, when we stopped by the Winter Garden theater two hours before curtain and a pair of 5-row center seats were available for that night. Nelson looked at me like, should we? I looked at him like, of COURSE we should! We saw touring productions, a dinner theater production, a summer theater production. Nelson never stopped loving "Mamma Mia!" Or the movie "Muriel's Wedding," with its ABBA score. With an eye roll he indulged my insistence that we watch "Meet Me in St. Louis" every Christmas Eve, but out of context he and we constantly spoke aloud that film's concluding line, "Right here in St. Louis." If you were a woman and you changed your hair or lost a pound he would notice it right away and tell you how good you looked. He cultivated actual friendships with his favorite grocery checkout clerks, and he knew the names and always asked about the kids of his favorite Amtrak dining car attendant and all our doctors. He loved riding the rails, especially overnight, and knew the routes and station stops like a conductor. He was a member of Triple-A for 54 years and immensely proud of that fact. But he couldn't read a map to save his life. The best gift he ever gave me was a vacuum cleaner, for Christmas in 2001, because it confirmed us as an old married couple. He melted my heart on a regular basis when, at the end of a day - could be any day - he'd sigh in bed, in the dark, "Today was a good day." If you asked him in that mindless, good-natured way, "How are you?," he would tell you, and the answer never was "Fine." *** Nelson made the choices in my career. (We're both Libras, prone to making decisions and then second-guessing ourselves to death. In restaurants, even ones we frequented all the time, he thoroughly read over the full menu on every visit, and after the server walked away, Nelson ALWAYS said aloud, "Oh, I SHOULD have ordered.") He pushed me to reject one job offer in favor of another joining a former boss to launch what became Orlando Weekly, opening the door to wonderful friendships, amazing opportunities and the next even better job. After 17 years in Orlando he urged me to move with that job back to St. Louis, because he knew the value of family to me - and my family to him - as my aging parents began struggling. He chose the quirky two-story, 1927 masonry Tudor house we bought - the first of some 40 houses we viewed - because it was closest to them. He prepared for my parents his traditional Noche Buena Christmas Eve feast. We delivered Steak n' Shake meals and watched ballgames sitting on their loveseat. Nelson blossomed in the chaos of extended relations: holidays, birthdays, school concerts, youth athletics, backyard pig roasts and barbecues. After a year, he said with some exasperation, "It never ends, does it?" It's OK to say no, I told him. He withdrew slightly but never stopped encouraging me to do it all. We were here when my dad died, then my younger brother, then my younger sister, then my mom. Nelson carried me through each one, even though he felt each loss as deeply as I did. He uncharacteristically turned against someone when he thought she hadn't properly acknowledged my dad's death. He was always my biggest champion, and fiercest defender. When I launched and then was credited as sole executive producer on a documentary film made over three years with incredibly gifted collaborators, Nelson fumed at film festivals when he thought I wasn't being given enough credit. (I received plenty of credit.) "It isn't pillow talk," I felt obligated to assure one of the directors. "That's not me. That's Nelson looking out for me." *** Everything he did, every thought he had, considered me first. On one of many trips to Yellowstone, two friends and I waited - and waited - to take a short boardwalk hike while Nelson was, oh I don't know, dragging his feet in the hotel room. I made the call: He wouldn't want to go anyway, let's go ahead without him. We returned to encounter Nelson panicked, frantically searching for us, angry at me for leaving him behind, but mostly just hurt. He erupted at my selfishness for five minutes. Then, completely over it, he told me, "I saw a t-shirt in the gift shop I think you'd like." I wear it still. He wasn't entitled, but he did accept things when offered, and then expected them the next time. My Orlando media perks included free center orchestra seats to touring Broadway shows on opening nights, thanks to kind friends who booked them. When "Sunset Boulevard" came through I had a commitment and we couldn't go. So I bought us tickets for another night. They were balcony seats. Nelson never let me hear the end of it. Invites to preview new theme park attractions were a constant. Nelson did not enjoy any day in a hot theme park - and when he did go, as when he surprised me on my 40 birthday with a trip to Busch Gardens Williamsburg, he was happy to watch me ride roller coasters by myself. But exclusive after-hours events, with no lines and a gift bag, were entirely up his alley. He reached a point where he wouldn't go to any theme park, under any circumstance, unless someone was there to greet him with a plate of cold shrimp. *** In 2004 I had two friends on extended working assignments in Paris, staying in free apartments. I flew over and bounced between them, extending a 10-day trip to 20 days, because I could. Nelson gave me his air miles but didn't go. He couldn't go. He was a green-card carrying legal resident of the U.S., who paid taxes and later pocketed Social Security. But his paperwork always seemed to be missing or lapsed; the only country he said he could visit was Canada, and then only if we entered at a border, and not through an airport. I constantly lobbied - not nagged - him to fix that, because there was a world I wanted to explore with him, and he understood three languages. In Paris, before the ubiquity of mobile phones and texts, I began ducking into internet cafes to describe my experiences in emails to him. Nelson waited until late in the night, and rose early in the morning, to read and answer every time he heard a ding on his computer. I was compiling a travelogue; Nelson answered with a daily trove of love letters. One of the world's most glorious cities lay at my feet, and I just wanted to check in read what he had to say. "You have no idea how happy I am about your trip and the fun, culture and new things you are being exposed to. Take everything in you can," he typed on May 18. He signed off "Le Ours Canarian (The Canarian Bear)." After endorsing my longer stay, and jumping on the airline site to research my return, he wrote on May 20: "I miss you but not as much as when you go on business trips or visit family. I know you're having such a wonderful time that it gives me strength to miss you a bit less. Just want you to have a BLAST!" (Before I'd left, I knew he had a trip planned to Chicago, for a gay event called Bear Pride. "P.S.," he wrote on June 1, "I'm very popular in the Bear circuits now, they keep asking where is my next event.") On June 2 he wrote: "I'm all excited about you coming back, I do need you by now, it has been too f-----g long, but I manage and proud of myself too. See you in hours my Love." *** Nelson had two birthdates. There was the one he celebrated, and then there was the legal one - three years and 24 days apart. (He showed me records verifying each.) He explained the 24-day difference like this: His mother had fudged the birth certificate to extend her time off from work. I could accept that. But THREE YEARS? In his village, he said, a smudged handwritten number on paper simply became part of his permanent record, making him legally older. (How this figured into things like his school start date, I could only guess; surely someone would have noticed that the child who claimed to be 6 was actually 3?) But it worked to his advantage. He qualified for senior discounts earlier. He started collecting Social Security at age 59. Even so, I observed over the years that Nelson really didn't want people to find him. He deliberately kept his name off our household records, and never created a social media life. He'd worked for years in Miami with a close, tight group, and I only ever met two of them, including his best friend and her family - Nelson's lovingly adopted family -- who were always part of our shared life. But never anyone else from his past - no other friends, no relations. Even when I offered, I wasn't sure how to overcome distance and language barriers to locate his father, who we figured must have passed away. Nelson hadn't had any contact with him for 50 years. I joked to friends that Nelson was in the witness protection program. It triggered a subtle defensiveness. I stopped making the joke. In 2014 a remarkable thing happened. A handwritten letter reached our mailbox: Dear Son. I've never forgotten you. I hope you've had a good life. I'd love to see you. Here's where to find me in MIAMI. Nelson hid it from me for two weeks. I knew something was wrong. Finally I sat him down: WHAT is going ON with you? He told me about the letter. How wonderful! Have you called him? He's 94 - don't wait! Then Nelson tearfully told me the secrets it would reveal. His father was Puerto Rican. He'd met Nelson's mother while stationed with the U.S. military in Havana. His father wasn't an attorney; he was a truck driver. Nelson's mother was Cuban. He was not Spanish. He was not from the Canary Islands. He was born in Havana, in his aunt's apartment. There were a hundred tiny details of his life that he'd slowly fed me over 28 years at that point, building a façade that suddenly collapsed in front of me. I didn't know what to think. It was an extraordinary web of constructed lies to which Nelson kept adding, because I asked. I'm a reporter. I'm curious. I'm also a romantic sentimentalist. We'd talked many times about visiting his native Spain, about traveling to the Canary Islands to look for the street where he grew up. These were not "facts" in his past that I'd archived and forgotten. These were topics of regular conversations. The lies simply became too great for Nelson to back away from. Until that moment I would have said he could never lie to me. He's incredibly easy to read. He has no filter. Every thought that enters his head comes out his mouth. It's maddening, and delightful. He can't help himself. If he has a flash of irritation, or hurt, he has to get it out, and then he's fine. I learned to listen but not necessarily respond, to avert pointless escalation. I can be snappish. I can be intolerant. When I hit a roadblock I lose my patience. Nelson never did. He plugged away and figured things out. His very nature countered all my bad traits. He brought me back to earth. He believed in the better me, which made me better. But with Nelson you also had to know the code. "Should we take a jacket?," he'd ask, which was my clue to say, "Yes, we should take a jacket." "Do you want to wear my shirt?" was his polite way of saying, "You're not wearing THAT, are you?," even though there's nothing in my closet he didn't buy for me. Nelson hid the letter because he feared I'd leave him over the revelations. I wondered, how could you not know me? I didn't fall in love with your biography, I said. I fell in love with your heart. Nelson called his father in that moment as I sat by his side. The third sentence out of his mouth was, "Soy un homosexual." I am a homosexual. It was, to me, an incredibly courageous thing. (Especially since I never formally came out to my own folks. My mom deduced it and confronted me. It led to a horrifically hard time for Nelson, me and my parents. Nelson never wavered in his love and support. "They don't have to accept me but they have to acknowledge me," he said. In time he became their favorite in-law.) Nelson told me he abruptly made the statement because he wanted to head off questions about a wife and grandchildren. His father's response, apparently, was not to bat an eye. We booked a flight to Miami. We entered a room full of people eager to meet this prodigal son. I told Nelson, whatever you get out of this is irrelevant; you're making your father's dream come true. But the reunion transformed them both. Nelson recognized his father's voice instantly in that call. In-person, he listened to stories of his childhood. His father at 94 was vital, engaged, funny and mischievous, like his son. He recounted the heartbreak of watching Nelson move to America. Nelson learned things about his mom he didn't know. Nelson's father had married a second time - at age 90! - but the stories made clear that Nelson's mother had been his true love. Nelson by himself, and the two of us together, returned over and over, including for Christmas and Father's Day, during the next four years. Nelson poured out and received affection that had been denied for five decades. I watched the hole in his heart, one perhaps Nelson didn't know he had, fill with joy as his life came full circle. At home, finally freed from his secrets, Nelson bubbled over with Cuban passions and history. (Apparently his grandfather grew up in the Canary Islands - so there's that.) He grew up on the Isle of Pines, an oasis with black sand beaches that American agricultural interests had tried to colonize before abandoning it. The island, the seventh-largest in the West Indies, is 50 km south of Cuba's mainland; his love of travel sprang from riding the ferries and airplanes required to reach the big island. It also was home to Cuba's national penitentiary. A young Nelson had seen Castro, then a folk hero, on the street after an early prison release. His mother sent Nelson in early middle school to Miami Military Academy - that little bit I knew; the unwanted separation and rigid setting enforced on the boy haunted him - but in January 1961 as Castro solidified control, Nelson returned to Florida from a Christmas break with his overpacked footlocker not knowing if he'd see Cuba again. He resettled with relatives. Soon after, his mom, a school principal who'd aligned herself with former Bautista military officers, heard rumors that she was a wanted woman - by then friends and neighbors were turning on each other -- and she fled to Miami with the clothes on her back. They joined an exile community of professional people, forced to begin again from the ground up, at a time when signs in Miami read, "No blacks, no dogs, no Cubans." Nelson was enrolled in public schools; countless times we'd driven by his high school without him saying a word. Castro renamed the Isle of Pines as Isla de la Juventud - the Isle of Youth. Unable to teach, Nelson's mother eventually became executive housekeeper of an oceanfront South Beach hotel. He and I went excavating on YouTube and called up documentaries about Cuba and his island. We watched videos showing his street, and the public square around the corner from his home, and the church where he took his first communion and served as an altar boy. There was so much he wanted to share, and he delighted in rediscovering and sharing it. It unlocked vivid recall of Havana as a glorious gem whose decline he felt personally, and he knew he'd never view it again as long as Communism ruled. "People go there to see the old cars," he protested. "I rode in those cars when they were new!" I couldn't imagine this deeply sensitive man's burden of holding it in for so long. When I asked about the conspiracy of others who'd kept his secrets, he said there was no conspiracy. Everyone - our longtime Miami accountant, for example, and Nelson's best friend and her family, Cubans themselves - knew his truth. I just hadn't asked them the right questions, Nelson said. He never explained why he'd kept me at arm's length. He only apologized, over and over, for not telling me sooner. I put that aside and embraced the wonder: after three decades together, Nelson was revealing surprising new things about himself, and I loved it, and him. When, at 98, his father died from a rapidly advancing melanoma, Nelson assumed the responsibility and privilege of burying him, as he'd done 33 years earlier for his mother. He and I hadn't discussed death much. But in an early conversation he made clear his wishes. Funerals in his Miami community are open casket, with 24-hour visitation, and you have to be there at 3 or 4 in the morning because people will show up, he assured me. Plan to spend the night. He wanted to be dressed in a Polo by Ralph Lauren shirt, and be doused with Polo cologne. He said it half-jokingly, three-quarters not joking. I filed it away. But as the losses around us mounted, he took a more practical view. He knew it would be easier for me to carry his ashes to the Miami cemetery that held the double plot where he'd be laid to rest alongside his mother. The inscription in Spanish he wrote for her memorial plaque reads, "Tu Hijo Que No Te Olvida." Your son will never forget you. He and we visited that cemetery, where Nelson always placed colorful flowers, on every trip to South Florida. In his typically magnanimous way, Nelson offered his half for his father's burial, to reunite his parents. But the second wife and we also knew Nelson's father was immensely proud of his WWII military service - he often brought out a small box of medals to show his son -- and so for Nelson I researched how to inter his dad's remains at the South Florida National Cemetery, where they now reside. I never considered a day I'd be without Nelson, but I hoped I'd be the one left to carry out his wishes. I also never asked - and now I wish I did - how it felt to stare down at your own plot. Did it make him feel weird, or bring comfort? *** Every wedding anniversary comes with a story. What got you to that point? Remember that our story includes a wait for the Supreme Court's permission, because we lived in a state where the majority of our fellow citizens, possibly including my own mom, had voted to deny us that right. "It doesn't involve me," she said with a sigh and without malice when I asked, "and I don't think it should involve the Supreme Court." We agreed to disagree. In the very early struggle for marriage equality, Nelson was in San Francisco when that city's mayor went rogue and briefly began marrying same-sex couples at City Hall. I excitedly phoned Nelson. Why don't I fly out and let's do it? Nah, he pooh-poohed. "It's just political," he said. "That's the whole POINT," I said. But we were never really activists, apart from the occasional march on Washington (we joined two) or stepping out in a Pride parade that rolled through our Orlando gayborhood. We just lived our lives. No agenda, gay or otherwise. We only wanted to marry and have it be legal in the place we called home. When at last the Court cleared the way, we planned for six months. We chose Nelson's favorite holiday and recruited a judge who was a friend to officiate a City Hall ceremony with the parking meter running. We wrote down the names of all who matter to us and tucked the folded paper into our breast pockets, so that each person would be close to our hearts as we exchanged vows. We loved that it gave equal weight to all - present or departed, near and far - and we felt the embrace of every single name we carried, along with the joy of considering how each made a difference in our lives. When we made my mom's condo our first and only stop afterward before jumping on a plane for a Times Square honeymoon, she stared at my left hand. "You're not wearing a ring," she said. We happily flashed our right hands, where the ring is worn in Spanish culture. On Dec. 31, 2021 - our 6 anniversary and 33 New Year's Eve together - I wrote from Whitefish, Montana, about my heart attack seven weeks earlier, on the heels of a two-week salmonella infection through which a terrified and hovering Nelson had also nursed me. "Without his hand to grab and hold onto, I can't say where I'd be, in this year or this life. We just go together. Proposal be damned, we courted for 27 years before turning legit. There is no one with whom I'd rather grow old - and as we now are doing so, the gift in that realization is meaningful to us both. The train trip to Whitefish is sort of Nelson's turn-taking after making me the priority these past few months; only afterward, when we exhaled together, did he reveal the fear he'd held back. All y'all who justifiably celebrate your own marital milestones on social media never mention the hard parts. The hard parts count. The hard parts are the mortar. We are devastated learning about the Covid death of a close friend, and omicron right now is raging, making this a dumb time to engage in anything that isn't necessary. But this vaxxed and masked-up trip, this reclaiming of an annual anniversary adventure, feels necessary to both of us, after what we've been through. There is no forever. There is only now. Having a heart attack makes clear this fact: That one heart is not just yours, but belongs to more people than you ever imagined. Nelson holds my heart closer than anybody. If he wishes to haul it to Whitefish on a train in a pandemic, the rest of me will follow." *** Nelson was a Christmas-and-Easter Catholic. I'm not a religious anything. But I like traditions, so I dragged him to Christmas Eve midnight mass past the point Nelson wanted to go (after watching "Meet Me in St. Louis," of course.) As a boy he celebrated the Epiphany with his gifts on Jan. 6, so we followed suit, because Three Kings Day calls for a party -- if you don't know, instead of leaving cookies for Santa, you set out grass for the arriving camels -- and because it gave me a do-over if I blew the gift thing on Dec. 25. He lit candles for the dead, and swore by fish on Fridays during Lent. (He cooked me something else on those nights.) But he wasn't a churchgoer as long as I knew him. After he died, my sister compassionately urged me to consider Nelson's beliefs. Then, in the one dresser drawer of his that I've opened - can't recall what I was looking for - I rifled through layers of hoarded plastic bags and there it was: a huge stand-up gold crucifix. Not just any crucifix. A crucifix that looked like it had been pilfered from the Vatican. A crucifix that, in my work as a crime reporter, could be a tool of blunt force trauma. I don't recall ever seeing it but clearly it had personal meaning or Nelson wouldn't have kept it through our moves. Maybe it was a link to his childhood. Maybe it was a link to his mother. It didn't matter. Here it was, hitting me in the face. I asked devout friends to send prayers, in English and Spanish. With a friend, I entered the funeral chapel for the final viewing brandishing the heavy crucifix in my right hand, to steel myself as much as anything, along with a classic green bottle of Polo cologne bought that morning at Macy's. I hadn't forgotten. The body was dressed in the black Polo shirt I'd dropped off a day earlier, with the red embroidered horse-and-rider on the left breast. There, inevitably, were also a few white dog hairs that Tico sends out the door of anything leaving our house. How perfect. I set the crucifix on a stand, dabbed the scent, and we said aloud our prayers. Our superpower has always been unlocked by clicking our gold wedding bands together. I did it once more, and then slipped Nelson's ring off his hand and onto mine, he left one, the one that Americans use. *** Translated: When I have to leave you for a short time, please don't be sad or shed tears or hold onto your sorry through the years; on the contrary, start again with courage and with A smile for my memory and in my name live your life and do all things the same as before. Do not feed your loneliness with empty days, but fill every hour in a useful way. Extend your hand to comfort and encourage and in return I will comfort you and hold you close to me; and never, never be afraid to die because I'll be waiting for you in Heaven! *** That evening I took my friend to my great-nephew's 8 birthday party. Seven days after that, my niece texted me from a Florida beach to say she'd just gotten engaged. When I called to tell another friend about Nelson, I learned that six days earlier he'd become a grandfather. Wonderful, glorious life spins forward. *** Four days after he died Nelson turned on the television. I was lying upstairs in bed at 5:17 a.m. when I heard voices. The previous night had been filled with tornado warnings and sirens, and the phones kept blasting alerts. Were more on the way? No. If Nelson was having a restless night, he might get out of bed and go downstairs to lie on the couch where he died and watch TV until he fell asleep. I walked downstairs and the TV was broadcasting whatever the local NBC affiliate broadcasts at 5:17 a.m. Never has the TV turned on by itself. "Nelson, I know it's you," I said aloud. "Thank you for letting me know you're here, but I'm going back upstairs to keep Tico company in bed." Two days later, my friend who'd flown in from Montana so we could support each other in our grief borrowed my car for a short trip. "Do you have crystals?," she said when she returned. What? "Do you have crystals. In your car." I did not. When she climbed into the SUV in the spot where I always parked in our driveway, she saw a clearly defined rainbow bridging the two front seats. I've slipped into that SUV in that spot at all hours and in all manner of sunlight, and never seen a rainbow. We both knew it was Nelson checking in. Right now I'm waiting for him to tell me where he left his car keys. *** The weekend in Memphis loomed. I decided Tico and I would go ahead with it, and bring the ashes. I carried them in a purple tote I'd bought for Nelson at the Medora Musical, a fabulous pageant we sought out last fall at an amphitheater carved into the side of a western North Dakota butte. In song-and-dance and roller skates, it celebrates Theodore Roosevelt, whose time in the area as a cowboy seeded his love of the American West, and also the North Dakota businessman behind the bath soap Mr. Bubble. As Nelson and I planned that trip and searched for stops en route, I remembered reading about the musical and called up a video for Nelson, who watched and grinned and said with a twinkle, "I'm in." So he's in the Medora Musical bag. I hoped the 5-hour drive to Memphis would be contemplative and let me live alone with my thoughts. But halfway through, it hit me hard: this is wrong, it's too soon, I'm not ready. I'd also had a blip on my EKG that morning while breaking into a shudder-cry during cardiac rehab. I guess a broken heart is measurable. The cardiologist responded by adding another med, and told me that if I insisted on taking the trip, I should avoid strenuous activity and make sure I knew where the hospitals were located. Great, I thought, I'm going to die in an anonymous Memphis hotel room like a rock star with a dog and my husband's ashes and no one will know what to do with either of them. About 100 miles from Memphis I felt my heart start to race, but I was exhausted and it was too late to turn around. I began scanning for hospital signs at the interstate exits. I was scared. It passed. I told myself I'd spend the night and then cancel the whole trip. But in the morning I awoke and decided, this is my life now. I can retreat or push through. So Tico and I made plans. I toured the Sun recording studio that gave us Elvis, and the amazing civil rights museum at the Lorraine Motel where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, racing through both while Tico sat in the car. We found a brewpub and I downed a dark beer. Nelson only lets us stay at Marriott properties, amassing a million hotel rewards points. But he also knows I love history, and he'd booked a former Art Deco apartment building-turned-Residence Inn where Tico could stay in our room three blocks from the baseball stadium. The night could not have been more beautiful, or the ballpark any more delightful, and I told Nelson so. But the more the game progressed - I was present but hardly paying attention - the more I missed his presence, especially as I watched the scoreboard clock tick toward 8:25 p.m., when exactly two weeks earlier I'd sent Nelson my last unanswered text and he was dead or dying. Dammit, I thought; I'm going to go get him. After the third inning I left my seat to ask a group of young gate attendants if I could leave and come back. No, they apologized. I stepped away, then turned around. If I buy another ticket, then can I leave and come back? Their quizzical looks made me spill the story. Turns out that when you break out in heaving sobs, stadium policy goes out the window. Go, they said. I did, and was back in my seat with a Philly cheesesteak by 8:25 p.m., with the ashes in the Medora Musical bag and covered in the same fleece blanket that Nelson had wrapped himself in. I slipped my hand under the blanket to rest it atop the container, then pulled the container itself out and embraced it in a bear hug against my chest. We sat like that for the rest of the game, and at some point I realized I was smiling. A peace I'd not known had come over me. I'd completed a journey, and shared a last night with Nelson at the ballpark. The Redbirds won, 10-5. Fireworks followed the game. It's partly why we picked it. Nelson knows I'll go anywhere for fireworks. Our joke was, I knew where he was going in the ground, but I was going in the opposite direction; if I died first, he should take my ashes and find one of those novelty companies that pack them into a firework and shoot me into the sky. Every explosion of the fireworks show jolted loose a new emotion. It went on and on, and the bursts at the finale didn't quit, and they were so loud and so amazing as they climbed higher and higher, and I just screamed out in happiness with Nelson's ashes cradled in my arms, until the sound of the booms drowned out my own voice, and then at last were still. *** A current public radio campaign in St. Louis uses an instrumental background that cycles over and over through my days, written by the genius Beach Boy Brian Wilson. In eight words he said what I've stumbled through 8,587 words (so far) to say, and which no amount of words will let me get right: God Only Knows What I'd Be Without You. Nelson playfully griped that familiar Spanish sayings didn't always translate, although frankly I don't know how "If my father had rails, I'd be a streetcar" makes sense in any language. And the frustration in "You make my ass want to smoke a cigar" is pretty obvious. But the one he sprang on me most often, the one he used when signing off in one of his Paris letters, the one that represents all that is sweet and good and endearing and unforgettable about Nelson, is the one that I'll claim as a mantra for the rest of my days. Te quiero, te adoro y te compro un lorro. I love you, I adore you and I bought you a parrot. God, I miss him.

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