"Pintica"

She's gone. The woman that gave me life is gone. She passed away on Tuesday after battling cancer for the last 4 years. She fought against this sickness and for a little while at least, we thought she'd beaten it. We were optimistic about her survival. We made plans to go here and there. I wanted her to meet my dog even though she didn't like the idea of pets. We didn't expect it to end so suddenly. Perhaps in the moments before she became irreversibly ill, she thought she would beat it. Perhaps she new she wouldn't but didn't want to alarm the rest of us. Perhaps she got a chance to make peace with the idea. Perhaps she didn't. The awful thing about it is, you do always go through it alone. Surrounded by people and yet not at the same time. I don't have the strength of character to believe there's more to it: Life and Death. I don't know what's out there either but I do know I don't know a ton of things. I hope, for her sake, that there is something and that it's good. Maybe she is a ghost now and privy to things I would rather she not know about me. Would that be worse than null? I believe she'd rather know how I'm doing rather than not which implies she'd rather be than not. I can't say for sure.

I think back on the trip I took to see her before she had the last surgery. She was dizzy and she'd fallen in the bathroom. They had taken her to the ER and I made my way down to see her immediately. She was doing better after the fall and subsequent trip to the hospital but the trip had revealed that the cancer was in her head. I don't know for sure if she knew then since we'd decided not to give her all the details but she was not a stupid person. I got a chance to talk to her face to face in a way I hadn't been for a while. It was good. Really good. I spent time at home, fixing things that needed fixing and updating things that needed updating. She seemed grateful but I feel like she wasn't as positive about the experience. Maybe she could feel the finality coming on. I do know that she always took care not to cause me alarm because I'm an emotional person by nature. She may have known all along and decided not to tell me. Even when he had arguments, I knew she didn't want anything but good things in my life. It's easy to think back now and feel terrible about not visiting enough or getting into meaningless arguments but I know there's no sense in beating myself up for it. We did what we did and that's how it is. I ended the trip on that Sunday morning by giving her an apple. We'd had a conversation about how I hated apples growing up but I had moved to a place where picking an apple from a tree and eating it was possible. These apples are far superior then the ones I was given growing up and today I love apples. I had brought an apple with me as a snack that I forgot to eat. To illustrate my point about how apples taste better fresh, I gave her this forgotten apple. She ate it with relish and very nearly at the core. She agreed that apples are better fresh. This is the last memory I have of her being completely lucid.

The surgery took her lucidity.She seemed positive just after it but there were complications and less then a week later, she was babbling. She wasn't there most of the time. I came to visit her again after the surgery and she was nearly someone else. She didn't have the ability to stand up from her bed anymore but she insisted that there was a conspiracy involving the absence of her shoes. She told me they'd taken them somewhere and she needed them so she could leave and to be careful to keep track of my own shoes.  She didn't trust the nurse there. She may have said some unkind words about her but at the time it was hard to understand her. She was slurring her words and it was difficult to make out what she was saying half the time. I had to ask her to repeat what she was saying a lot and I think that pissed her off. She always had a bit of a temper but she seemed to forgive me and repeated herself. I spent about 3 hours with her in this way. She didn't stop talking. I suppose I know now why I sometimes can't either. The next day, she was a lot quieter and fell asleep for most of the morning. At one point I remember someone (me?) asking her a question and she just shrugged, quirking the corner of her mouth as if to say "I don't know, maybe". This expression is emblazoned onto my mind. I don't know why but it's burned into my memory of her. There was something so sad about it. I think she was fully there at the moment and perhaps the realization was starting to show in her face. Again, I don't know this for a fact and I'm likely reading into it but I can't shake it. There was another moment that sticks in my mind. After the lucidity left her, she was a bit wild-eyed. She looked around a lot and she spoke to people that may not have been present. I like to think that she was having conversations with people in the past or maybe others that had passed away. She spoke of food and preparing food a lot too. It clearly was her favorite activity. Anyway, her eyes never really focused on the person addressing her for long. In this instance, we locked eyes for what seemed like an eternity but may have only been a couple of seconds. She smiled (something that she hadn't been doing) and said nothing. Her eyes pierced my body. I did all I could not to start crying in front of her. I didn't want her to feel sad. I covered my face and looked away. I hugged her and I kissed her and I asked her to kiss me. I told her I loved her. I hope she knew I did.

She was a great person to me. She consoled me when I needed it. She was there for me in the rough times and I wasn't the only one. She raised me and my sister. She raised her siblings and their children. She lived with her parents until they were gone. There are a great many things she enjoyed and I can't come close to expressing that list but she was never bored. She loved to cook and she loved seafood. She loved to play dominoes and she loved fried rice with shrimp. She loved Snickers and Milky Ways and Häagen-Daz ice cream and she used to sew all our clothes and make bed sheets and she loved all of the many plants she had in her home.  She used to hit me with the belt when I was bad and she always told everyone how proud she was of me and she meant the world to me even though I didn't always show it or know it and now she's gone.

I'm not the only one that has dealt with this and there's a small consolation that she died quickly and on morphine but nothing changes that there's a hole in me now. I think about these words I've just written and how cliché they sound but it only sounds that way because that's how it really feels. The rest of my large family feel and will continue to feel the loss for some time. We loved her and she loved us. I just hope she's happy wherever she is.