Excerpt
Tragedy affects people in different ways, and different people grieve in different ways, but usually grieving brings acceptance and healing. My grandparents, my mother, my aunts, and my uncle had every right to grieve. Imagine how horrible and painful it was for my grandfather to lose his brightest son in such a senseless, tragic way. How his heart must have ached, yet Papasito made it through this profound loss. Perhaps he realized that he had other children and that he had to go on for them.
For my grandmother it was different. The moment of Valito’s death was the moment that my grandmother’s madness began. The day my grandmother buried her son was the day that the light went out. She was traumatized for life. Valito’s death compounded the trauma she had suffered from the circumstances surrounding my great-grandmother’s death.
When my great-grandmother was on her deathbed, she kept telling my grandmother that she could not die without her. Following the guanche* beliefs and old-country tales that my immigrant great-
grandparents brought from the Spanish Canary Islands, when my great-grandmother died, the women measured my grandmother, just a little girl, and put her measurement in her mother’s coffin. This secular, old-country custom meant that my grandmother’s mother was taking my grandmother with her in spirit; and, therefore, my grandmother was destined to live a sad, miserable life.
Valito’s death only intensified her belief that it was true.
*Canary Islands natives
@ All Rights Reserved
Dania Rosa Nasca
April 14, 2016
