In Remembrance: Miguel Rosado Rivas (1942 – 2002)

Born in 1942 in rural Mexico in a family of six brothers, Miguel Rosado Rivas was the youngest child of Pablo Rosado Varela and Maria Rivas Hernandez. He had soft features – a large forehead, round eyes and a happy, smiling face. A precocious child, he taught himself to read and write by the age of five. Not much is known about his early years, except he loved to talk and ask endless questions, a quality which grated on the nerves of other family members. By the goodwill of a close relative, who recognized Miguel’s special talent and saved him from the fate of hard labor, he was admitted into the local Catholic school – the only child in the family of Pablo Varela to have received any kind of formal education. In winters, when the rest of the family toiled in factories, Miguel spent his time in the parish library, memorizing verses from the Bible and scribbling notes in his black diary – the contents of which were never discovered. In the evening hours, he could always be spotted sitting quietly in the library along a trail of potted poinsettias on the windowsill, waiting patiently for the red star-shaped leaves to bloom from the darkness and greet the winter light outside.

In 1965, as a young man of twenty-three, Miguel left Mexico for Dallas, Texas, United States, to take up the position of a teaching assistant at a missionary school. He tried his luck at several jobs after that: from carpentry to writing for Catholic journals, driving cargo trucks to arranging flowers at funerals, instructing choir groups to maintaining the library. But as much as his heart craved for the life of the mind and the spirit, he was attracted to the noise and glamour from the faraway, a world of limitless possibilities, hidden from his view, in which could slip in as easily and subtly as a shadow and become anything he wanted. So in 1971, he stunned everyone when he left Texas and moved to Los Angeles, California, working full-time as a bartender at a popular discotheque – a decision which upset many back at the Order.

As the business of the club grew in the late 1970s, Miguel’s popularity increased by the day. Handsome, quick-witted, and sharp, he earned the secret admiration of men and women alike. He was a trusted friend to many and was fiercely loyal to them. His jovial personality and unique sense of humor caught the attention of some Hollywood executives who regularly invited him to serve at many high-profile parties. He entertained packed rooms with lively anecdotes from his growing up days in old Mexico – people often reeled with laughter, he was instantly likeable.

But as Miguel matured with age, he became a deeply private person, increasingly drawn to silence, both within and outside him. In the late, busy hours at the club, lit by a haze of flashing pink neon lights, he could hear shadows on the wall speak; he could hear what people, lounging at the counter, said in their minds when they quietly stared past each other. On rainy days when he walked home, the humming chorus of some of those quiet notes, would rise in the air and whistle past his ears, swiftly pouring down the drain in front of the building where he lived.

In 2000, having worked and lived in several countries since his time in Los Angeles, Miguel moved to Berlin, Germany, and started working as a cabaret manager at a nightclub. It was only then he began complaining of a sharp pain in his lower abdomen. As the pain grew severe with time, it was followed by intermittent bouts of retching, fever, and nausea. He visited many clinics in the city for check-up, but no one could accurately diagnose the problem and instead put him on high dosages of various prescription drugs, to relieve him from the pain. An unexplained illness had taken hold over his body by then – and he suffered greatly for it. In his final years, as his body rapidly declined and he became thin and frail, he developed a soft, penetrating gaze. Once a lively, handsome man who always had a ready audience, he had no one left to tend to him and his needs.

Although raised as a Catholic, Miguel believed in reincarnation. And over the years, even through his inner struggles, he remained steadfast in his belief in Christianity and God. He read the Bible every night before going to bed and continued scribbling thoughts in his black diary, which he took along wherever he went. Each day as life ebbed from his body, his inner gaze became wider. He looked at the world outside from his window with renewed clarity – birds, trees, snow, people – the nature in its full glory – and desperately longed to be a part of it once more, just like the child who waited patiently for poinsettias to open their eyes from the darkness and see the light.

Miguel Rosado Rivas passed in 2002 after a long and debilitating illness. The cause of his death may not be as necessary to probe today as the manner of his death. He died under mysterious circumstances. His body was never discovered. The nurse who looked after him at the clinic said that she put him to bed the night before he disappeared, only to find a pot of full-grown poinsettias in his place in the morning when she came to give him his daily medicine. It is her professional belief that his body was too weak to carry itself and therefore, he could not have walked out of the bed on his own. And all through his stay, he never once received a visitor – family, friend, or relative – who could have done that for him either. For administrative reasons, the date and time of his death was recorded as 25 December 2002, 2 a.m.