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A few weeks later, on February 4, 1996, he suffered a stroke. His<br />
grandson, Angel, called us from the Loma Luz Hospital in Santa Elena.<br />
Greg and I went immediately. In the hallway outside Don Elijio’s room we<br />
met a sober-faced doctor who shook his head and said, “Your friend is brain<br />
dead. There is nothing we can do for him. Take him home. Let him die in<br />
his own bed.”<br />
Hospital staff disconnected his tubes and helped us put him in the back<br />
seat of our truck. Down the San Antonio dirt road we bumped and bounced<br />
to deliver his still-breathing physical body to his family. I held him close to<br />
keep him from falling off my lap, cradling his head, crying all the while.<br />
Angel, who had left the hospital to prepare for Don Elijio’s return, Angel’s<br />
wife, and several of their eleven children met us at the gate to his house.<br />
Together, we carried Don Elijio inside and placed him in a little twin bed<br />
dressed in clean, sweet-smelling linens. Immediately, his closest friends and<br />
relatives began to arrive to pay their last respects. I asked to have a few<br />
minutes alone <strong>with</strong> him during which I held his frail wrists and whispered<br />
nine times the prayers that he had taught me. I asked the Nine <strong>Maya</strong> Spirits<br />
and God to guide him, to protect him, and to illumine the lamp of his heart.<br />
By the time I was done, a crowd had gathered and we left him <strong>with</strong> his<br />
family and neighbors. A blazing orange and dark purple sunset streaked the<br />
western sky, reminding me of the hundreds of sunsets I had watched as I sat<br />
on Don Elijio’s doorstep chopping the plants that were his peoples’<br />
medicine.<br />
Greg said, “Rose, it doesn’t make sense to go all the way home. He<br />
doesn’t have long. Let’s go up the road to the Mountain Equestrian Trails.<br />
Maybe Jim and Marguerite have a room for us. We can come back first<br />
thing in the morning.” And so the moonlight played hide-and-seek <strong>with</strong> the<br />
<strong>Maya</strong> Mountains as we drove into the pine forests above the jungle in the<br />
growing darkness. We shared a quiet dinner <strong>with</strong> our friends then slept<br />
fitfully. I was awake from 3:00 A.M. until dawn. No sooner had I fallen<br />
asleep than Greg woke me, at 6:10 A.M. He said, “Rose, Don Elijio has<br />
passed. I had the most wonderful dream.” I laid my head on his chest and<br />
listened to his dream.<br />
“I looked down on the floor next to the bed where we slept,” he<br />
recounted. “There was old, infirm Don Elijio gasping for breath. He took<br />
one long breath, then one short, another long, and finally his last gasp. He<br />
was dead on the floor. In a moment, he rose up from the floor a young man.