One of the surprises of bringing my 86-year-old father to Peru was seeing how much he ultimately thrived on having lots of human contact. To be blunt, his being doted on by sweet-tempered Peruvian women helped transform him from a vain, self-absorbed, prickly old man into a calm person who was actually kind of nice to be around. (Getting him on antidepressants—which I suspect he had needed for years–also helped.) Being part of la comunidad (the Spanish word for “community”) was an integral part of his emotional care.
Never a physically demonstrative person, my father had lived a rather solitary life in the United States. Widowed at age seventy-seven, he lived alone in a four-bedroom house in northern Florida and resisted having me, Jorge and Sam come live with him when we proposed the idea. His interactions with other people were limited to weekly church services, monthly Masonic meetings and brief transactions with grocery clerks, bank tellers, doctors and nurses. This wasn’t really that big a change from the way he had lived when my mom was alive. For decades my mother had been the center of his emotional life; when she died of lung cancer in 2004, he bought a toy poodle and lavished his affections (and Krispy Kreme donuts) on that. He had no close friends to speak of, just people he had known up north long ago and with whom he exchanged annual Christmas cards.
Moving my father to live with us in Peru put us in a different, more humane, paradigm.
In contrast with the United States—which prizes, above all, independence and individualism—Peru is a country of collectivism. Continue Reading
