Rosa

What do I know about my great-grandmother?

I know that her birth name was Geraldine Rosa Carvajal, but that we all except for my dad would called her "abuelita Rosa." He just called her "Geraldine," which felt quite impersonal to me, but I guess that this was her name as well. I know that she had several brothers and sisters, and that her father was a well-off man and an owner of extensive lands, but who wasn't a fair person. I know that she lived in Venezuela for a while, and that she was married two or three times. Her first husband and the father of my grandmother was a cyclist. He died when a truck did a sudden stop and, with him riding his bicycle right behind it, he couldn't help but to get smashed and crack his skull open with the back of the vehicle. I know that she was cheated on by one or more of her husbands, and that she would say to me to never trust men when they said that they loved you. She was tall, elegant, strong and resilient as an oak. Even at her early nineties she had the most beautiful and softest skin I had ever seen. Her hair was silky and the color of silver and snow. I think it used to be dark black when she was young, but of this I am not certain, for by the time I was born that color was long gone, and so far I've only been able to see a black and white picture of her when she was nineteen. She enjoyed playing cards and she was very good at it (I know she cheated a bit when she was about to loose a game, but she didn't know I knew this.) She'd help my grandmother cook despite her stiff diabetic fingers, and she'd make the most delicious empanadas. Her diabetes had claimed 80% of the vision of one of her eyes, and she had to be injected with insulin everyday, which she hated. I know that her older son, Raúl, was violently killed in Argentina when he was in his early thirties. She never got over that. I tried asking her to tell me more about it, but she'd always say "let's talk about happier things," and so we did. I know that she dearly loved me, too.

Yesterday my abuelita Rosa would have turned 99 years old. Three days after Christmas in 2017 she started to feel uneasy and had to be hospitalized in Natal, Brazil. A day later she was gone. I received the news from the other side of the globe, and it felt like my world had ended right then. My abuelita had always been like a mother to me. When I was around 5 years old, she used to comb my hair to help me get ready to go play with my friends. One day I decided that I was old enough to do it myself, and I managed to arrange my hair into a ponytail. I proudly showed her what I had done, and she graciously said "very good job" without making any improvements to what I had achieved with much effort, as full of bumps and unstylish as it was. I grew up playing cards with her, spending hours at the time drinking mate and telling jokes while playing Rummy. She could be really competitive! Most of the times she would win, and she would laugh and say "well played" even if I had had a terrible hand. As the years passed and I got better, I started to win more, but sometimes I secretly would let good cards pass by just so that I could see her enjoying her victory.

My grandparents and abuelita Rosa came from Argentina to Spain to be able to see their grandchildren grow up. They left all they knew behind and started a completely new life. I'd walk to their house almost everyday, and most weekends we'd have a family gathering. I'll always be grateful for this. When my life took a 360° turn in 2014 and my parents got divorced, my father got a job in Peru and my mom decided to move to Brazil, with her parents and Rosa following her just a couple months later. At that time I was in the beginning of a relationship with who is now my husband, and I was too blindly in love to see or to really acknowledge how everything I knew was going to change forever. I stayed in Spain to finish my studies, thinking that maybe I'd follow my family to Brazil after I was done. That never happened though. I decided that I wanted to stay in Europe to go to college, which I don't regret, but this meant that I couldn't see my loved ones much. I remember the first time I spent a year without them...I arrived to Brazil after a 30 hour trip, taking several flights and taxis to arrive to the remote beach town where they now lived. Their home was a small white house with two dormitories - one for my grandparents and one for Rosa - and a living room with a tiny but functional kitchen. All my grandmother's parakeets and canaries started screeching as I came in, and the dogs and cats started to run and chase each other while my abuela Beby and Nono hugged me and kissed me. I was experiencing everything as if I was watching a movie, outside of my body - just like in a dream. Then my abuelita Rosa came from her room calling "Solcito, llegaste!" as I dropped my bags in the floor and my chest tightened. She embraced me and I cried so hard and so loudly that I think I scared her. "Is everything okay? - she asked. "Yes, I just missed you." She asked me to come to her room and sit right next to her. She took my hand and put a few wrinkled reais in my hand and pressed my fingers closed. "Don't tell your siblings," she said with a wink. Those 200R$ (equivalent to about 70 American dollars at the time) must have accounted for 1/4 of her pension. I tried to decline the gift, but she insisted. I kept that money hidden in my drawer for a long time, not being able to make myself spend it. A couple years after she passed, I found the bills again, which had now declined in value and could barely buy some groceries at the supermarket. They still were a gift that she had given to me, which made them infinitely valuable.

Grandpa Nono, grandma Beby, Abuelita Rosa, Me, my sister Mar. My 18th birthday. Brazil.

As the years passed the weight of the guilt for being far away from my family became heavier and heavier, which was confusing as I was also having the best experiences of my life - traveling abroad as a backpacker, starting college, creating the best art I had done so far, being madly in love with Tom and living as a grown up couple in the suburbs of Granada. In the summers Tom and I traveled to different places to do Workaway. We were helping this yoga teacher with housekeeping chores and painting murals in exchange for accommodation in Carna, Ireland, when I had to start planning what I'd do that winter. I wanted to go to Brazil, but at the same time I didn't have the money to do it. My father, who had been able to buy my flight to go visit in the past, was going through a rough moment and he couldn't afford to help either. Desperately checking for cheeper options and finding none, I decided to give up the search and take the offer of my generous mother-in-law to spend the holidays with Tom's family in Kansas City.

I had started to adapt to experiencing the lives of my family members through Whatsapp videos, for I didn't have much choice. In Christmas 2017, my brother had been recorded wearing a tiger pajama, dancing with its tail rocking from one side to the other and making funny faces, at which my abuelita was laughing really hard. The tables were completely covered in trays of food, with a pyramid of empanadas at the center. Oh man, how I wished I could reach out and grab one of those!

Video chatting with abuelita. Someone had pressed a filter by accident.

On the night of the 28th of that same December, I received a message from my mom saying "your abuelita isn't feeling well." This had happened before, so I sent her good wishes and I hoped for her early recovery. As the night progressed, my mother's messages started to get more and more desperate. "She's really not doing well, maybe you should come here." I checked flight prices and they were all above $3000 for a one way ticket to Brazil due to the holidays. I panicked, locked myself in the bathroom and cried. There aren't enough words to convey how shitty it feels when you're far away from someone you love and they're dying. There just aren't. Tom, trying to help me feel better, proposed playing some drums and singing for her as if in a ceremony. We did it and it felt right - it felt important and meaningful. I still went to sleep crying, and I woke up at 8:20 am with a dream in my head as vivid as any other thing that had ever happened to me in waking life. A yellow canary had flown towards my right hand, landing on my index. I could feel the light weight of its body, its tiny claws grasping my finger. As it stood still inspecting me, I held my breath as to not scare it. After a few seconds it turned its head to look at me with its other eye, and I noticed it was missing. It flew away, I blinked and I was awake. I checked my phone and at 8:00 am my mother had sent another message. "I'm sorry Sol, abuelita Rosa just passed away."

I don't remember what I said to my great-grandmother on that last day, but having noticed my distress she had decided to record a voice message for me. "Solcito, don't worry. I'll be okay. God will help me get out of this one. Please don't worry. I adore you. Everything will be okay. Goodbye my love." I still have her voice message somewhere in my computer and, if I played it, it would sound exactly as it did when I heard it for the first time before going to sleep that night, when I still didn't know that these would be my abuelita Rosa's last words to me.

Now my nightmare of not being with her when she died had become true. For years I felt guilty at not having been there. I didn't go to her funeral either, and I only saw a picture of her lifeless body resting in her open coffin. She was surrounded by hundreds of roses and by the sad faces of my relatives, who had clearly been crying for days. I deleted the picture shortly after, for it was too painful to see. In a way I never had closure, for our goodbye through a screen felt unreal. For a long time there would be something in me that still believed I would find her in her room when I went to Brazil to visit. Going through her things I found I folder where she had kept all of the drawings that I had made for her when I was a kid. The almost 20 year-old papers looked as if time had never passed through them. When she had to move from Spain to Brazil, she had left almost all her clothes and belongings behind, for my family couldn't afford to pay extra for bringing more luggage with them. She brought those drawings with her though, for they had in them something written in clumsy letters that spelled " I love you with all my heart abuelita, you're the best abuelita in the world."

Three years ago in a 14th of July I was doing an offering for her in celebration of her life and of our connection. I played my moon-shaped frame drum as I told her about our plans to find a place to live in Upper Peninsula, Michigan. It wasn't being easy, for it felt like everyone else was trying to do the same and the house prices where skyrocketing, but we were still having fun trying. We went to visit dozens of properties, but places seemed to always be very exciting on paper and utterly disappointing in person. "We're keeping ourselves entertained while we wait, though." I told her I wish she could have heard me sing when she was alive, for the 17-year old Sol that she used to play cards with knew nothing about music then. I finished my small sacred ritual and, going back to my mundane life, I checked my phone. The screen lightened up to show a refreshed page on my Zillow search, and the first listing that appeared had the picture a cute cabin with wooden shingles on its front side, two big screen doors and with trees all around it. "Off-grid, propane fridge, remote." I like to think that my abuelita heard me sing that day, and that she helped me to find this place that I now call home. We might have not believed in the same god, but I do know that she's somewhere taking care of me still.