My Mother, and More on Life and Death

(Sorry, this is a few weeks old. I have trouble keeping up with my own writing, editing in time...)

Yesterday morning, Sunday, like every Sunday, my mother called me. I talked to her for a few minutes, giving her updates on my health and the things I am doing, or the ones I can tell her about. And, after giving me the updates from her side, she told me that my grandmother, Nona, the Italian one, went on Saturday to my cousin’s place and they show her pictures of me on Facebook, and there were some pictures there from a bbq I went on the 4th of July which she didn’t approve of. The pictures in question were taken when I was enjoying Stefan’s jacuzzi with Bernard, Elif, her kid and another kid. I was wearing a blue bikini.

-    La Nona says that you were in a small pool, like a bathtub?
-    No ma, it is a Jacuzzi.
-    Well, but she said that she couldn’t see what you were wearing…
-    A bikini, bigger than any of the tiny ones they wear in Argentina (the bikinis there cover the minimum indispensable of the rear parts, of all parts for that matter. The style is called cola-less…)
-    And she says he looks so much younger than you…
-    He is three years younger than me, yes. Rob was 6 years younger than me…
-    But you should be careful what you put on the Internet.
-    I didn’t put the pictures up. Somebody else tagged me.
-    That’s even worse! People talk…
-   
People talk yes, they talk all the time, too much and about things they have no business of talking, and if they do, why should we care! We have such different lives, my mother and I, that sometimes I think she cannot even imagine.  Ever since I left, when I was 24, now it’s been 15 years since then, I had the freedom of telling them only what I wanted them to know. You, Americans, think that’s normal. You are used to leave home at 18 when you go to college, and live in separate cities all your life since then. In Argentina families are much more close knit. I didn’t leave my parents house until I left the country. I tried to when I was 19, but my father didn’t wanted me to so he build me a room in what it used to be the garage so I could have privacy, but specially, so I could bring the piano there so I will stop waking them up at 8am when I started practicing. People there are used to know everything about everyone, and my mother is always worried about what others will say or think about what we do, specially, what my cousins and aunt will say and think of us. And that worry limited her all her life, afraid of doing things because, what will people say.

But I have to say, my mother went a long way. Her mother, la Nona, didn’t know from where the baby was going to come out when she was in labor. Nobody had told her. Even she said to me once: we lived in the middle ages then, the dark ages. We didn’t’ know anything about sex, nobody talked about it. My mother had to finish elementary school as a homeschooler, because Nona took her out of school when she had her first period. Señoritas are not allowed in school according to my Nona. It is dangerous with all those men around. They wanted to find her a husband when she was 17. So, I understand that my mother did already a lot to free herself from those restrictions and limitations they pilled upon her. Her parents didn’t want her to go to high school, she had to learn to sew and cook instead, but they finally gave up when she was 17, so she started school when everybody was finishing.

So this life of mine here, it is a mystery to her, she cannot even start to imagine it. She will not imagine that, after she called me on that Sunday morning, we made love, I got up, smoked some before drinking mate made on the electric coffee machine while listening to Led Zeppelin… The small everyday things are different. Here I don’t have to walk the few blocks to the bus stop, or walk to the bakery in the corner to buy facturas, or do the line for two hours at the bank to cash my check. I can’t drink mate talking to her and Nona in the afternoon, or she cannot see when I practice piano, when I write, who I am with. Here I go out with the car, go swimming, when I need to buy food I go to the grocery store, or anything else go to Target… I cannot tell her about all the little things, my fights with my cat that walks all over the counters, that gets me up at 5am, my war with the clandestine mechanic of the block that steals all the parking spaces, my last adventure trying to find a maria dispensary open…

But Adrián, the friend that recently passed away, reminds me that life is here to be lived. We came here with a mission: live life. This, who we are, this combination of atoms, will live life the way that only this particular combination that makes me can live it. And no matter how others try to tell me what to do, there is always going to be something that this person, me, does differently than any other person. 

Yes, I am talking about death lately, with Kim my room mate’s girlfriend, and her theory of the meat robots, and it came to me the realization that yes, maybe there is an afterlife but it is not this identity the one that lives on. This identity dies with this body. We all go to join the big sea of souls, the source, and this identity, this cuca, disappears. But it is bliss to join the whole, it is bliss to disappear, it is a different life. We oscillate between life and death, between individuality and totality, yin and yang, and I thought, life is this, this identity, and I should try to make the most of it, the most of this identity, before it disappears again in the whole. A drop of water joining the sea. And this particular drop of the sea took on this identity with its quirks and problems and psychology, and it is what it is: Me. Me is this, and this can go places, be happy, be sad… be alive on this earth. It might come back again, as the Hindus believe, reincarnation, but it would not be me, it would not be cuca the one that comes back. It will be a piece of the whole, a drop of the sea, but how much of cuca will have? I don’t know, maybe nothing.

So today I was seeing everybody as a brother, because, after all, we are all part of the same, we are all from the same source, but as we come here, we take in a personality, a certain combination of atoms and energy, and we take on this individuality that separates us from the whole and that allows us to experience life in this earth, which otherwise, we couldn’t, not in this way, with the senses. It is a treat.

What little story I have just invented. Pretty little story. Well, I guess it helps me go to sleep at night, makes me feel at peace somehow, as if being part of something bigger than myself made me feel, “important?” Is that the word? I don’t know. Makes me feel that I want to do the best I can of this particular combination of atoms, this energy that is me, I want to make it fulfill its potential, all the promises, its dreams. I’d like to make it fly.

Maybe that’s why we are so scared of death. Because once we are dead we can see how stupid we’ve been, how we missed the point, how we didn’t understand its meaning.  And how afraid we were.