As we’re coming up on the 4th anniversary of Mario’s grand exit from this life, I’m thinking back to Feb 10th, 2021 and where I was, mentally and emotionally. I’m just going to repurpose something I wrote back then. I’ve since expanded on some of the memories and adventures mentioned in other posts, but there are so many more and I want to remember all of them.
This February 10th is a Monday and I already have a meeting scheduled and work to do. I normally would try and schedule something fun to do on that particular day just to make new mental associations with the date, but couldn’t pull it together this year.
Anyway, here’s what I wrote back on February 22nd, 2021…
Never Say Goodbye, Say Caio
My other half shuffled off this mortal coil on Wednesday, February 10, 2021 at 6:52 p.m.
It’s so weird writing/typing that out. But writing is what I do to get things out of my head…to process.
I’m still in that surreal stage where I feel like I will wake up one morning and this will all have been some bad nightmare. It doesn’t take long for reality to sink in again.
I keep replaying the last couple months. So many “lasts”. I want to catalog and remember them forever.
We met at UCLA School of Art. The year was 1994. We hit it off right off the bat. That was 27 years ago. The majority of our lives… certainly the majority of his. We were married for the majority of that time.
He always told me that he wasn’t in a “rush to the finish line”. Yet from a very early age, he’d always proclaimed that he’d never make it to 50.
The last meal I made for him was Annie’s organic cheese and spirals with steamed broccoli on Super Bowl Sunday.
He had to know he was dying. Deep down I knew it. But he wanted everything to be as normal as possible as long as possible. There is a point where the human will to live is broken and it becomes simply existing. The last couple months were like that. How many times did he lie awake at night wondering what day he would die? How I’d take it? He wouldn’t talk about any of it.
We talked about those mundane, everyday life things or sometimes we’d have deep conversations about life, the universe, or fond memories, but he did not want to talk about the end.
The last voice mail message he left on my phone was on 2/7/21 at 10:20 a.m. and it sounds like he’s in a very far off place with bad reception, yet I know he was laying on our couch in our living room calling me to pick up another item while I was out grocery shopping.
He was dying and nothing and no one could stop it and yet he faced it like it was just another day. No freak outs. No desperate measures. No emotional outbursts. That’s metal af.
It was a weekend in May in 2009 when we went out to central Oregon to go camping. We visited the Newberry National Volcanic Monument. We had a great time. We checked out this lava tube cave. There was no one but us there. No guides. We had just moved from Southern CA 2 years prior and still marveled at how “on your own” you were in much of Oregon. The entire state seemed to be a lawsuit waiting to happen. We didn’t get far until we freaked out and turned back. We joked that the rangers took bets on how long we’d last.
(In the lava tube cave.)
When we got back to our camp spot, I didn’t know that in just about 12 years, I’d use the picture I took of Mario, giggling with his plastic wine glass, for his obituary.
Even though we didn’t get to travel the world like we’d always wanted, we had so many small adventures over the years.
Our last camping trip was August 1–2, 2020. I distinctly remember thinking this was the last time we’d go camping, but I didn’t want to believe it. I just wanted to be “in the moment” and forget everything else.
We went to so many parties, clubs, and raves back in the day in Los Angeles. We were both DJs with a collective speciality of dark drum ’n’ bass, but Mario also spun some wild, hard techno too. I remember once I got booked to play in Detroit and had a massive panic attack about doing it and he went in my place.
I dealt with panic attacks for awhile after that. I still remember a day at my old apartment in L.A…. it was during a time when I barely left the house because when I did, I’d panic. Mario said he was coming over, so I was sitting on the concrete steps in front of the apartment waiting for him. Soon enough, he came strolling down the sidewalk. He silently sat down next to me and we just sat there in the sun for a few minutes. Then I’ll never forget what he said when he did decide to speak. “You know… there are stars going supernova out there.” That was a turning point for me and something I’ll remember forever. He always had a knack for knowing the right thing to say.
I encouraged him to create his own electronic music by helping him build a PC that was capable of running the music software. I can’t remember the exact year now but it was the late 90s. He was so talented with that and with the visual art. He was the tortured artist and I was the creative go-getter with the magic to make things happen.
The last thing he said to me was, “Okay” after I stood at the side of his hospital bed the day before he died and told him that his mom was coming to pick him up… that they were going on a trip together and I would meet up with him later… that he couldn’t stay in this place. He thought he was still laying on the couch at home. I had asked him if he knew who I was and to say my name and he did, but the very last thing that he said was that “okay”.
This is such new territory for me. I’ve never been through anything like this. So many surprises. So many feelings that seemingly happen suddenly and come from out of nowhere… neurons firing off good memories and bad… a weird, low grade headache and stabbing “ice pick” headaches that went on for the better part of 2 weeks… underlying stress bubbling up… the need to “stay busy” with non-work projects just to keep my mind from straying too far into the past or too far ahead to a future where I always saw us growing old together.
Seriously though… how did he do it? How did he so easily just lay on the couch and accept his fate?
Going through a cache of digital photos, I come across the ones from May 3rd, 2020. The last birthday. We weren’t treating it like, “the last birthday”, but he was already quite ill. My mom made sure to have a number 4 and 7 on the cake. It should have been a bigger party, but pandemic and all.
I just want to remember everything… like the times we used to stay up all night playing Super Mario Brothers… or the time where he cried tears of joy at finally seeing Kraftwerk live… or the time my Honda hatchback broke down on the way to Vegas and we spent 4 hours in 120 degree heat waiting for AAA… or the time we braved getting Tui Na massages at a hole in the wall (actually in a basement) place in NYC… or getting stuck on the ferris wheel at the county fair while Styx was playing in the background… or how freaked out he was when I drove us out to the middle of nowhere to look for obsidian shards… or the look on his face after our cat died in his presence… or how he hugged me when I bought him tabla drums for his last birthday… or any number of other memories, good or bad, that have happened in the last 27 years.
