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Only in Dad’s passing 30 years ago did I finally see the magic of his rough humanity, a man filled with compassion for others but who most of his life tried to hide it, a father who finally found ways to tell his children he loved them, a husband who learned he was only half himself without his companion of 54 years.

And a decade ago, when Mom finally left us at age 97, memories brought to focus much of what she tried to say, in her way.

Like their generation, both left many things unsaid to their children, to each other and to their siblings. That was their way.

Most often, we did not ask why. That was our way.

A few years back, on land in east ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥ that once was like what my great-grandparents homesteaded in the 1870s, the Sotomayor family — Dad’s side — gathered en masse for the first time to celebrate who they are, where they came from and what they had accomplished. Not long after, Mom’s side, the Rodriguez family, reunited on the northern foothills ranch that my mother, Carlotta, and my father, Robert, long had cherished. (It is now a subdivision of nondescript track homes, but at least it is called Rancho Sotomayor.)

As they celebrated our heritage, what could not be forgotten was the memory of all the mothers and fathers who made us a Sotomayor or a Rodriguez, and what these families of hundreds have given ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥ in small, meaningful ways that slip into the background, unnoticed.

These people we call our family came from the west side barrios such as El Rio, Hollywood and Santa Rosa, from Calle Anita downtown and Menlo Park, the ranches in Sonoita and out east and north, from South ÃÛèÖÖ±²¥, Government Heights and Sahuarita.

Our mothers and our fathers built the city, paying homage to their families in individual struggles that did not always take them far, but most often did. They were railroad engineers and machinists, welders, laborers and roofers who knew that doing a job the right way was the only way. They were cowboys, dairymen and farmers who supplied the early stores in the “local farm-to-market� method before it came to be known that.

As plumbers, masons, painters and carpenters they built houses they could never afford to live in; they bound and printed books they would never get to read. They retreaded tires during the war, lined the power poles to keep the lights on, crafted fine furniture. They proudly navigated tough professions but envisioned easier lives for the children.

Most saw their dreams, big and small, fulfilled. Sons and daughters became college deans, professors, police detectives, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists and computer technicians, airline pilots, administrators and Army officers who went to places like Iraq but returned safely.

Strong, determined matriarchs held together the pieces of their families, nurturing and pointing the way. We did not see them as teachers, but they were nothing less. The brilliant daughters of brilliant mothers broke the tradition in which women simply went from teenage hood to motherhood, forsaking careers to raise families. Today, they are accountants, nurses, they conduct symphonies and coach college athletics; they are published authors, and they make documentary films.

Others are librarians and deacons, college professors or military officers serving in the new wars, and God again has watched over them. One of the first doctorates among us was a daughter. Her father never lived to see it, but somehow he must know and is proud.

Our parents had an endurance we will never match, a toughness honed by the times like their ancestors in Mexico knew, but which many of us were spared, mostly by their labors. They accepted what had been dealt them and admonished us never to tolerate the same. They did not understand or know of fair labor laws, often had no choice of health or retirement plans or “Obamacare,� but they provided for family. That was always paramount. Their lives were not spent grousing about their lots in life, but instead, working to make one better for their children.

In their leisure, they did simple things, like swap the stories written by their sweat. We young ones would listen from the edges of swampy rooms in summer to these mentiras, wondering where the truth ended, or if it ever began. We understood that the tales were special, though we didn’t know why, and generations later we still remember them as if we were hearing them today. We’ll never have stories like theirs to tell our kids. How could we? We did not live lives as they did.

“They just drank from a different well than we did,� my oldest brother, Robert, once told me. “They don’t make them like that anymore. I wish they did.�

They are not remembered much in public, and maybe they should be, because they, too, were pillars of our communities. But no civic center is named for Tia Lina. Nino Ramoncito isn’t the namesake of a park. There is no annual charro for Perfecto the cowboy, no library for Doña Antonia, who so loved her books. No placita is known for Chata, Tio Horacio or Tio Lisandro, and no plaque says, “This fertile land was farmed to richness by the back-breaking work of Manuel and Santos Sotomayor.�

Many of the generational markers are disappearing. They have left us to build new ones. But we don’t often erect monuments to our mothers and fathers. We just remember them, start a new generation and search for ways to get them ready like our parents tried to do.

At San Augustine Cathedral years ago, the late Monsignor Arsenio Carrillo — he, too, was family — eulogized my father as an educator, a pioneer who taught his children well, and who prepared them for life. That was what family meant to him, what it always meant to Mom, and what they spent an entire century trying to teach us.

We did not always understand that, but they did, and they did their jobs well. As we finally said goodbye to Mom, we began to see what our mothers and fathers taught their sons and daughters, and what has been achieved.

Maybe those things will be our monuments to you, Mom, and to you, Dad.