Dear Editor:
This is a father’s eulogy to artist-son Rene Luis Lasa Mata, who died under mysterious circumstances in New Jersey:
During our lives we all experience many kinds of love, both as givers and takers, but next to God a parent’s love for a child is absolutely matchless, and when one loses that child the pain is so great, oh so unbearable, that you can’t even cry out to heaven above your anguish over his untimely death.
This is how I feel at this very moment as we prepare for the interment of my beloved son, Rene Luis Lasa Mata, an artist, who died under mysterious circumstances in Secaucus, early this month.
Yet that love for someone so dear is never extinguished in time by death. Anybody who has given so much of himself for another and finds deeper meaning in the very act of giving, becomes an integral part of the person so loved. This is even more so for a parent whose love for his children is unconditional.
And part of loving someone is the willingness to let him go. We cannot rightfully wish for his physical presence beyond his time. We will miss him greatly. We are diminished by his death.
In life, Rene Boy celebrated the footprints of God in Nature by affirming through his brush and paint the sanctity of the air, the waters, and earth. He made full use of his talents with a sense of mission–to help heighten human awareness of how fragile our world is. It was an apostolate in every sense of the word.
Because the landscape of Rene Boy was global, there is so much that reminds us of him. We can feel his happiness each time a new tree grows, a river is brought back to life, the air is made clean, and the seas are renewed. We feel his sadness too in the continuous denudation of our mountains and the loss of our forest cover, the depletion of our marine resources, the widespread use of pesticides that pose a risk to our underground water, the urban blight, and many, many more crimes against Mother Earth.
As a sensitive and contemplative soul, Rene Boy could not stand any more the degradation of our environment. The artist in him made him seek solitude elsewhere, in a land where he thought people were more caring for their environment. He was not made of a stuff that would enable him to meet head-on the windmills of indifference and sheer commercialism. He was much too gentle and subdued.
In a sense Rene Boy did not actually find solace somewhere else, for Mother Earth is everywhere. All the mountains and forests and the seas and oceans are interconnected. The same sun gives life-giving light to every island and continent. The same Moon causes high tides everywhere.
When Rene Boy left for the United States, it was more out of a fundamental desire to find a home for his restless spirit in search of a congenial environment. But the only home where there are neither tears nor fears and where beauty is forever is in Paradise. Indeed, Rene Boy has finally come home.
And now, with these remembered lines from Colleen Hitchcock’s Ascension, I can feel Rene Boy telling us–parent, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, nephews and nieces, cousins and friends:
“And if I go,
while you’re still here..
know that I live on,
vibrating to a different measure
behind a thin veil you cannot see through.
You will not see me,
so you must have faith,
I wait for the time when we can soar together again,
both aware of each other.
Until then, live your life to its fullest,
And when you need me,
Just whisper my name in your hearts,
….I will be there.”
Farewell, my beloved son!
Nestor Mata