The weather is amazing, but I’m quite sad and I bet it’s because of the movie I watched yesterday. It was the amazing story of three women from different generations: a grandmother, a mother, and a daughter. It made me think a lot about my fabulous grandmother, and one of the most wonderful movies I’ve seen in my life “Antonia’s Line.”
I love my grandmother with all my life. She has been one of the most important and influential figures while I was growing up, and I hate to see what had happened to her. It terrifies me.
My grandmother was one of the first women to become a doctor in Argentina. For instance, by the time she was in college there were so few female students that there were no bathrooms for them. The only three women in her cohort were allowed to share the bathroom with the professors.
She was tough, very tough, there was no way that someone weak would have been able to become a doctor when all that was expected from her was to be a good housewife. (And, she studied while having three young children, one of them my mother.)
I have no doubt that her children suffer a lot for having “that” kind of mother. She wasn’t easy. I can tell this for the very, but very little things my mom had shared with me over the years. But, I don’t want to talk about it right now. Today, it’s all about my bobe Eva.
I miss her not because she’s dead, or because she’s in Argentina, but because she’s not who she used to be anymore. My grandmother has Alzheimer, and I can’t explain how hard it is. There are no words to explain how painful and heartbreaking is seeing the person you love not recognizing you, or not remembering anything about their lives, or even your life together.
When I was in Buenos Aires in December, I asked her about María, and she told me as I was holding her hand that she didn’t know anything about me. “Since she left, I haven’t heard anything about her, I missed her.” I burst into tears. It was one of the most painful moments of my life.
I really don’t know how my mother can put up with it. I deeply admire her strength. Only my mother, or maybe any mother, can survive losing a sibling, a father, and pretty much a mother in less than a year. I wish I could be as strong as my mother.
It’s all about my mother, any mother, always.
