Descanso for My Father: Fragments of a Life

American Lives

by Harrison Candelaria Fletcher

When his father died, Harrison Candelaria Fletcher wasn’t quite two. His mother packed up his father’s belongings, put the boxes in a hall closet, and closed the door. The “man in a box” remained a mystery, hardly mentioned, and making only rare appearances in stories when Fletcher or his siblings inquired. Meanwhile, his young Hispanic mother transformed herself into an artist, scouting the back roads and secondhand shops of New Mexico for relics and unlikely treasures to add to her “little shrines,” or descansos. “Look closely,” she’d say to her son. “Everything tells a story.” 
This book is Fletcher’s literary descanso, a piecing together—from moments and objects and words—of a father’s life, of the life lived without that father, and of his own mixed-race identity. Fletcher’s reflections unfold like a collage, offering a rich array of images and stories of life with his single mother, organizing weekend family car trips to explore graveyards and adobe ruins; of growing up on the fault lines of class and culture; of being a father who never had one of his own to learn from. From incidents and observations, Fletcher assembles a beautifully crafted portrait of his family’s unspoken affliction with loss over the decades, a portrait that finally evokes the father at its heart.

Genres: Memoir, Nonfiction

168 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2012

Reviews

[Sophfronia Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

I do believe, I say. Always have. The stories are beautiful. From them I draw a sense of who I am. The people and places she describes are alive inside me, fully formed, as if I've always known them. When she speaks, she awakens a dream. I'm just trying to align what I feel with what I see.
"What happened was a miracle," she says, removing her hand. "You don't understand."

But author Harrison Candelaria Fletcher, conversing here with his mother in an excerpt from Presentimiento: A Life in Dreams, does understand or at least is trying his hardest to do so. The results of his labors can be founds in two books, Descanso for My Father: Fragments of a Life and Presentimiento. I'm posting this same review for Presentimiento because the two books are best read together if possible. They are both a part of the same story comprising the ancestral roots of the author's family.

The books are not written, though, as stale and formal historical records. Fletcher is dealing with scraps of memories and long told tales. In the case of his father, Fletcher had precious little to work with because his father died while the author was still a toddler and that side of family, apart from Fletcher and his siblings, ended there. But he does have desire to guide him, the yearning to know a man so close to his heart if not his memory. And Descanso as well as Presentimiento take on the dreamlike quality of a walk through the fog of emotion and history as Fletcher offers his words with the reverence of sacred text, not unlike the artifacts he and his mother collect in their travels through New Mexico as she shares once more, at times with painful reluctance, the story of her family, the Candelarias.

Fletcher is seeking reality, not dreams, and within the reality of his ancestors he hopes to understand his own identity. His endeavor sparks compassion and empathy. It feels as though we are combing the New Mexican desert dust with him, searching for our own bloodstones of remembrance, of meaning. I recommend both books and I recommend you sit with them a good while and let the author's spell overtake you. These books are miracles, and worth understanding.

[Kateri Kramer]

“Descanso for My Father; Fragments of a Life” by Harrison Candelaria Fletcher was quite possibly one of my favorite, and most helpful books I’ve read this semester. I have been struggling for some time, to figure out a way to bring my mother into a text that centers around my father. “Descanso for My Father” does an incredible job of painting portraits of all the people involved in Fletcher’s family. It wasn’t until I read this book, did I realize how important that was. I wanted to have an artifact that represented my father, his life, and what he meant to me, but in restricting my writing to only him, I was eliminating a crucial element; my family. My father meant a great deal to everyone in my family and to not spend the appropriate amount of time on them I was doing a disservice to my father’s story. I think that going forward, I would like to spend some time writing about other members of my family who had a great impact on my father and whom he had an impact on. I think that in the long run, when everything is put together this will create a fuller, more dynamic portrait of who my father was and what he meant to the people he loved.


In addition to this new understanding, it was a joy to experience Fletcher’s different use of form. I love that he uses artifacts to evoke memories of his family and I think that was what I was attempting to do in the “Painting with my Father” piece. I would like to experiment with this more as I am learning that writing shorter pieces that can link together, or shorter essays as a whole is something I am very interested in.


I thought that one of the greatest strengths of this text was that the South West, namely New Mexico was as much a character in this text as any of the members of Fletcher’s family. After reading the book by John Muir I expressed the desire to do more nature writing in the pieces about my father, but in that particular writing, I would like to write the wild as a character. I think this is the only way to potentially express the love that my father, and I, have for it.

[Michelle · Rating 3 out of 5]

A group of essays and vignettes on his family, growing up, the hole in his family with his fathers death when he was young, life as a pilgrimage and becoming a father.

[Jenny Shank · Rating 4 out of 5]

http://www.hcn.org/issues/44.15/a-par...


A parent lost and found: A review of Descanso for My Father: Fragments of a Life

By Jenny Shank

Descanso for My Father: Fragments of a Life
By Harrison Candelaria Fletcher
147 pages, softcover:
$14.95.
University of Nebraska Press, 2012.

When Colorado writer Harrison Candelaria Fletcher was almost 2 years old, his father, a pharmacist, died, leaving behind a wife and five children. His mother, who was 29 years younger than her husband, grew up in a Hispanic farming village on the Rio Grande, 'a block away from his Route 66 drug store.' 'Following the advice of a child psychologist,' Candelaria Fletcher writes, his mother 'gradually erased his presence from our Albuquerque home,' stowing his few remaining belongings in a closet.

Ever since then, Candelaria Fletcher has been searching for the parent he barely knew, using his skills as an investigative journalist to follow his father across the country. Descanso for My Father is the eloquent result of his quest, a collage of essays crafted with precision and grace. Together, they provide a full portrait of his father, Ray, and detail how his loss shaped his son's life -- a life that was marked by the boy's own struggle to find his place as a pale-skinned biracial child.

Candelaria Fletcher's essays consist of short sections -- each set apart by numbers, titles or symbols -- that capture one unique, distilled image or incident, as vividly as snapshots. Like the pieces of a puzzle, they come together to create a complete and emotionally complex picture.

Candelaria Fletcher sees his art as the legacy of his Mexican-American mother. (To respect her privacy, he doesn't name her or his siblings.) She taught him to 'look closely … everything tells a story.' Five years after her husband's funeral, he writes, 'my mother transformed herself. The bookish housewife who baked peanut butter cookies after school had become an artist who protested against the Vietnam War and pinned 'Nixon No!' buttons to our grammar school lapels.' She welcomed stray animals into the house, and encouraged her children to scour the landscape for discarded objects, which she then assembled into works of art, inspired by the roadside memorials called descansos, 'the Spanish word for resting place.'

Descanso for My Father is laced with stories about people encountering ghosts. Candelaria Fletcher may not be clairvoyant, but he conjures up the spirits of his ancestors in this unusual and moving book.

[Elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thus is a delightful, and very subtle memoir,of a boy growing up in New Mexico and coming to terms with his father's death when he was a toddler. His mother has packaged all his father's items in a closet, and the boy pulls objects out randomly in an attempt to understand his own life. His mother, a quirky collector, adds to the home's mementos by taking het children on treasure hunts throughout the New Mexican landscape. Fletcher is drawn to the landscape and the mementos throughout his youth. A telling and wonderful memoir.

[LibraryLady · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading almost like a series of vignettes, Harrison Candelaria Fletcher explores the mystique surrounding the life of his father, who died when the author was young, and details his attempts to discover who this man was and how it impacted who the author became. Winner of the Creative Nonfiction Colorado Book Award; 2013.

[Jamie Rose · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wonderful writing. Interesting structure.