Keeping On

And I would never see her again. I felt it in my gut that night while I couldn’t sleep. Mamá was gone.

Hospitals are strange places. I don’t like being in them nowadays, that’s for sure, and I never liked going there back then. They’re where people turn into ghosts, sometimes where living ghosts can also turn back into people if they’re lucky enough. I thought it was all rotten luck at first.

I’d seize the rabbit’s foot I kept in my pocket during kindergarten whenever I felt like something bad was going to happen. I kissed the picture of Mom I kept above my bed every night before going to sleep, because I was scared that my dad would end up in the hospital if I didn’t. I needed her to look out for me now that she was in the clouds – I needed her to know that I still loved her and that I would never let her out of my memory.

Somehow, I think she knew. She would visit me in dreams when I was little. I would be in third grade, and I would come home from school to see her come home from work, back from working at the bookstore she had worked for since her and Dad moved to Chicago.

And it was so real. She moved effortlessly, no hiccups in her joints when she picked me up and asked me about my day. There was strength in her thick frame, a contrast to the way she sat in hospital beds reduced to skin and bones. She was healthy and happy, not hooked up to machines and tubes, her chocolate hair full without traces of bald spots or stitches.

I liked to think that she had recovered in my dreams. Early on, I just pretended like nothing had happened when I saw her in my sleep – like the tumor on her brain had never existed, like the cancer was never even a thought. And then I accepted the possibility that my dreams could be an alternate universe where she pulled through the surgeries and medications, bouncing back into the swing of things.

Somehow, that probably made me sadder in the long run, thinking about what could’ve been.

And at the same time, when the funeral happened, there were so many people surrounding me that I was mainly focused on the fact that recovery was bound to be a long process. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to think of it as a process, though. I probably wasn’t even supposed to think about it at all.

After crying my eyes out while an old white priest talked about Heaven and the struggles of life, I really tried not to be sad. Dad hugged me during the ceremony in the church, and I could feel his body shaking as he quietly cried. I had known that death was a part of life. I think Dad taught me about dying a few months after Mom was admitted into the hospital and it looked like things weren’t going so well.

So I guess I should’ve expected it. I didn’t embrace it, and it was hard for me to see it as a good thing at first like my relatives told me to.

They lowered her into the ground after we were led to the burial site. Our family stood around her grave after somebody else spoke of hope, and everybody threw a handful of dirt onto her coffin.

I started crying again when I had to do it, wiping my snotty nose onto my dry-cleaned suit, but my dad didn’t yell at me. He kneeled down next to me and kissed me in the forehead, saying it was always tough to let go. He let the dirt slip between his fingers into her grave. Then he told me that I wouldn’t have to let go alone, that he would be right next to me.

I let my handful of earth fall, still sobbing.

That was that. Everybody piled into their cars to head back to our house, and everybody’s attitudes changed. Family members asked us about everything including the kitchen sink, kicking back drinks and eating all of our food. They told us how Mamá was out of her pain and how she was combing her long hair once again up in Heaven.

And I got enough of the crowd before too long and wandered off to my room. Somebody had tapped me on my shoulder right as I went in, and then I turned around to see my best friend and next-door neighbor, Tegan. She had a mischievous smile on her face that never seemed to leave, even years later.

We took our minds off of the heartache that day by playing video games in the living room. Adults would walk past and see that I wasn’t crying, and I guess that was enough to know that I didn’t need a drunk uncle to slur something in Spanish that I wouldn’t remember anyway.

Grief is a heavy weight to carry.

Me and Dad still carry our grief. I think we’re just used to the weight by now.

For nine days after the funeral, relatives who were in Chicago (where we lived) would light candles in the church. Me and Dad would sometimes go with them, and sometimes we would go alone. He took a week off of work to sort things out, and sometimes I’d see him sitting at the kitchen table surrounded by insurance papers and pens, rubbing his face and groaning swear words under his breath. Then he’d see me standing at the foot of the table, so he’d ask if I wanted to light the candles.

I always said yes. I’d have given anything to take the stress off his shoulders, and I think going to the altar helped a little bit.

Even long after he had to go back to work and when things were settling into our new definition of normal, I’d find little remnants of mourning in his character. Sometimes I would come out of my room in kindergarten and first grade, seeing him fast asleep in the lazy chair.

I would climb up into the seat and onto his lap, and he’d wake up. He’d ask what I was doing up at that hour, and I’d just shrug. Sigh. He’d loop his arm over my tiny shoulders and let me doze off against his stomach.

When I woke up, I was always somehow in my own bed. I’d see Dad out and about in the kitchen making breakfast, smiling like he never needed the comfort.

Maybe he didn’t need it. He was always stronger than he let on, anyway.