Gustavo Rojo Dot Com

The cycle was complete. The city of Bakersfield, which was their home away from home for many years, would be the land where she would seize to exist on this planet. Death is painful. All of the sorrow that fills everyone is horrible. The feelings of anguish for the death of their mother is sadly mixed with those haunting experiences that cloud their memories of their upbringing. The beatings. The fear. I felt horribly for my mother, the eldest. She was the second mother to all of the family. She fed the continuous cycle of babies. She tended to the family chores. She defended her mother when alcohol got the best of their father.

It was obvious that the end was near. The onset of Alzheimer saddened us all. The delicate bones. The inevitable fall that fractured her hipbone that resulted with a screw holding her hip in place. It was one thing after another it seemed. A massive stroke to her left cerebral hemisphere told us immediately of the finality of the situation. The end was near. Would it be a few days? Weeks? Months? My grandmother couldn’t talk to us. Her eyes were open. It seemed as though she could hear us and at times it seemed that words would come out of her mouth. But they didn’t. Did we really need to start thinking of funeral necessities? The hypocrisy of those that supposedly were distraught over her situation when years before they would scold her. The cowardly sons, my uncles, who never defended their mother from their father’s extreme machista tendencies. The pain of seeing your own mother cry hysterically over the loss of her mother, my grandmother breaks my heart.

Over the years I can only recall having a handful of true conversations with my grandmother. She would tell me of the misadventures of the younger uncles and how I should not make their mistakes. I always wished to have a grandmother I could really talk to. I never made that connection. That’s on me. I could’ve made a connection with her, but I didn’t.

She’s gone now. She passed away eight days ago here in Porterville. Instead of celebrating her life we had to deal with the prospect of her being taken back to Mexico for burial. Why? She wanted to be near her family. All her children wanted her here. Yet that fear that has plagued her children continued to haunt them and they chose to listen to their father and take her to back to Mexico where she would be buried seven days later in a cemetery along the side of the road a few miles from our town. A cemetery that some of our family members will never see again.

Do I feel disdain for my own abuelo? Admittedly so. Why? For all the pain he made his family suffer through. Even after the death of his wife, their mother, my grandmother they still feared him. After her death he still managed to create more pain and sorrow for all. What might be the inevitable truth is that the one person that kept this family together is no longer with us. What prospects await us now?

Disculpen por lo mal escrito.