The Novena of Tío Mauro

I’ve spent the last few months reflecting on everything that’s happened to bring me to this point. It’s been a bittersweet recollection. If you were in Toronto in the late autumn of 2020, you might recall that Ontario reopened businesses and workplaces for a short period of time before abruptly overturning the decision. It was a haphazard and confusing time that only placed the most vulnerable at risk. My uncle, Mauro, was infected with COVID. He passed shortly thereafter. 

My parents arrived in Canada in the late 80s and early 90s as refugees from El Salvador, a small country lining the Pacific Ocean in Central America. They were fleeing a brutal civil war that lasted over a decade. The militarised government would conscript boys as young as 12 to fight the guerilla. My father fled at that age, only to live undocumented in the United States for four years before coming to Toronto. This is where he met Mauro, a Salvadoran refugee that had defected from the military and sought asylum in Canada. The two quickly became friends and lived together from the ages of 21 to 27. 

Mauro was beside my father on the day that I was born. For two men that lost everything, they became each other’s family. Mauro was my uncle in every way but blood. 

Following “La Matanza” of 1932, where tens of thousands of Indigenous lives were taken, El Salvador became a predominantly Catholic state. Our funeral practices mimic those of the church, which meant that my uncle’s death was followed by nine days of mourning called the Novena. However, ancestral ties to the Nahuat Pipil nation always complicated that Christian connection for my father. As a result, our Novena saw nine days of reminiscence, grief, pain, anger, silence, and acceptance. 

The first day was the hardest. Neither of us could find the right words to say. All my father said was, “Do you remember when we used to go camping with him up North?” We used to head up to Algonquin Park with a couple of other families for a day or two. We would drive up to Jane and Weston to pick up Tío Mauro along the way, usually getting to the campsite just in time for dinner. The smell of tortilla, meat, and fire would stick to your jackets and linger for days after. For me, that was the smell of community and peace. 

The funeral should have been about community. A collective grief that we all shared, a burden ever so softened by the presence of loved ones who felt exactly what you felt. Funerals during the height of the pandemic robbed us of that. My family was lucky enough to be invited to the in-person ceremony. Everyone else mourned from behind their computer screens. One of the last comforts offered to mourners before the casket is lowered into the ground is a rose. Each attendee is given a flower to place on the casket of the deceased. I could count less than a dozen flowers on Tío Mauro’s casket. One of the funerary home workers must have noticed how sparse they looked over the wood because he came to bring them together in the smallest bouquet I have ever seen. 

At Salvadoran funerals, we have a guitarist strumming folk hymns of our people while others sing the lyrics. You reunite with the earth, carried by the voices of those fortunate enough to share part of this life with you. There were no singers that day. There was no guitar. Only the wails of a woman burying the love of her life asking, why, God, why? 

I sat by the fire with my father, watching the flames dance around, letting the smell permeate my jacket, my shirt, and my skin. Hoping it would strike deep enough to clear the grief in my heart, but all I could feel in that moment was pain and sadness. We sat that way until the fire burned out, and the cold became too much to bear. 

The next two days were about storytelling. My father has a way of bringing his world to life right in front of your eyes. He reached down from the side of his chair and grabbed a handful of snow. He watched it roll through his hands and drop back to the earth. 

“Have I ever told you of the first winter your mother and I were together?” Tío Mauro lived with them at that point—more accurately, my mom had moved in with my father and Mauro. There was a restaurant bar around the corner of their apartment with live music, good drinks, and an ambiance that let you forget about the freezing weather outside. My parents and Mauro thought it would be fun to race back home. They took off, trudging through the snow with exaggerated steps. My parents won the race. Five minutes passed… ten minutes passed. No sign of Mauro. He walks in, covered in snow, and starts complaining that he fell into a snowbank and nobody came to save him. My dad asks, “What do you have behind your back?” Mauro laughs and throws a snowball at him that he brought from outside. It was surreal for me to hear my father tell this story—inexplicably, picturing him in his 20s seemed fake. But his laughter was real. It was contagious. 

The next few days followed a similar pattern of sitting by the fire, eating, and drinking. Every day was a mix of sharing stories and feeling a smile creep in, while shedding tears that never seemed to run dry. 

On the sixth day, the weather was unbearable. The only time my father was tempted to take a bereavement day was to avoid the forty-minute drive downtown to work. We seriously reconsidered the commitment we had to these nine days of mourning. The Canadian cold and snow forgive no one, including the bereaved. My dad looked at me and pondered, “At least Mauro is wrapped up, not feeling the cold.” It was hard to tell if he was making a cruelly dark joke or if there was an earnestness to his comment. I guessed a bit of both. Despite the chill, we spoke until the embers glowed orange. 

The ninth day holds a powerful place in my heart. I would like to say that acceptance of the situation found its way into my life within nine days. It would have been a perfect ending to recognize that I had superseded the tragedy of my uncle’s passing. Unfortunately, my sorrow was as prevalent as it was on the first day. It shifted between unbearable and numbing, as it did the day of his funeral. That being said, he was alive as ever in each of the stories we told. 

Any individual that has lived as a refugee exists in a dichotomous world oscillating between erasure and violence. The hardest part for me has been reconciling his death with the life that he lived. My uncle deserves to be remembered both for the violence he was forced to endure, but more for the beautiful life he carved out for himself in Toronto. I am honoured to have been able to share part of that experience.

Disaster is a point of fracturing in the lives of those involved. It felt like my life had been torn into two parts—one where I still held the innocence of hope and one where this global disaster had affected me on a deeply personal level. I lost a part of my life and family’s history that I will never retrieve. And yet, as we pass three years since the Novena of Tío Mauro, I find myself accepting hope, despite the intimate awareness that nothing is promised. We may all find perseverance, and this is my journey to finding it for myself. 

It is my sincere hope that others may find solace in what I have to say.