I "Was Born" when My Son Died

By Josho Campillay

The feelings of despair and helpless we express at the death of someone we love with all our being, are forces impossible to defeat unless they are faced with the hopeful certainly that, although we may be covered in scars, a new opportunity awaits us. That new opportunity lives inside us. And the only ones who can activate it are ourselves, with true conviction.

God used this book to help me stay afloat when it looked like the world was sinking beneath my feet.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Josho Campillay
• Release date: Nov 3, 2020
• ISBN: 9781005176082

Josho Campillay

Josho Campillay was born on April 24, 1976 in the city of Chilecito, in the province of La Rioja (Argentina). He is the son of a tradeswoman and a photographer, recognized neighbors of their little community for their daily work.He earned his high school diploma from a school of art where he was able to develop his taste for music. When he finished high school, on December 1993, he moved to the city of Córdoba (Argentina) to study computer science.At the age of 22, in 1998, he founded Grupo Email multimedios and brought the first public internet connection to his hometown, so that the neighbors of his community had access to the medium the connects the whole world.In 2001, he met his wife Guadalupe, and together they had three children: Abril, Ezequiel, and Agustin.In his career as an entrepreneur, he has founded four FM radio stations (Ñ, Comarca, El Punto, and Urbana), and also two other local media: Diario Chilecito and Chilecito TV. All of them together make up Grupo Email multimedios, where he currently works as director.

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Translation: Cecilia Garcia Checa and Fernando Stagliano.

Hecho el depósito que prevé la ley 11.723

© 2020 Josho Campillay

e-mail: [e-mail]

Prologue

This book was born after the loss of Agustin, my son, who was nearly two years old.

The name of this work—which unknowingly began to take shape in 2013—may be hard to understand, and the only way you’ll comprehend what you are about to read in these texts is trying to put yourself in my place.

I went through seven years of thoughts that could have led me to live an entire life within the walls of madness. It was hard for me to talk about what I was going through because I felt that nobody could understand my pain, and because it wasn’t fair that the world received the burden of my anguish.

What began as a great amount of suffering pushing me into an emotional tempest was turning into calm as I wrote, searching for answers to the questions that disturbed my mind.

With this book, I don’t mean to change anybody’s life, only to share my thoughts and feelings that, when turned into words, soothed my soul and helped my family and me to survive.

The feelings of despair and helplessness we express at the death of someone we love with all our being, are forces impossible to defeat unless they are faced with the hopeful certainty that, although we may be covered in scars, a new opportunity awaits us. That new opportunity lives inside us. And the only ones who can activate it are ourselves, with true conviction.

I was born again, I lost the blindfold that prevented me from seeing how wonderful life is. My family was born again; my friends, too. All of our environment remembered what our true essence is.

God used this book to help me stay afloat when it looked like the world was sinking beneath my feet; and that’s why I want to share it.

The day my son left

It was eleven in the morning and my son Agustin was even more restless than usual. While I tried to work at my home office, he —being less than two years old— only wanted to play. So I turned on my keyboard, and he started pounding on the keys, singing and moving his body. That’s how we usually spent our mornings.

In the afternoon, there were several workers doing renovations in our house. I went out for a while in my pickup truck to buy some tools they had asked me, and when I was going back, somebody suddenly came out on a bike from the garage of a sports club. It was a young man from my town whose son had been run over by a car a couple of years before. I didn’t see him, and I nearly run him over myself. I slammed on the brakes, we got startled, we looked at each other, and I asked him if he was alright; he apologized for going out carelessly, and we went our separate ways.

My heart was still beating hard from the shock; and I couldn’t help but remember the tragic day when he lost his son. In our town, we all know each other, and that tragedy had a huge impact on us. As I was going back home, I wondered how he had managed to endure so much grief and be able to go on with his life.

A few minutes later —in an accident that can’t be explained— life would show me what it felt like: our son Agustin would die.

All the five members of our family were home when it happened. My wife Guadalupe and I got on the pickup truck and left at full speed to take our son to the hospital with the hope they could still save his life. On the way there, I asked God not to test me with the loss of my son, while my wife —completely devastated— rode on the back with Agustin in her arms. I had never heard such desperate cries as the ones she gave for our son. When we arrived at the hospital, the doctors confirmed what we didn´t want to accept: Agustin was gone. It’s impossible to forget every single detail of that day. A large number of people from town were at the hospital’s doors, showing their support in our suffering.

By the time we went home, more than 24 hours had passed since we left to say our goodbyes to the remains of our son. I entered my office and saw that the keyboard was still on, and the chair my son had been using was near it so he could reach it. The keys had peach jam on them from when he had been playing the keyboard the previous morning. He had been eating biscuits with jam and his hands were sticky. Everything was as he had left it.

The silence was overwhelming. What had been our place until yesterday had now become a cold and lifeless space. The music had stopped. My son wasn’t there to sing anymore. I felt the need to sit on his chair and caress the keys he had left silenced. Almost without noticing the passing of time and what was happening, I suddenly found myself playing a tune I had never played before. That music soothed me, it was like an anesthetic for my pain.

I got carried away by the melodies, which little by little became deeper, until sadness turned into song. My soul felt a desperate need to say many things, and the words poured out as the melody was forged. My son had just died, and paradoxically, with his death Ángel del amor y la canción (Angel of love and song) was born: it was a compendium of music notes and words which expressed a grief that is impossible to explain, but that would be etched through music forever.

My wife Guadalupe was in a profound pit of despair, which was as deep as it was deafening. Some sort of incongruity took over each of us: she was near-mute and quiet, and I wrote, watched videos of our son and sang to him in the hope that he could hear me.

We were completely disconnected as a couple. We tried talking, but it was impossible to maintain a conversation. She blamed herself for everything that had happened to us. And I felt guiltier because I understood I had failed in my job as a father by not protecting my family.

As we had become lost in that situation, we didn’t feel the passing of time. It could have been a couple of hours or a whole month, but to us it was all the same, because the grief that had taken over us couldn’t be soothed by any thought or distraction. The days were short and the nights were endless. Time had lost its meaning.

In a brief moment of clarity, we agreed and managed to talk. Wrapped in tears and hugs that came from deep within ourselves, we promised we would strive to hold together the family God gave us, in spite of all the grief we were going through. Even if the promise seemed solid, the grief was too strong.

It was evident that my wife had given up, she didn’t want to go on living. And to make matters worse, our little children Abril and Ezequiel — who had witnessed the death of their younger brother— made the terrifying announcement that they didn’t want to go on living without their little brother. They were only five and seven years old, and they were also overwhelmed by the situation. They needed their mother and their father. And I felt the world was falling down. I wasn’t strong enough to keep my family afloat.

I had reached the limits of human frailty and I felt that nothing or nobody could help us. The feeling of being on the brink of an abyss, the void and despair were so strong that the darkest thoughts anyone could think of ran through my head. I felt God had abandoned us, and that feeling was even more overwhelming, since I knew that without His help our family would be devastated.

Days went by, and my wife sank even deeper. She locked herself in our bedroom and cried in silence and solitude for days. She didn’t want to see anyone. Until one afternoon our son Ezequiel entered our bedroom and saw his mother in bed. When I asked him if he knew where she was, he replied, She’s lying hopeless in her bedroom. My son, only five years old, used the expression lying hopeless. I became desperate because I couldn’t imagine the damage we could be causing to his little head. I talked to my wife and told her what our son had said. Guadalupe got out of bed immediately, washed her face, brushed her hair, got dressed, and went to talk with Ezequiel. While she was hugging him, she told him how much she loved him and apologized for being absent for so many days. That day she promised she’d strive to continue to be Abril and Ezequiel’s mom, and my wife, too.

During all this process, we only wanted to talk with parents who had gone through a similar situation. Hundreds of people would come to our house —friends, relatives, acquaintances we knew from life— and all of them would hug us, trying to comfort us in our grief. Yet none of them could bring us any consolation with words because none of them knew the magnitude of that pain. None of them had experienced it.

Guilt was growing and slowly taking over our lives. My wife and I started to argue because we couldn’t bear to see each other’s suffering. Everything in our life was becoming dark. Everything we had built was falling apart.

One day I found —among a complete mess— some boxes with sleeping pills. Faced with the situation we were going through, and watching her behavior, I feared my wife might take her life; so we sat down and talked. I asked her to set aside the pain she was feeling for a while and to put herself in the place of her little children, since they were also suffering. They were grieving to see that everything they’d known was coming apart. And if besides the pain of seeing their brother die they also had to cope with another tragedy and grow up without their mother, what sort of life was left for them? How would they overcome such tragedies in their lives? If we really loved our children, we had to become stronger no matter what, so that they could have a healthy life, like the one we had. My wife listened to me attentively. We cried together, trying to imagine all that pain multiplied. Also together, we promised that we’d never do such a thing and we’d devote our whole lives to try to rebuild the happiness that had been interrupted.

The prayers from the people who love us started to take effect. Our prayers were also heard, and God was reaching out His hand so that we could go on. Our children deserved to have a normal life with parents who were present. It was not their fault that their parents had lost a son. They needed their parents, they’d already suffered too much: they had also lost a brother.

We know for sure that what happened to Agustin changed us forever. We’ll never be the same. And there’s not a single day we don’t talk about what he left us, what God taught us through him. It’s amazing how much he affected our lives in so little time he was with us. To remember him is to laugh, but also to cry. It’s happiness as well as anguish.

Our children Abril and Ezequiel played a crucial role in this process. They taught us a lot about how to go on every day. Although they were very young, they understood everything. And, even though sometimes they also fell apart because they missed their little brother with whom they played all day long, they had very clear thoughts about their brother’s life.

Today, I