Ramón Sampedro’s father, when he learns of his son’s will to want to die with dignity, unleashes a terrifying phrase: “The only thing worse than a son dying on you is that he wants to die.” The devastating sentence comes from the script by Alejandro Amenabar in Mar Adentro, the real life of a Galician quadriplegic who, after ten years bedridden, asks for help to die.
The death of a child is an unbearable thought that will surely only get worse if it happens to you. On Saturday in La Contra de La Vanguardia, Víctor Amela interviewed a retired press photographer, Joan Guerrero, who spoke of the death of one of his sons, Ernesto, with a poetic and sad phrase: “I filled the oceans with tears.” Guerrero also recounted the death of his friend Antonio Montferré who made a pineapple in the FOC with Pasqual Maragall. Montferré died years ago from a run over and the photographer, as he found his photos, 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 her mother secretly cut them into small pieces and ate them. Joan Guerrero summed up: “It was a way to have her son 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 theirs should confess to her how much they love her… that what they think in life should not be verbalize after death and that it is not weak to express our feelings. The triumph should be counting the times we say we love or they say they love us.
Today, after La Contra on Saturday, I would also recommend to mothers and fathers that we enjoy our children, that we don’t leave it until tomorrow, that kisses never end and that the love we give our children should be eternal as if We were the first parents in the world. And, of course, wrong or right, we did everything with them in mind.
Knowing 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.”
