Pensión Lobo
Room 13
The worship of life has overshadowed our relationship with the only true truth: that of death. We have banished it from our homes and locked it away in hospitals, clinics, and funeral homes. However, Ramón Lobo did not shy away from reality: after being diagnosed with two cancers, the renowned journalist and war correspondent decided to use his masterful pen to dissect death from his own experience.
What is the nature of our fear of death? How can we face a bleak future? What to do with our most important possessions? These universal questions, so silenced and stigmatized in the "Land of the Healthy," are the ones that the author addresses in this bittersweet fusion of memories, reflections, hope, and resignation, in this ode to life that is serenely drawn within the framework of what gives it value: its own end. Pensión Lobo is a posthumous memoir, a final personal and collective exercise, where through testimony, Ramón Lobo investigates death from a sociological perspective and confronts it from a personal approach.
I suffer from a serious illness that will kill me in a few months, I still don't know if in two, three, or five. The die is cast. The perception of the imminence of the end illuminates my traveled path, gives it meaning. I don't carry too much baggage because I learned to move lightly, without tethers. A month-long journey fits in a carry-on. Now I write, meditate, and dream in search of materials that will allow me to sculpt something resembling an epitaph. We are just that: a sentence, a short paragraph; the rest is artifice.
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Reviews
"A very personal, intimate, and wonderfully written work, whose reflections on a life lived, accepting death, and illness can serve all of us. It is a lucid farewell from someone who loved life and feels the imminence of his final goodbye." Marta López, El Periódico
"A brilliant chronicle (once again) in real time of what it is like to leave this world and how we do or don't understand the inescapable fact that we all fade away." Revista Mercurio
"When we thought he had already told us everything, Ramón Lobo surprises us with a posthumous chronicle as painful as it is beautiful, detailing his last months fighting cancer. A veteran war correspondent accustomed to reporting on the worst conflicts, in Pensión Lobo he tackles the battle he would have preferred not to recount—his tireless fight against cancer. ... But his talent is alive and condensed in a very special way within the 236 pages of his book. ... His indelible legacy ensures that he will never die in the collective memory." Patricia Labrador, La Sexta
