'He Taught Me What Unconditional Love Is': A Granddaughter Remembers Her Papi Tomás, Lost to COVID

More than 80,000 Californians have died so far from COVID-19. The California Report Magazine has been honoring some of them with a series of tributes from loved ones. If you’d like to submit a remembrance, please fill out this form.

This tribute to Tomás Reyes Soto comes from his granddaughter Madi Bolaños, a radio reporter at KVPR, the local NPR station in Fresno.

We all called my grandfather Papi Tomás. He died on Dec. 13, 2020, a week before his 69th birthday. In the year since his death, I’ve had a lot of time to think about his legacy and what his decisions meant for me and my future. I feel this extreme sense of gratitude to him. My Papi Tomás taught me the value of hard work, to have pride in my work, and that nothing was out of my reach.

Papi Tomás was born in Pueblo Nuevo, in the Mexican state of Durango, in 1951. When he was 12, he started traveling to the neighboring state of Sinaloa to work picking tomatoes. On one of his trips, when he was 16, he met my grandma, Elisa Aguilar Zepeda, who we call Mami Licha. She says he was very direct.

“He went up to me and said, ‘You’re going to be my wife, chaparrita,’” she told me in Spanish. “I told him, ‘You’re crazy.’ That Saturday, he sent a mariachi that played music from Northern Mexico.”

They married and had five kids together. Soon after, they moved to Mexicali, on the border with California. He was a taquero, making and selling tacos. My mom, Monica Reyes-Aguilar, says some of her favorite memories are helping him cut cabbage and tomatoes.

“I just remember he used to make the best tacos, the best flour tortillas, tacos with the best salsas,” she said. “He made really good spicy salsa. That was his thing.”

But Mami Licha said Papi Tomás always had bigger dreams to move to the United States. He never attended school as a child, and he didn’t want that for his kids. So in 1985, he took his wife and kids through the desert to cross the border.

“He had the idea that his children had to grow up in the United States and that they were going to be the best there,” Mami Licha told me. “He was always proud of their accomplishments. When our two oldest kids graduated from university, he cried so hard.”

Mami Licha says sometimes she felt like her kids loved their dad more than her, because she had to be the strict one. But my mom remembers her dad being even more strict than her mom, especially after he came home from a long day of work in the fields.

“We’d see the truck and we would run home, make sure that house was clean and everything was nice and tidy because Papi Tomás was coming,” my mom recalled.

He picked garlic, olives and oranges for 40 years. He enjoyed it. It was honest work, but he wanted his kids to strive for more.

“He would tell all of us, ‘You better pay attention in school or this will be your future,'” my mom said. “And I took it literally. I wanted to get straight A’s because I did not like working in the fields.”

Papi Tomás’s kids remember him as a tough-love kind of dad. But that changed when he became a grandfather. I was born when my mom was 20 years old. She was a single mother. Many people, including my grandpa, told her she was making the wrong decision by keeping me.

My mom says their relationship was contentious for the first year of my life. But she was determined to prove him wrong and everyone else who doubted her. She was going to be a successful single mom because her dad taught her to be hardworking and determined.

She got a job as a teller at a bank. Now she works as a lending consultant. And she owns a new home near the same fields where her dad took her to pick olives as a teenager. He would always say, “A chambear porque nacimos bonitos pero pobres!” (Translation: “Work hard because we were born good-looking but poor!”) She took that literally, too.

I was his fifth grandchild. Altogether, there were 15 of us.

“He’d start counting them,” Mami Licha remembered. “Every few years he’d say, ‘How many are there now?’ And he’d name them, but not by their actual names, by the nicknames he’d give them.”

He called one of his grandson’s “rábanito,” Spanish for radish, because he blushed easily. Another one was “nadador” (swimmer), because he was trying to swim in the tub at only 6 months old. I was his “Monicita Jr.” or his “Madi Yupi.”

As a kid, it was a great morning if he’d call and say, in Spanish, “Madi Yupi, do you want me to pick you up from school today?” I’d run out of my classroom and see him waiting for me in his pickup truck wearing his jeans, a button-up shirt, a hat and his signature mustache. He’d dye his mustache every few months when it started to turn gray.

At that time, he worked as a supervisor in the fields. After picking me up, he’d usually have to go back to work or run a few work-related errands. I remember on one of those days, we stopped at the gas station near his house and from inside his truck he called out to a woman on the street. He told her, “Be careful, immigration agents are driving around the neighborhood.” He was always looking out for his undocumented community.

I knew I could always count on my Papi Tomás. He taught me what unconditional love is. He was a second father to all of his grandchildren. He was even a father figure to his nephew and niece Grecia and Angel Mundaca, who didn’t have a present father.

In the last few years before his death, he spent the most time with his younger grandchildren Mario Olguin, 11, and Melanie Olguin, 17.

“I mean, if my mom or dad wasn’t there when I needed them, who would be there? My grandpa,” Mario Olguin told me. “He would always be there when I needed him.”

“He would always pick me up from school and he just wanted to hang out more with me and, like, get to know me better,” Melanie Olguin said. “He’d be like, ‘Oh, let’s go to eat.’ Oh, look at your belly, so tiny, so small. You look so skinny. Let’s go out to eat.’ All the time.”

His grandchildren were the joy of the second half of his life. But that time was also far from easy for him. He had high cholesterol, but he didn’t take it seriously until he had a heart attack at age 57. He underwent major heart surgeries shortly after. Then, at age 68, he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. In the final years of his life, he’d talk about his death like it was just around the corner. He’d tell us to make sure we took care of our grandma, our Mami Licha, after he died.

At the start of the pandemic, Papi Tomás took COVID-19 very seriously. He only left his house to go work in the fields. Then in late November 2020, Mami Licha contracted the virus while working as a housekeeper at a hospital. Papi Tomás took care of her. Then he contracted the virus, and so did my mom.

“My body was in a lot of pain and all I can think of is that I hope my dad is not in the same pain that I am going through,” my mom remembered. “And the next day when we learned that he had passed away, it was painful.”

He had been sick for a few days. My grandma tried convincing him to go to the hospital, but he told her he didn’t want to die alone. She tried to convince him that since she worked at the hospital, she would check in on him as often as she could. He still refused.

My Mami Licha found him at home, lifeless, after returning from her night shift at the hospital. That morning, I remember waking up to a scream from across the house. My cousins had gotten the news. My mom, who had been bedridden for days, suddenly had the energy to get dressed. We all raced to the car, tears streaming down our faces as we made the 25-minute drive to my grandparents’ house. All his children and most of us grandchildren arrived shortly after hearing the news.

“We were parked right there outside the driveway,” Melanie remembered. “I remember my mom screaming really loud, ‘Oh, no, no, no, you’re lying!’ in Spanish. She was like, ‘You’re lying! He’s fine!’”

Tomás Reyes Soto died in his sleep, lying on his side with his hands clasped together in front of him. For my mom and me the grief is still very real.

“It’s still painful,” she told me. “You never want to go through that pain that your parents are gone, especially someone that you care for so much.”

A year before my grandpa died, I graduated college and got an internship in Washington, D.C. The day before I left, I went to visit him. I told him how grateful I was for his sacrifices, for the values he instilled in my mom and that she passed on to me. The values that allowed me to fly across the country to pursue my dream of becoming a reporter. We hugged and shared a few tears together.

Later that day, my mom told me Papi Tomás called her to tell her she did a good job raising me. I felt and still feel indebted to him and my mom for the sacrifices they made for me. I’m just happy I was able to tell him that before he passed away.