The doctors, having determined there was little more to be done, sent Pierre Jimenez home last week. His liver and kidneys are finished. Morphine manages the pain. Oxycodone gives him nightmares, and “the last thing I need is to wake up at 2 in the morning with nightmares,” he says.
Pierre is back at his mom’s house, the house his dad built on the Northside after coming home from the war. He spends his days in bed, but is in good spirits. Perhaps you are expecting me to say, “in good spirits, all things considered.” But he’s in good spirits, period. He’s leaving us and while he cannot say he’s ready to die, he can say he’s going out on his own terms, “which means to me that you did it in a way that speaks to who you are,” he says.
Who he was, who he is, even now in his last days, was an advocate and a leader and a rabble-rouser and stubborn cuss and a joker and a believer in the goodness of humankind. He was tireless. He spoke out against failing schools, police brutality, the lack of minority representation on city boards, anything that carried the stamp of discrimination. He was an activist and he never stopped being an activist, even as that role lost stature and value in the public eye. As if there were no longer any need for champions. Pierre Jimenez said what he thought — and sometimes that ticked off the establishment and sometimes it angered his fellow activists. How could you support school vouchers, they said. How could you work for Gov. Bill Owens, they demanded.
“He’s never in his life been into groupthink,” says Jimenez’s longtime friend, Tomas Romero, who, in a column for this newspaper, once wrote of Pierre: “‘Hispanic activist’ is the tag lazy journalists pin on him. If you’ve been with him at schools or at the Gilliam Youth Services Center, you’d know his heart aches for this whole city.”
I do not have room here to list all the organizations he founded or chaired or belonged to. I do not have room for all the testimonials offered to me over the last few days. Every five minutes, the doorbell of his mother’s house rings and another one of Pierre’s friends walks through the door. They all come, the Chicano activists he marched with, the middle school kids he ran around the neighborhood with, the students he mentored. Nita Gonzales, daughter of Corky, chokes backs tears to say: “You’ve been a warrior for all of us.” Pat Vigil, who first met Pierre in 1969, when Pierre was 17 and a freshman at the University of Colorado at Boulder, tells me: “He had something you just can’t learn, it just has to be embedded in you, and that was to help the community.”
Pierre listens from his bed, disagreeing with this, cracking a joke about that. He has always been a man in motion and though his body is failing, his mind is not. It is full of all that he has done and said, and to converse with him now is to share the current of his thoughts.
“I’m sorry. I’m usually more prepared than this,” he says, as his mind drifts. “It’s OK,” I tell him, “you have a good excuse.” “Yeah,” he says, of the lot of the dying, “the only problem is I can only use it once.” And he flashes that Jimenez grin.
“Stubbornness,” his youngest son, David, says when his father asks him what he passed on to him and his brother, Paul. “No,” Pierre says. “What I said is, ‘Be determined about those things you consider important.’ “
He lies in bed and thinks about all the people who made it possible for him to believe in himself and all the ways in which he tried to do the same for the youth who followed him.
“In retrospect, I think it all started with that old teaching: You treat your neighbor as you would want to be treated,” Jimenez says. “Fundamentally, everything I did comes back to that. For me, that lesson came from the world we lived in. It was John F. Kennedy and the Vietnam War and the civil rights movement. It was the movement in the Southwest for basic human rights for Chicanos. It was the maelstrom of all this happening at once and we were thrown into it and told, ‘OK, go make something happen.’ People would say, ‘You can’t change the world.’ And I would say, ‘That’s just an excuse not to do anything.’
“I’ve always enjoyed the battle. I’ve always enjoyed the competition when it is fierce, but fair. I’ve always thought there was a greater purpose in life for what we do — or that there should be. So, I’ve come to peace now. I’ve been a very impatient person, or I used to be, but I’ve come to peace.”
Among those who visit Jimenez is Robert Cross, a Wajaje Lakota spiritual leader. Cross offers Jimenez his prayers of encouragement and strength. He sings and drums, and friends and family pray. Surrounded, then, by love and song in the house his father built, Pierre Jimenez rests.
Tina Griego writes Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays. Reach her at 303-954-2699 or tgriego@denverpost.com.
