Goodbye to Gerardo Osornio, as an elegy

I still haven’t finished processing the death of Gerardo Osornio. Gerardo Javier Osornio Ortiz never gave me classes, and yet he was an excellent teacher. The apparent paradox is explained very simply, since he was one of those people that he shares, that he gives a lot of himself in every detail of his life. Of those people who love life, well. And Gerardo Osornio is gone.

He was a teacher for more than a third of a century and a sports journalist like few others.

Already at the beginning of 2018, he was also the first kidney recipient patient at the Civil Hospital, a medical center that he thanked very much for his work so accomplished and for whom he had so much confidence. There he recovered a hope that, in his own words, he understood was a reality that fortunately came to fruition, to give him time. But his health was complicated and last Wednesday the teacher passed away.

This past Thursday, a mass of ashes was celebrated in the parish of Nuestra Señora del Carmen, just at the beginning of the night. I was there a little early. I saw, with distance and respect, how his wife, Blanca, arrived with her ashes. Everything in tranquility and silence, on one side of the church, and accompanied by her family.

At mass I met people who I had no idea had treated the teacher. And that made me happy: seeing how much Gerardo Osornio touched so many lives, enough to fill a church in the middle of the week and in a pandemic.

I appreciate, like so many others, that there was a mass to be able to go and say goodbye. Go and feel that I will no longer find him on the street, go and assess the fortune of having met him.

I don’t know when I first spoke to him, but I will forever be grateful for those talks.

I fondly remember the talks he gave. And also to those that he allowed me to join, like in the hours between classes at the International Mexico University (UMI), when he and my later boss, Javier Valdez, talked about everything and nothing. Some day without a name I will find some of those audios (by that time he recorded everything and took about a thousand photos a day). One day he arrived at the UMI with some books, there were about nine or ten of them; he said that he had made a discard from his library and gave them to me. He said that it was important that I not only read the work of the great Mexican writers (we both studied Letters at the UAS), but also delve into his thoughts. A couple of those books have been on the bookcase at the head of my bed ever since. There are words that must be close, like lullabies that never stop resonating with us.

A few months ago, when Andrés Villarreal was still coming out giving news at noon and therefore it was right for me to turn on that box, I was watching a Spanish program on local TV, Cazador de cerebros; there they exposed something precious: how the cell, each one, carries within itself all the information to form an individual in such a way that within hours of having created an embryo, it already locates where the right, the left, its up and the down. And that, they explained, it is not yet known how the cell can know. Because, well, although it is known of the existence of gravitational fields and bioelectric fields that make bodies know where there should be a certain organ and with what characteristics it should develop, much is still unknown about the “physical forces that influence the expression of the genes”, explained Pere Estupinyà, presenter of the program. What there is is that bioelectric fields can be manipulated in experiments so that, for example, a frog grows an ear on its back “and that allows us to dream of forces that may one day surprise us,” said a scientist. He thought these days that there are people who move a lot, so much that they share a lot of themselves without hardly stopping. And with little or vast treatment they leave a lot in one. Lots of good. No plans, no maps. Like the cells. Only with the naturalness in essence of contributing. And Gerardo Osornio is for me one of those people.