Director Rodrigo García recently published his book, Goodbye to Gabo and Mercedes: Memoirs of a son of Gabriel García Márquez and Mercedes Barcha, a, intimate chronicle that narrates the last moments of his parents, Gabriel García Marquez (2014) and Mercedes Barcha (2020). 

Rodrigo left a record of his deepest feelings in the book as well as of the processes close to death.

Writing a book about the last moments of one's parents involves exposing a lot of intimacy and vulnerability. But also, it exposes oneself to the judgment of everyone, even more so if one of your parents is a Nobel Prize winner and of international fame. Rodrigo Garcia found himself taking notes on the last moments of life for both his parents as a way of processing the situation and honoring his father.

"My father complained that one of the things he hated most about death was that it was the one aspect of his life he couldn't write about," Rodrigo says.

A film and television director and Los Angeles-based writer, he published the contemplative account of his parents' loss in Spanish, and it is expected to be published in English by HarperVia later this month. 

A Farewell, a short title in English, is a 176-page memoir that meditates on the end of life and its consequences, both physical and psychological, for those of us who remain on this plane of existence. While writing the book, Garcia hoped to create something that would not be "too distant" or "too sentimental," and tried to be concise.

This is how he recites "a celebrated novelist, in his twilight, losing grasp of language as his mind is shrouded in a fog of dementia; his taciturn wife, a woman without a college degree who nevertheless held her own in rooms full of accomplished writers, demanding to take a drag on a cigarette even when hooked up to oxygen."   

A Farewell is a tribute to his father, the writer, to help him write about the one moment in his life that he himself could not write about, his death.