She’s in Everything

It’s been five months since my mom died, and a few days more.

I am writing a book about her death called Two Months to Live. I wrote the first part as things were happening while she was sick in Colombia. It was a way to keep myself grounded and to release my feelings after spending all day holding it together in front of her.

In the days immediately before her death, and the days after, I was too busy to write. Back in Miami, it took me a long time to gather the courage to open the file again and continue writing about those days—when she died, and the hours that followed.

I finally did it this week.

I had to write the day she died from memory—the minutes and hours after. I made it as far as the funerary service and stopped there. I cried the entire time. I told myself I would do it once a week, and that was enough for this week.

At the same time, I am rewriting in digital format everything I wrote as a child. I found all of it while emptying her closet. There were notebooks, loose papers, full stories, half-finished stories, essays.

I am amazed by how much of her is in my writing. How clearly I can hear her voice when I read what I wrote as a child. She’s so alive, even though I can’t call her.

She lives in every thought, every word, every drawing, every movement of my hand, every laugh.

She is so alive in all my writing that it has become the strongest fire motivating me to put it out there—to make space for all of this, to take it seriously, and to show it without fear.

To trust myself as much as she did.