Welcome family and friends to this celebration and send-off of our sister, Tania. To start this eulogy for my sister, I am first going to read a slightly modified version of what is written on the back of the Order of Service handout that you received when you came into the church.
Our sister, Tania – Tatiana F. Orozco – was the fourth of the six children of our parents, Leo & Hazel Orozco, and now she is the first to depart from us, her loving sisters and brother. She was born in San Fernando on July 6, 1954, raised in Sylmar, in the two houses built close together by our dad on our half-acre property, she attended St. Ferdinand’s grammar school and graduated from Bishop Alemany High School. She lived her entire life in the San Fernando Valley and always dwelt among at least some of us in various places in the Valley. She died from the complications of cancer after a five-year battle against it, on March 31, 2021, at her home in Chatsworth, her two remaining cats still in faithful attendance upon and near her. She will now be missed by all of her five siblings, Cecilia, Chris, Nydia, Frankie, and Andrea, all the spouses and family members stemming from us, by our old time family friends, and by her own very faithful friends that she held so dear.
And this very short biography, of our sister, Tania, contains within its words essential truths about her:
That she was our sister,
That she lived here in the Valley all her life,
That she was always part of our family,
And that she was loved and will be missed by all of us.
Tatiana F. Orozco, our sister was the fourth of the six children, many times seemingly the pretty one in family photos, possessing a smile that beamed her cuteness and charm to the world, always loving being in the new dresses our mom sewed for all the girls.
Tatiana, is an interesting name, chosen by our English mom from a character in the Shakespeare play, “A Mid-Summer Night’s Dream” – Tatiana, the Queen of fairies. And Felice, her middle name, the word for happy in Spanish, may be a derivative from our great-grandmother, Felicitas. I think she was well-named, she always lived in as much style as she could muster and afford, and when happy, she would sparkle like many of the rings she loved to wear.
She never married, she never had children, and her family, all of us siblings and everyone stemming from us and being part of us, were very important to her. We were all part of her life, a unique relationship among all of us, as all other five siblings have spouses, and four of us also children and grandchildren, and she incorporated all of us insistently into her heart and life. She became one of the links keeping the family close, as we all cared for Tania and included her in our lives as best we could. And for her, we were a foundation of stability, of relationships of worth and importance, these links and bonds in time maturing and strengthening as we all changed. As life progressed and expanded for all of us, as we all were being molded and transformed by all of relationships we individually had within our lives, Tania was always within those relationships. We cared for her, we loved her, and she, on her part, insistently worked to always be a vital and even vivacious force within our family, again always in the family photos, many times center.
None of us would describe any of us siblings as sweet, except for perhaps our oldest sister, the firstborn, who was an only child for about 3 ½ years until I came along, and she must have been a daddy’s girl, as only she fully absorbed our father’s sensitive, tender, gentle, and generous ways. The rest of us were mixtures of our father and our English mom. From our mom, we learned the definition and habit of dutiful love – we saw it clearly every day – and frugalness and hard work and planning and staying up late at night to finish sewing dresses for all the girls even when she was tired and after everyone else went to bed. We learned from our dad an innate spirit and will to survive, and generosity, and a tinge, and many times more, of stubbornness on mostly important things, like the value of family love and loyalty – but sometimes a stubbornness manifesting itself even on small and, perhaps, not always important things.
And Tania encapsulated within herself all of these virtues and their potential downsides – as all of us siblings do – and these qualities – her love of family, her loyalty, and her insistence, at times, at something being totally her way – these things always, and I mean always, provided the glue, the rationale even, for all of us caring for her, and for all of us wanting to always move on and take care of issues – because we all recognized that the struggles and quirks of Tania, were also within us. And this mixture within Tania, made her love real – Tania was always real and insistent and persistent.
And in her final years, and months, of neediness and vulnerability – the weeks and days within which we beheld the Tania that we knew begin to weaken, we all began to feel deeply her ebbing from our lives. And this deepened our own love and care and commitment to her, as we saw the sister we grew up with, struggle and fight to come to peace with the inevitability of her leaving, which she did bravely and insistently as she did with every other aspect of her life.
In her final weeks of life, we as a family, arranged for someone to be with her 24/7. I was with her four evenings a week and during those times, I made an effort to engage her in conversation and pray with her. Many times, she really wanted me to pray; a few times, she just insistently wanted it to be short. She never opened up to me on how she was thinking through her coming death, of which she was very aware was coming soon, and I don’t believe she opened up to anyone on this. But she was asked by one family member what did she think about going to be with God, and her response was that she was still moving towards that. In the final weeks, she seemed to take greater comfort in our prayer time and the readings from the gospel accounts of Jesus moving towards the Last Supper and His crucifixion. She took great comfort in the prayers and anointing of the sick by Father Ethan, audibly praying the responses, and she was at peace, making at the end, peace with her God and with family members. She died on Wednesday of Holy Week, again with style, this time provided by the grace of God.
To conclude:
And now…Tania, our sister, will be missed, a missing we have all started to process, this funeral mass and her imminent burial another step on that journey. Her joy in watching college basketball, and Lakers games and Dodger games and the Super Bowl with family and being eager to participate on the text threads where everybody commented on the game and its ups and downs – that will be missed, and is already missed by those who participated and enjoyed the games with her. We will miss and have already missed her participation on the extensive family threads, daily threads, on just about anything that someone would mention – that will be missed. It was sad when we created another thread without her name and phone number being part of that it.
We will miss her organizing and preparing everything in December for the family annual tamale making breakfast where we would gather to make the tamales that she would then serve at the traditional Christmas Eve tamale dinner at her home.
Her enthusiasm for these events and things, all centered around family, will be the things this year, and for a while, that will define how we miss her, because they defined in large part who Tania was, and how she was, and we will miss her voice, her insistence, and her energy and joy with which she did her best to gather us together, and with which she participated fully in the gatherings at the homes of other family members. Tania will be missed, this a legacy of her love for the family, and of our love for her.
Requiescat in Pace
Tatiana F. Orozco
July 6, 1954 – March 31, 2021
***
Yes, Chris, Tania will be missed. She always had that beautiful smile, that sometimes mischievous answer to any question. Although she never had children of her own, all of her siblings children were hers. When she talked about them, you could feel the love and see it in the pictures she posted. The world was her intimate family. We all were her family.
Yes, Tania will be missed, always in our hearts.
You captured her perfectly. Such a fitting eulogy.
I just saw this link and I wanted to share that last year, when my mother called me in Spain to tell me that Tania had passed, I was really taken aback. Tania was a special friend to so many and I have many fond memories of our 12 years together in school. What I remember most about Tania was her wit. When we saw each other in 2002 at our 30th High School Reunion, we spoke about our families. I, like Tania, am my family’s “token spinster aunt”. So we shared that special bond. At one point we were standing to the side talking and looking at all of our classmates when she turned to me and said, “We still look really good . . . and that’s because we never married and had kids! Stress will age you!! ” At that moment I had just started to take a sip of my drink and I laughed and spit it out! As our 50th Reunion came, I again thought of her, because I know she would have been the first person I sought out to talk to.