Abuela Elena Goes Home
The leaving of someone who gave you something important is different from other leavings. It feels complete even while it hurts.
Elena || Goodbye || Love || Gratitude
Abuela Elena went back to Oaxaca in the first week of May. She had been with us for three and a half months — long enough to have reshaped the household in the particular way that certain presences reshaped things, not by changing the furniture but by changing the quality of the air. The house would be different after she left. Not worse, not better — different, the way all spaces were different after a significant person had passed through them and left some of themselves in the corners. She packed with the same thoroughness she’d arrived with, repacking the spices and the books and the rosary and the tin box — which she left on the dresser for exactly the length of time it took for me to notice and say: “You’re not taking the box?” “You keep it,” she said. “It’s yours now.” I looked at the tin box with the letters and the photograph and the dried flowers and forty-seven years of a love kept careful and given at exactly the right moment to exactly the right person. “Abuela,” I said. “Keep it,” she said. “And when you are old, and someone young in your life is carrying a river, you can give it to them.” I held the tin box and thought about the chain of it — the specific way that things given at exactly the right time could travel forward, could do their work across generations, could be the thing that made the difference for someone who needed the proof that it was possible. I put the box on my desk, beside the face-up photograph of me and Jamie at the regional qualifier.
Dad drove her to the airport on a Tuesday morning. I went with them. We stood at the departure level with her suitcases checked and the goodbye happening in the specific way that goodbyes with grandmothers happened — not dramatic, not drawn out, but complete. She held my face in her hands again, the same gesture as the day she arrived, and looked at me with the seeing eyes. What she saw was different from what she’d seen in October. I could tell by the expression — satisfied, not in the sense of task completed but in the sense of something hoped for having arrived. “Alejandro,” she said. “You looked like someone carrying a river when I got here.” “I know,” I said. “You look like someone who has learned to swim,” she said. I laughed, which was not the response I had expected to have, but it was the right one. She pulled me close. She said into my ear, in Spanish: I am very proud of you. She would be proud of you too. She meant Catalina. I thought about Catalina laughing in a black and white photograph, and Abuela Elena’s forty-seven years of thinking about a choice, and the tin box that was now on my desk, and the love that had traveled from a market in Oaxaca in 1973 to a kitchen in Portland in 2024, across all that time and distance, and had done exactly what love was supposed to do when it was given freely to the right person at the right time: it had made something possible that would not have been possible without it. She got on her plane. Dad and I stood in the airport for a moment after she’d gone through security. He put his arm around my shoulders. “Okay?” he said. “Yes,” I said. “She’s good,” he said. “She seems — lighter than when I last saw her.” “Yes,” I said. “I think she gave something away that she’d been carrying for a long time.” Dad nodded, in the way he nodded when he understood something he couldn’t quite put into words. We drove home. The tin box was on my desk. The photograph of me and Jamie was face-up. May in Portland was doing its tentative best. Everything was different from September. Everything was exactly right.