Ramón Sampedro’s father, when he learns of his son’s desire to die with dignity, utters a terrifying phrase: “The only thing worse than having a child die is that he wants to die.” The devastating sentence comes from Alejandro Amenabar’s script in Mar Adentro, the real life of a Galician quadriplegic who, after ten years in bed, asks to be helped to die.
The death of a child is an unbearable thought that is sure to only get worse if it happens to you. Saturday in La Contra de La Vanguardia, Víctor Amela interviewed a press photographer, already retired, Joan Guerrero who spoke of the death of one of his sons, Ernesto, with a poetic and sad sentence: “I filled the seas of tears”. Guerrero also explained the death of his friend Antonio Montferré who played pineapple at the FOC with Pasqual Maragall. Montferré died years ago after being hit and the photographer, as he was finding photos of him, sent them to the family. Until one day Montferré’s sister asked Joan Guerrero to stop doing it because the photographs disappeared from the drawer where they were kept. They discovered that the mother, secretly, chopped them into small pieces and ate them. Joan Guerrero sums it up: “It was a way of having her child inside”.
Three weeks ago, two days after my mother’s death, I forced myself to say on the radio that those who can still enjoy her, tell her how much they love her… that whatever they think of life do not verbalize it after death and that it is not weak to express our feelings. The triumph should be counting the times we say we love or that they say they love us.
Today, after La Contra on Saturday, I would also recommend to most mothers and fathers that we enjoy our children, that we don’t leave it for tomorrow, that kisses should never end and that love that we give to our creatures is eternal as if we were the first parents in the world. And of course, right or wrong, we did everything with them in mind.
I all know painfully that, as Serrat sang: “Nothing and no one can prevent them from suffering, that the hands of the clock move forward, that they decide for themselves, that they make mistakes, that they grow up and that one day they say goodbye to us.”
