viajera

It's difficult to remember when exactly my sparkly green aventurine crystal ball became La Viajera to me. But I remember when my mother became La Viajera. Now they are linked in my mind. This makes no sense to you, of course. But in my mind I hear the Luis Alcaraz song that goes Viajera que vas por cielo y por mar... and there she is--my mother--traveling in the sky and on the sea.

She wanted to go to Fiji and she wanted to write a book but did neither. Those were her two regrets in life, she told me. Yet she did travel: China, Singapore, Chile, Argentina, Italy, France, England, Switzerland, Mexico, the Caribbean, all across the United States of America, but never back home to Honduras. She never wanted to go back. I think maybe she thought going back there would be disappointing because nothing would be like it was when she was a child. She had her memories and spent a lot of time with them, relating them to us whenever she found an opportunity. They were golden memories. She didn't want to tarnish them. That's what I think. It's hard to know because she never said it plainly.

She also wrote poems. I imagine her gazing down at her journal as she wrote them. My mother's eyes were brown, not green like aventurine. Brown like coffee with a little bit of milk in them. She took her coffee with lots of milk, preferably evaporated milk for some reason. She never used cream. I don't know why. She had some little eccentricities like this. In the house I found items in places that made no sense at all. There were unopened boxes of food that had expired years ago. Did she simply forget, or did she keep them just in case? There were five open tubs of Land O'Lakes brand whipped butter, none of them near empty. There was a drawer filled with all kinds of makeup--lipsticks that had been used perhaps only once, eyeshadows, blushes, eyeliners, lipliners, mascaras. The makeup she used was right in front of the little mirror. The rest was tossed into the drawer with little hope of being remembered. She hoarded things that way, yet her home was tidy. Never "a mess" anywhere (unless you opened the wrong drawer or cupboard--how many soup ladles can fit in one drawer?!).

In her phone were very few photos, but photos of every bouquet of flowers I brought her were in there. I knew she loved flowers, but it struck me to see that she photographed them all and kept them the same way she kept so many things. She held on to things like she held on to life for 91 years. And then she let it all go.

Why did I sing that song to her? Viajera que vas por cielo y por mar.... Because she was on her way. She said, "This train is leaving, and I'm in it." She was ready to travel.

In truth none of us knows whether there is an afterlife of which we will be conscious after our bodies stop. I've read about thukdam, but it doesn't make me certain of anything that occurs after clinical death. All I know is what she said, some of which made less sense as she neared the end. There was a look in her eyes, seeing something I could not see, as she spoke to others who were somewhere I could not see. She traveled at least some distance and maybe far beyond what I could imagine. It's comforting to think that she is somewhere even though I'm not sure I believe.

I'm trying not to think about it too much. But when I look up on the mantle at my green aventurine crystal ball the song plays in my head, and I see her smiling. That's good.