Obituary for Mr. Nelson J. Figueroa-Ortega

Nelson Julio Figueroa-Ortega, whose irrepressible charm, sweet
soul, pure 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 behind with an overabundance
of endearing stories, smiles, laughter and tears.
A graveside memorial service will take place at noon Saturday,
Sept. 3, at Miami Memorial Park, 6200 SW 77th Ave., where
Nelson’s ashes will be laid to rest alongside his adored mother,
who preceded him in death on March 4, 1985.

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 Colon,
a Puerto Rican national who served in the U.S. military and
overseas in Europe during 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 father, who made a surprising and joyous reentry
into Nelson’s life after 50 years in 2014 at age 94, died Oct. 13,
2018, and was buried with full military honors 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 — after Nelson 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 Nelson’s
and teased him mercilessly, to which Nelson responded by
spoiling Tico silly, after Jeff’s mom 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.

Se ha quedado un Tesoro precioso entre nosotros,
Un Tesoro con recuerdos de una vida plena.
El Tesoro de un amor que nunca dejara de existir

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.

Mi mente todavia te habla
Y mi Corazon todavia te busca.

Pero mi Alma sabe que estas en Paz

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 38, I was 28, 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 hello 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 his home in 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 grew, 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 few pairs of pants,
then a full 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 Santeria
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 requested 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 out 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 he said, let’s wait and see. It was the same thing we’d done
six months earlier, when I experienced similar unexplained
discomfort, before an ambulance rushed me the next day to
the hospital with my own heart attack. But just in CASE we
decided to go the E.R. later, Nelson said, he wanted to shower
and shave first. Classic Nelson. He said afterward that it made
him feel better. I said, “love you,” grabbed my keys, and went
out the door on his short errand to the store. 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.
He was 72, and died 69 days before what we would have
celebrated as the 34th anniversary of our first date.
***
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 had 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 barbecue grill and firepit table on hand to
assemble. While we put them together in the sun, we made
plans. Two weeks down the road we’d scheduled a Memorial
Day weekend drive with the dog to Memphis to finally see the
Triple-A affiliate of our beloved 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 room.
From Iowa City we’d detour on the way home through Peoria
to hit another minor-league baseball game. Nelson absolutely
loved baseball, although he did not 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 male fans from up north come down and start working on
their summer tans by taking their shirts off. That, he
understood. He came to grasp, and then become obsessed
with, the game (but never grasped football). I took him to see
the movie “Field of Dreams.” He bought me a DVD of the movie
“Bull Durham.” After we moved in 2007 from Florida to my St.
Louis hometown, Nelson started recording 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 attempted to say it
in Nelson’s accent (as Nelson laughed right along). We once
saw Albert Pujols hit three home runs during a single game at
Wrigley Field in Chicago. Nelson could not forgive Albert Pujols.
We already had tickets to the final Cardinals home game of the
season, 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 the brakes when Nelson read
about 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 city of Savannah.
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 followup often was, “Father and son?”) I
always felt so flattered, and made sure Nelson knew it. 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.
***

Not that it’s obvious in the scowl he projects in some of those
late-in-life photos (my current favorite being a stone-faced
Nelson, taken on our last New Year’s Eve in Whitefish,
Montana, sitting alongside a stone-faced portrait of a moose),
but Nelson and I were forever playmates. 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 Nelson was always in on the joke. He
couldn’t wait to see how people reacted. In the boxes of photos
I spread at my feet after he died – and around 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. We had fun constantly, and always had
something on the calendar that we looked forward to doing
together. He’d go anywhere, do almost anything, if I just pulled
him up out of the chair. (Although he did require at least a half-
day’s 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 widowed
mom’s decline, when she spent her final 17 months in a care
center with slowly advancing dementia, Nelson helped me bust
her out every Saturday and 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 spring in St. Louis before the heat and humidity
sent 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 that 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 TV? 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 damn 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,
which he folded for reuse and stored in plastic bins under the
bed.
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 at Burdine’s.

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,
and delighted in sharing and sampling from everyone’s plate,
which was 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 wearing his red
Cardinals jacket, he did a mean impression of it that never
failed to make me laugh.
He loved the musical “Mamma Mia!.” The first time we saw it,
in 2001, was on Nelson’s birthday in New York City, during
Broadway previews, when we stopped by the Winter Garden
theater two hours before curtain and a pair of 5th-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 the
movie musical “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 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 of his
doctors.
He loved riding on trains, 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.
He was addicted to weather apps. He picked out his clothes for
travel based on the long-range forecast, when the
meteorologists couldn’t possibly know what was going to
happen, and then give me temperature updates, sometimes on
an hourly basis, 12, 10, 8 days in advance. He never wanted to
be unprepared.

He loved to vacation in the mountains. But he always feared
falling off the side of a steep road. Once, he made me stop
outside of Park City, Utah, and then he climbed into the back
seat of the rental car and lay down with a jacket over his head
so he wouldn’t see what he perceived as the danger. I don’t
know how many chair lifts I made him ride to the top of some
peak before he told me he was afraid of heights. He didn’t want
to spoil my fun.
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 – it 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 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; I smiled learning
after he died that he’d circulated a photo of me with my niece
at her college graduation a week earlier, which he had to miss
only because she’d been given just four tickets. We were
together 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 never
said or did anything intentionally to hurt anyone – he was
incapable of it – and yet he uncharacteristically turned against
someone when he thought she hadn’t properly acknowledged
my dad’s passing. 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 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 National Park, 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 orchestra seats to touring Broadway shows on
opening nights. When the musical “Sunset Boulevard” came
through I had a commitment and we couldn’t go. So I bought us
two 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 40th birthday with a trip to Busch Gardens
Williamsburg, he was all-too-happy to watch me enjoy 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 him –
not nagged – 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 race to see what he
had written to me. “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’d
been a truck driver. Nelson’s mother was Cuban. Nelson was
not Spanish. He was not from the Canary Islands. He was born
in Havana, in his aunt’s apartment. There were scores of tiny
details of his life that he’d slowly fed me over 26 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 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 going in, 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 was raised

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; Nelson’s 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 in
Florida – that little bit I knew as true; the unwanted separation
and rigid setting enforced on the boy haunted the man – 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 was resettled with
relatives. Soon after, his mom, a school principal who’d been
friendly with ousted former Batista military officers, heard
rumors that she was wanted for questioning – by then friends
and neighbors were turning on each other — and she fled to
Miami to join her son with only 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 watched documentaries about Cuba and his
island. We found 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 see it again in person 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 nearly 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 brightly
colored fresh 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. I hope it brought him comfort.
***
Every wedding anniversary comes with a story. What got you to
that point? Remember that our story includes a wait for the
U.S. Supreme Court’s permission, because we lived in a state
where the majority of our fellow citizens, possibly including my
own mother, 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 Dec. 31 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 person
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 New York City and 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 6th anniversary and
33rd 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 nursed me. “Without his
hand to grab and hold onto, I can’t say where I’d be, in this year
or this life,” I wrote. “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. This 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 that he
might lose me. 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 first dresser drawer of
his that I opened – I 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 easily 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 Spanish and
English. With another 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 purchased 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. Inevitably, there on the dark shirt
were also a few white dog hairs that Tico sends out the door of
anything leaving our house. How perfect, I thought. I set the

crucifix on a stand, dabbed the scent, and we said aloud our
prayers. The superpower that Nelson and I shared 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.
***
Cuando tenga que dejarte por un corto tiempo, por favor no te
entristezcas ni derrames lágrimas ni te abraces a tu pena a
través de los ańos; por el contrario empieza de nuevo con
valentía y con
Una sonrisa por mi memoria y en mi nombre vive tu vida y haz
todas las cosas igual que antes.
No alimentes tu soledad con dias vacíos, sino llena cada hora de
manera útil.
Extiende tu mano para confortarny dar ánimo y en cambio yo
te confortaré ye te tendré cerca de mi; y nunca, nunca tengas
miedo de morir porque yo estaré esperándote en el Cielo!
Translated:
When I have to leave you for a short time, please don’t be sad
or shed tears or hold onto your sorrow 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 8th
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 and OK, but I’m going back upstairs to keep Tico company
in bed.” Two days later, a friend who’d flown in from Montana
so we could support each other in our grief borrowed my car.
“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 that we’d planned in Memphis to see baseball
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
former president 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 on the
way, 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 my cardiac rehab. I guess a broken heart is measurable.
The cardiologist responded by adding another medication, 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. 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 of the game 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 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 contained ashes in the
Medora Musical bag under the same fleece blanket that had
covered Nelson as he died. 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 Memphis Redbirds won, 10-5.
Fireworks followed the game. It’s partly why we picked that
date. 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 9,098 words (so far)
to say about Nelson, 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
love 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.
***

Written June 16, 2022