Very late on Tuesday, April 21… at 2:00 am in the morning, so technically Wednesday April 22, 2026… my father stopped breathing.
He was 92 years old, had been ill for the last seven years, and completely bed-ridden for the last three. So this was not a surprise. And still… Wednesday evening, after a day of helping my stepmother rearrange furniture and make arrangements at the funeral home, I wrote in my journal: “Even though his capacity has been diminished for quite some time, there is still a finality about his no longer being encased in a breathing body that is… vast and freeing and grieving and final and irrevocable…”
My father was a complex man. “Chiaroscuro” is a word I’ve been using a lot lately. These days, I’d say that the biggest gift I’ve received from him, is the opportunity to hold both light and shadow, without collapsing into either. Of course, one might say that this is the gift that any parent, any complex human being, gives to us. We are all creatures of light and shadow… and as a culture, we are being called to mature by learning to hold both.
Armando F. Zubizarreta was an Unamuno scholar, author of Tras las huellas de Unamuno (“Following the footprints of Unamuno”) and Unamuno en su nivola (Unamuno in his “nivola”). Yet for most of my life, I only had a vague notion of who Unamuno was; a famous existentialist philosopher who was also a novelist.. or vice-versa… or something along those lines. Since my father’s death, in an effort to honor him more fully and to understand him more deeply, I have at long last begun to trace those footprints, and to glimpse their relevance.
Another book my father wrote was La aventura del trabajo intelectual: cómo estudiar e investigar (The Adventure of Intellectual Work: How to engage in study and research”.) While appreciating the evocative title, the book I devoured when I was 19 was not one he authored, but one he gifted me. He gave me a copy of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.
The larger gift my father was offering was an invitation to question, not just established knowledge, but the very way we look at the world around us. I can’t say he always appreciated it when I applied that gift, but I know that it came from him, as well as from my mother. They had met in Salamanca, Spain, at Unamuno’s house-turned-into-a-museum; he was a graduate student from Perú, she an undergraduate student from Cuba. I am the eldest of four kids, born in Perú, where my parents married and lived together for the first eight years of my life. Later, we moved to the United States and they divorced. Both of them eventually found new spouses and remarried. My mother is still very much with us, at 88. My father is now with us in a different way.
What I am belatedly learning about Unamuno feels extremely relevant to our own era. Science was developed to free humans from dogma, yet eventually became its own materialist prison. Unamuno struggled between the poles of Reason and Faith, and made a virtue from what he saw as their irreconcilable agonism. My father, too, made a virtue out of agonism; in his case, an agonism born in the crucible of the highly class-conscious Limeñan society. A child of working-class parents, a scholarship kid at an elite school, completing a Ph.D. in Spain and winning the national prize for the best dissertation did not erase the cruelty of the class distinctions he faced once he returned back home.
Yet my father once told me how his first name and his middle name complemented each other. Even though we mostly saw Armando, the fighter, he pointed out that his middle name was Francisco, usually abbreviated as “F.” This nearly hidden middle name of his, spoke of a connection with St. Francis of Assisi, and the ways of peace. The year I turned 19, alongside the gift of Thomas Kuhn, my father also gave me Teilhard de Chardin’s The Phenomenon of Man.
My father did not speak of his mystical side easily. (As I am learning now, neither did Unamuno.) I felt the sentiment behind the gift, and appreciated it. At the same time, as a young feminist, I was a bit put off by de Chardin’s gendered title; also, my own spiritual leanings inclined to indigenous wisdom and buddhism. It took me decades to begin to appreciate the Western mystic traditions more deeply. As a result, de Chardin is a treasured gift from my father that still awaits to be opened. And I am fascinated by what I am starting to learn.
I have a sense that I will be writing some version of this tribute to my father, for the rest of my life. How might we reconcile the material and the world of reason, with the heart and the world of spirit? How might we shift our cultural paradigms from “dead matter” that we can consume and exploit, to a living planet with whom we live in respect and reciprocity? And how might we shift from the agon of “argument as battle”, to ways of arriving at (temporary and partial) shared truths, together?
I know my father wanted me to learn, “cómo defenderme”, how to defend myself. He had the best of intentions. And yet, I know in my heart of hearts, that “argument as battle” is a metaphor that needs to shift, a harmful epistemic paradigm that underlies so much of what is hurting in the world today…
These questions around reconciling apparent opposites have already been at the heart of my life’s work; yet now I am grounding them more deeply and with greater awareness, in the gifts I have received from my father, from my mother, and from all of my ancestors.
…to be continued….
Nuestras vidas son los ríos
que van a dar en la mar,
que es el morir:
allí van los señoríos,
derechos a se acabar
y consumir;
allí los ríos caudales,
allí los otros medianos
y más chicos;
y llegados, son iguales
los que viven por sus manos
y los ricos.
verses from Jorge Manrique: Coplas por la muerte de su padre.
one English translation available here.
Acknowledgements
With deep gratitude to my father and all of my paternal lineage, and to my mother and all of my maternal lineage, for the gift of life.
With much gratefulness to Judith A. Zubizarreta, my father’s wife for 39 years, for staying with him “in sickness and in health”, and for all the care and nourishment she has offered.
With real appreciation to Google AI and Claude AI, for long conversations that have helped me to learn more about my father’s significant legacy, and to explore how, along with other influences, his work continues to inform my own.
the official obit is here.