My mother called one day when she was in her late 70’s or early 80`s and told me straight out that she was losing her mind. I can’t remember how I answered her, but I don’t think -at the time- I gave her fear much importance. However, she was right… and the transition was not as slow as one might imagine. By the age of 83, my mother had all but lost her conscious mind to a rapidly progressing dementia… she turned into ‘my little girl’.
Naturally, I was in the prime of my life and not about to saddle myself with my mother’s dementia, so I got her a keeper who moved in to live with her and whom she hated from the word ‘go’. It wasn’t cruel… it was necessary. If I had attempted to take on the care of my mother -apart from the fact that it would have been impossible in the long run or even in the short one- I would have sacrificed my life and hated her for it. I feel no guilt, I did what had to be done and provided my mother with the best care available in her situation.
Seeing as my brother lived in Spain (my mother and I lived in Mexico at the time) and I wanted to move there with my second husband, I asked him to find me a residence where we could put out mother and have her properly cared for. He did, and I arrived some time later and deposited her in a very nice -and expensive- residence for the elderly. Seeing as she was by that time reduced to and aged infancy, I also hired two Ecuadorian girls to take care of her for 16 hours a day as I knew that in these types of residences, the help is scarce and usually overworked. So my mother was never alone while she was awake and always kept clean and pretty. I lived relatively nearby and visited her at least three times a week taking her out for a stroll in her wheel chair when possible and as long as she enjoyed it. At the end, she was terrified of going out so I would arrive to visit with a cup of ice-cream which was her favorite. She weighed next to nothing and would run over and sit on my lap the moment I arrived, so it was as if the roles had been reversed and she was my little “old” child. I had but one prayer which I often voiced to the Universe: “Please, don’t let my mother die alone; I want to be with her when she goes, please.”
Then, one day, one of the girls I had hired to watch over my mother, asked me what the word “Daddy” meant and said that my mother kept repeating it and reaching up with her both hands towards the ceiling. It made me wonder -agnostic that I am- if my grandfather was appearing to my mother. I remembered that my grandmother -whose father had died when she was two years old so she couldn’t remember what he looked like- a few days before her death said that she heard his voice coming from a deep well, telling her that he was coming.
One evening I had just exited a restaurant where I had had my dinner, and was driving home when I felt a sharp pain on the left side of my chest, and the words “My mother is dying” appeared in my mind. Instead of going home, I drove straight to the residence where she was. It was 11 o’clock in the evening, but strangely enough the street door to the residence where my mother was, was not locked and I walked in unannounced without even having to ring a bell. The desk where the night guard always sat was also empty… not a soul saw me open the door, enter, cross the lobby, walk down the hallway and go into my mother’s room. She was dying, that was obvious. She lay on her side, a slight thread of blood coming from her mouth and staining the sheet on the bed. Her eyes were open. I sat her up gently, placed a pillow behind her for support and then sat on the bed next to her, holding her hand. She lay her head on my shoulder and closed her eyes. I began talking in a soft, gently voice, telling her how wonderful her life had been, how she had been loved by my father, how happy she had been always and how there was nothing at all to fear. I talked for a while and then fell silent, sitting beside my mother, holding her hand and looking up at the ceiling. We sat there together for about 20 minutes and then she sighed and stopped breathing. I was sitting beside her, looking up at the corner of the room and the ceiling above so that my line of vision was between my mother’s body and the ceiling and that was when I saw it… My mother’s ‘ghost’, a transparent figure of my mother and someone else (looked like my grandfather) floating up towards the corner of the room and ceiling, and disappearing through the wall. I didn’t dream it, I saw it. I guess that is what they call the “ghost”, but the marvel was she wasn’t alone. I was flooded by the most incredible feeling of euphoria I have ever experienced and could do no more than call out over and over again: “¡You made it Mommy, you made it!” I did not imagine this, it was more than I could have imagined given that I do not believe in ghosts, the after-life or even God for that matter. I saw it. Of course, when I turned to my mother, she was dead… she had to be, I had seen her leave.
Instead of sorrow, I felt a euphoria as I have seldom experienced as I embraced my mother’s small lifeless frame and kept repeating over and over: “You made it Mommy, you made it”. Needless to say, the evening we held the “wake” right there in the home and everyone came to say their ’I’m sorries’… I didn’t cry;foe me it was a celebration. My mother was free, and I had had the most spiritual experience of my entire life. She had allowed me to see her go, undoubtedly it had been her or her spirit that had summoned me with the pain and the thought. She had gifted me with her death, and I am so, so grateful. The most wonderful gift a mother can give you. Thank you, Mommy. I love you always.
Tomorrow would have been the 82nd birthday of the father of my children. In his memory, I have decided to dedicate the day to reading all the “stuff” he kept over the years, even after we had been divorced and he was remarried: a bag full of letters and mementos collected during our relationship, both before and during our marriage
But it did… turn out, I mean. Months later we both shared our experience of that first night. I confessed that I had not wanted to go to the dance and that my mother had bribed me into it with the fateful dress, and that I had thought very poorly of him for not offering to take me home. As it turned out, he hadn’t wanted to go to a 15-year-old’s dance party either (after all he was finishing medical school and soon would be a practicing doctor), but that morning his horoscope had said he would meet the love of his life and he had gone to the party to prove it was wrong (destiny is a tricky thing!). As for taking me home, he had heard me from the first hint, but didn’t own a car at the time and had not thought to take any money with him, so he had no idea how to solve his dilemma until my friend had offered her chauffer.
Today I did 3 hours of volunteering for the French Association called “Les Restaurants du Coeur” or the Restaurants of the Heart. It was the local collect in the supermarket and my neighbour and I were on duty from 4 to 7. I have never enjoyed anything so much! I really thought I would hate having to ask people to give something… and in French! I believed I would be embarrassed and feel badly when they said “no”. I couldn’t have been more wrong.
iences of extreme generosity, of efforts made in spite of not having much for one’s self, of the painful way people hid their faces when they didn’t want to give or even take the paper, and so much love that my heart was overflowing. As I left, mentally kneeling down with gratitude, I wondered if somewhere along the line I had missed my calling. It has been a long time since I have felt so much love in my heart. How to say ‘Thank you,’ except…. Thank you.
had her saffron. The answer was “Yupee”. Thirty minutes later I got a message from her also through Whatsapp saying that her 96 year old father had just fallen down the stairs and died, and that she was leaving for New York to bury him and find a home for her mother who is suffering from dementia (also 96). Today I asked how she was and the answer was that she is sad and tired, seeing where she can put her mother to live. She said: “Mom understands he is dead but she hasn’t cried yet; that is dementia for you.” I answered: “Yes, sometimes dementia might be a blessing.”
thing sticking her tongue out all the time and repeating a senseless phrase in Spanish which literally said: “When are we going to eat nothing.”
very heavy Electra complex to make my mother jealous, something that heightened my own competition with her. And then again, my mother was extremely beautiful and I… well, I wasn’t that kind of beauty and I tended to be overweight.
gotten all her life whenever things did not go the way she wanted them to. I would visit and upon entering the room I would see her face tighten and she would glare down at the floor.
the Florida coast. At that time, they were both married and not to each other, although Perico was not living with his spouse and Betty -while still enjoying the multiple advantages that hers offered- was on the brink of separation. What went on on this first meeting is anyone’s conjecture. But 
the fact that this event had even taken place underlines the fortuitousness of destiny and the incredible intricacy in the pattern of individual lives which blindly determines their fate.
At the time of their meeting, according to this son, Perico stayed at the house of his friend, Gager Wasey (at left) at that moment still married to Betty. Also according to that narrative, Betty “would walk around the house naked,” and Perico “could not take his eyes off her.” Then, so his friend would not be fooled, he told him that “he fancied his wife a great deal.”
phrase “half-naked”, and considering the circumstances (beach, warm weather, seashore, island), she might have sat on the deck or walked across the living room in her bathing suit which at that time wasn’t even close to being a bikini. Or she may even have laid by the pool wrapped in a towel as after a swim, something more normal for a girl brought up in America, than for the tight-laced English or the ultra-Catholic Spanish ladies that Perico had known previously. As for warning the husband of his 
future intentions, it is no more in Perico’s character than having told a son that the second wife flaunted herself shamelessly in front of him making it impossible to resist her. Perico was, above all, a gentleman and speaking poorly of one’s wife, present or past, was not in his nature; much less would he have violated a friend’s invitation by confessing he lusted after that man’s wife, even though on the following visit, lust he did.
Writing a life 