She had three daughters, two lungs eaten away by cancer, the morphine padlock, her days numbered and no fear of collapsing. Today, September 23, exactly two years ago he died, too young. That’s why this article, which is not a tear, but a memory. Don’t look for tears in these lines because she didn’t have any, not even when the disease turned her, first, into the woman she wasn’t, and then into one who no longer recognized herself.
I start the script of a song by Melendi: “Y sabes muy bien que no es triste / Por mucho que sea despedida / La cure solo existe / Si antes hubo herida”.
It’s bad to talk about death. Too complex to be dispatched in 2,500 characters, or 6,000. Or in a million. It is a very personal experience in everyone’s biography and, at the same time, what a paradox, the most general and common one there is. It is not a macabre deal of cards that an unlucky player has to lament, but the rules of the game that apply to all players without distinction.
You don’t even remotely suspect everything that goes wrong until someone you adore is gone. In any case, sadness and anger make a whole new emotional continent explode in you, as surprising as it would be to find two unfamiliar rooms in the flat where you live. Grief opens an unfathomable abyss underfoot. You suffer from an absence that you expected, but for which you did not prepare. The wound, sings Melendi.
A certain strangeness at the death of a loved one is inherent in the business of life. I borrow this last sentence from the philosopher Javier Gomá. A bad day, like September 23, opens a kind of orphanage of affections and experiences that will never be repeated. Good thing they stay there, deep inside. To those who survive us, continues Gomá, we give them the non-forgetfulness, that is, the memory.
In life you have to throw yourself into it without prejudice. It’s not a problem or a riddle. Neither happiness nor misfortune. It is a fantastic possibility, and fulfilling it, the responsibility of each one. Fools don’t know what to do with their gift and ask for an instruction book. I read this in Gala. It is advisable to allow yourself everything, because life is a permit. You have to exercise it passionately and intensely and accept that everything lasts as long as it lasts. The most fucked up thing is to be alive and spend your days as a dead person only to look back at the end and beg for an extension.
This is the life explained by Olga, but without Olga. And that’s how we try to live it, those of us who have stayed here and missed it since September 23rd.
