Easter Eggs and Prayers
Tomas Cantu
July 27, 1940-April 30, 2021
Easter 2021
Tomas Cantu, 80 years old, is playing with some of his 19 grandchildren. Chasing them in the yard. Cracking confetti eggs on their heads. Clowning, carefree, for the camera.
He’s been living with Alzheimer’s, but he doesn’t know it. He knows he forgets things sometimes; nothing more. His oldest daughter Jessica, a nurse, says the silence is a gift and a solace.
Jessica dances during the second annual Starr County Alzheimer’s Awareness event in Rio Grande City.
He hugged me as everyone applauded. I still feel him now.”
January 2016
Jessica comes out of her home one morning to find her parents parked in her Edinburg, Texas, driveway, their possessions loaded into their car.
She has worried about them more and more as the border turned restless, Roma more tense. One day when she was there, a pickup truck loaded with drugs crashed into their yard. The smuggler leapt from the vehicle and began running. U.S. border guards, guns drawn, chased him. Jessica held her baby in her arms and wondered, “what are we doing here?”
In 2015, when Jessica again urged her parents to move in with her, Tomas said: “I will pray about it.” A couple of months later, they are in her driveway.
They didn’t want to wake her. They were willing to wait. But they are ready to resettle.
April 14, 2021
Ten days after Easter. Sixteen days before Tomas will pass. He is having trouble sleeping, relying on morning naps. He wakes around 2 p.m. and rises to pray, holding onto a bunk bed for balance.
Every night when Jessica was growing up, Tomas gathered his family in the living room, and they read the Bible aloud. “He would start us off, and then we would take turns,” Jessica recalls.
Now, she videotapes his prayer on her phone. He mentions his wife and his daughter by name.
“You’ve been our faithful witness, Lord, you’ve seen it all,” he says. “That’s why I’m going to go to your house…I’m going to be with you.”
Tomas wrote notes before giving a sermon. This one was found tucked between the pages in one of his many bibles. “By looking at his handwriting,” says Jessica, “I can tell it was when his disease had already progressed.”
Jessica made this pin displaying a photo of her late father. She often wears it to Alzheimer’s awareness events.
Tomas holds Jessica and a plate of food at a post-church luncheon. “He always wore a blazer suit to church and a tie,” says Jessica. “As soon as church was over, that tie came off.”
Tomas Cantu’s headstone stands across the street from the Whataburger where he used to meet his sons and his brother for coffee every Saturday morning in Roma.
Tomas loved to be outdoors—doing yard work, building treehouses for his kids—and he always wore hats. He favored duck-billed caps until the day he borrowed this hat from his son, and adopted it as his own. From then on, full-brimmed hats became his signature look.
