Unpredictable Life

Life takes unexpected turns. Planning is good...but I know we have to be ready for those tight curves, unexpected storms, and potholes (more like sinkholes) on our path. This last Thanksgiving night we lost a dear member of our family, my aunt, my mother’s sister.

This is painful in a way hard to describe. She was my first best friend. The first person I told everything to. Our friendship was strongest when I was about 4 years old but I know how much she loved me and she knows I loved and trusted her. She was always there with the right advice, the right opinion, and ready to listen to me. She always said I was a storyteller and artist. She used to record my voice as I made up crazy stories about our family and she sat through the ridiculous plays and monologues I would create for her and my mom. She taught me how to garden and I still remember collecting my first harvest of gandules (pigeon peas) and habicuelas colorás (red kidney beans).

It was a humid and sunny day in our backyard in Lajas, Puerto Rico the day we decided to sow the seeds. I used to live in Lajas for a while before moving to San Germán. In my childhood memory it was a huge backyard with a pomegranate tree, a tamarind tree, and other magical tropical fruit trees for which I don’t know their translation like jobos and corazón. We went out to the middle of the backyard and selected a small section of dirt. We took out all the weeds and she said, “it will take a while, but we will have gandules and habichuelas. We just have to be patient and wait. But you can’t forget to water them, because if you don’t water them they will die.” I remember watering them a few times, but I can’t recall if I did water them consistently – geez, it was a long time ago. I doubt that my mother took care of watering the plants… I truly think I did water them daily because I would not have wanted to let my dear tití down by not having any gandules or habichuelas when the harvest time would come. As a kid I didn’t like eating any of those legumes, but I loved getting the seeds out of their pods.

Funny thing is that the true lesson behind creating this garden was not something I learned immediately. Not something I realized consciously until today. To take appropriate care of plants we need to water them appropriately. Some plants need daily watering, others like succulents barely need water. It is the same with the people in our lives. We either decide to take care of our relationship by watering it accordingly with love or we just let the relationship either die or wane.

I can’t say that my relationship with my aunt was ever as strong as it was in my childhood. I left Puerto Rico 13 years ago. My aunt spent part of my adolescence in the U.S. and when I moved to the U.S. she spent most of her time between Ponce and Utuado. We probably saw each other once or a few times a year. We rarely spoke on the phone because for a while she did not have a cell phone. Whenever I actually saw her, I remember most of our conversations were about her health complaints. She was going through a lot of pain and she spent a lot of her time alone by herself. Not a lot of people were watering their relationship with her. What we didn’t realize was that she had cancer. A cancer that had spread all throughout her body, it started on her breast and eventually made it to her liver and even her ankle. On November 10th the doctor gave her 3 weeks. She lasted 17 days.

I remember when I got the news earlier in November. I thought she would make it until whenever I finished all my responsibilities in Los Angeles. I thought I could go home sometime mid-December and then carry on with my plan to travel some place fun and exciting. I was in denial about her disease. I was hoping my family’s life and destiny would accommodate to my plans. But that was not the case. That is rarely the case. Yes, we can plan for everything that we want out of life, but sometimes there are blows that make rethink our plans. This blow was one of them.

With this I’ve realized I need to spend more time in the present watering the relationships of those I love the most. I just hate that for me to consciously appreciate the lesson I learned as a four year old it had to hurt. Can we as humans learn without pain? Can we ever be ready for the crazy turns?

#unpredictable #life #unpredictability #dealingwithloss #dealingwithdeath #lifelessons