This article was published in Central PA (www.centralpa.org) magazine last February:

An Unexpected Widow
By Rebecca Thatcher Murcia

When I met Saúl in Brownsville, Texas, in 1999, I was a young, hard-charging investigative reporter. I fearlessly tracked down drug traffickers and murderers and wrote stories about them. My dentist told me he needed x-rays in case he had to identify my body.
Saúl was one of the first Colombians I had ever met. He had dark, sparkling eyes and a broad smile that left me completely enamored. He was a kind and gentle soul who had just graduated from Goshen College, a Mennonite school in Indiana, and joined Mennonite voluntary service. They had sent him to Brownsville to work in home repair. They say opposites attract, and in our case the attraction was fierce. We were inseparable almost from the day we met. We married a few months later.
Soon after we began living together, we realized that while opposites attract, they don’t always live together easily. His quietness drove me crazy at times. My need for communication sent him over the edge. But we survived those difficulties and flourished in the border city. His supervisors asked him to take over leadership of the Mennonite voluntary service programs in Texas and New Mexico. Later he earned the job of national coordinator. Editors at the Austin American-Statesman noticed my hard work and offered me a job there.
We loved Austin. Our first son, Gabriel, was born in 1995 and Mario came two years later. We agreed that our children should be bilingual and tried to speak to them mostly in Spanish. Every two years, we took them to his parent’s farm in Colombia and enjoyed visiting with relatives, playing in the river and exploring all the nooks and crannies of the little hillside property.
When Gabriel was a baby, we carried his car seat from the farm to the nearby road on the back of a mule. I wrote a funny story for the newspaper about how nervous I had been about that idea. The newspaper published the picture of Saul sitting on the mule, holding the car seat, with little Gabriel’s face just peaking out over the edge – the pacifier firmly between his lips. People loved the picture and the story.
Saúl’s talents as a leader and an administrator did not go unnoticed. When the Mennonite Central Committee, a relief and development agency of the Mennonite church, had an opening on their Latin America desk, they called Saúl and asked him to apply. In the summer of 2001, we moved from fun-loving, cosmopolitan Austin to tiny Akron in Lancaster County. Saul became the agency’s co-director for Latin America.
We bought a house just off Main Street in Akron and built a new life in a small town. I worked part-time as a free-lance writer and Saúl threw himself into the challenges of running development and aid projects in places like Bolivia, Paraguay, Colombia and Jamaica. The children made friends and joined soccer teams. Life was good.
Saul shocked me in the summer of 2003 when he said, “I think I’m going to die.” He showed me a lump on the left side of his chest about the size of half a tennis ball. A wise radiologist at the local hospital had already said he thought it was Chondrosarcoma, a rare kind of bone cancer.
I researched the implications of a large Chondrosarcoma tumor and the information was disheartening. The articles said the chances of a fatal metastasis following the discovery of a large tumor were high. In Saúl’s presence, I tried to be calm and reassuring. When I was alone or on the phone with my mother, I cried.
Doctors at Johns Hopkins Hospital removed the tumor in December 2003 and treated the area with radiation. Saul was in the hospital for a week and came home with a big scar and Gortex where he used to have ribs. He seemed fine and we hoped that we had dodged the bullet.
In the summer of 2004 his back started hurting. The cancer had spread to his spine and lungs. It’s easy to say that the last year was a nightmare – as we struggled with the paralysis, the surgery, the recuperation, and the return of the cancer. In many ways it was a nightmare. It’s awful to see some one you love decline to the point of total dependence. At a certain point, Saúl couldn’t even raise his hand to scratch his nose.
But there were many good times. We came together as a family and we relied on an incredible church family – Pilgrim’s Mennonite in Akron -- to help us with everything from cleaning bathrooms to sleeping on the floor next to Saúl’s bed and waking up to turn him every two hours. Saúl never lost his dry sense of humor nor his charming smile.
On Saturday, June 4, we were expecting three of Saúl’s old friends from Goshen College days. He sent me to a little Colombian market in Ephrata with a long list of his favorite Colombian foods. I bought it all and created a feast. The friends arrived and we managed to push Saúl’s wheel chair out onto the porch. We sat in the sun and ate and talked. The next day we all went to a soccer game. By then Saúl was very weak and it took two people to get him from his wheel chair back into the car.
The end was mercifully swift. Saúl was sleepy on Monday and delirious on Tuesday. On Wednesday he was mostly unconscious and breathing with difficulty. On Thursday afternoon, I sat at his bedside, unwilling to let him go so quickly. “Your cousin Tony is here,” I bellowed, hoping for at least another brief return to consciousness. Instead he closed his mouth and seemed to go in peace. I cried there at his side for a little while, then I went upstairs to say the two hardest words I’ve ever uttered to my children, “Pappy died.”
Mario, 8, threw himself on the floor of my bedroom in tears. Gabriel, 10, ran to his bed to cry. I went back and forth, wanting to console them but not dictate how and where they cried. The next few days were a blur of visitors, the burial, the memorial service – and lots of writing. I wrote an obituary, a eulogy and a children’s story for the memorial service.
Soon people began asking if we will stay in Akron. It’s as if they’re thinking, “Why would a Massachusetts-educated New Yorker who lived in Texas for 14 years stay in small-town Pennsylvania?”
It is a hard question to answer but at this point it feels right to stay here. People here cared for us in a time of trial. The children like their friends, their schools, their soccer teams and their church. And even if all those things weren’t the case, Akron has grown on me. This is where Saúl was laid to rest, on a beautiful hill just down the street from our house. No, it’s not Austin, but it’s home for now.

Rebecca Thatcher Murcia is an Akron writer.