Descanso for My Father: Fragments of a Life by Harrison Candelaria Fletcher is an award-winning essay collection first published in 2012 by University of Nebraska Press. It’s a book that explores grief, the author's mixed-ethnicity identity, and his difficult childhood with the ever-present specter of an absent father.
Fletcher was not quite yet two years old when his father passed away. Grief-stricken, his young Mexican American mother packed his belongings into boxes, locked them away in a hallway closet, and rarely talked about him.
Growing up, Fletcher perceived that his father was a "man in a box"—a mystery pieced together only through grainy photos, a few belongings and occasional sharing of anecdotes.
One thing Fletcher’s mother does explain to him are descansos — like the descanso of the title of the book — which draws directly from the Spanish word descanso, which means "resting place." Fletcher grew up in New Mexico, and in the American Southwest descansos are the handmade roadside crosses and shrines erected by families to mark the exact spot where a loved one died.
Fletcher uses this practice of establishing a kind of descanso as a metaphor for the book itself. That is, the text serves as a literary descanso, a mosaic built from broken fragments of memory to give his father a resting place at last.
It’s interesting that the book about the absence of a father by this author who never really knew the man in life, can be such a touchstone for those of us who also miss our fathers who are also gone too soon.
In each essay, Fletcher reconstructs the life of his father. He takes that “man in a box” those moth-balled, dusty belongings that seem such a tucked-away symbol of his absence and the mystery of his mother’s silences about him. He calls forth those photographs, anecdotes, family lore and the journey the family must travel together without him — but somehow with him, too.
How do we create meaning from the things we are missing in our lives? Don’t we do this all the time? Focus on our losses as a means to understand ourselves? To find ourselves? Our truest selves?
The paradox of evoking the ghost of a father long gone to make meaning out of his own role as a son and then as a father is in full and poignant effect here.
Fletcher’s father was almost 30 years older than his mother. His father was a white Anglo man, and his mother was Mexican American. Fletcher reflects on these differences, too, but again, he turns that difference on its head to reflect on the fullness of his cultural roots and his identity.
One of my favorite essays in the collection — and it’s the one that brought me to the book— is “Beautiful City of Tirzah.” When anyone asks me to name an essay that I return to again and again as exemplary, this is among just a few I unfailingly name. Let me tell you a little bit about it.
Fletcher’s childhood home was a menagerie of unusual animals. One day his brother brings home a tiny owl, and their mother instructs them to keep it — like a pet. She promptly names it Tirzah after learning that it’s the name of a beautiful city mentioned in Scripture. She wants everyone to see the owl in that positive light — something lovely and worthy of their love and care.
For the young Fletcher, the owl is another lost and wounded creature trying to survive along with the family. His mother finds beauty in the owl. And her son learns to see beauty in it — and other unlikely places.
The owl is “Tirzah,” it helps the home become a place of refuge, memory, love, and family connection. After the father's death, the family gathers around this creature — and many other creatures — and through them they experience loving something unconditionally.
For readers of Descanso for My Father, the title also echoes one of the book's central themes: that beauty often emerges from loss, and that memory itself can become a place we inhabit — a kind of beautiful city built from love and remembrance.
“Beautiful City of Tirzah” is just one essay in this wonderful collection. But it’s one I think about all the time. For those of us who fill our lives with small creatures to care for, the essay binds the elements of the book — all the resonant losses — in profound ways.
In piecing together these fragments of his father's life through memory and storytelling, Fletcher creates something larger than a memoir. It becomes instead for us a meditation on how we inherit stories, carry loss, and make meaning from everything that remains.
Harrison Candelaria Fletcher is the author of Descanso for My Father: Fragments of a Life. It’s published by University of Nebraska Press.
