Stories That Survive Us

My mother died last month. She was ninety-seven, so I can’t say it was a surprise. She dwindled away slowly after she broke her arm last year, preparing us for her departure in case her advanced age wasn’t enough. Of course, I knew she was close to leaving, especially the two months before her death when she was hospitalized with sepsis and pneumonia. In my mind, I understood that it was a matter of weeks if not days, but on a visceral level, her death shocked me.

There are moments in life that we expect to experience, among them marriage, the birth of a child, and a parent’s death. But, although they often occur after careful planning, we still face these events in a state of disbelief. For even the happy days of weddings and births come with a sense of loss. Loss of freedom. Loss of self. Our lives change in unimaginable ways. Everything from that day on will be “now,” and before that will be “then.” And, more importantly, the person who stands on this precipice of change will disappear, replaced by a stranger who navigates through the world with different eyes. I mourn my mother, yes, but I also mourn the person I was when I had a mother. I am no longer anyone’s daughter. The daughter died with her. Even though I’m in my sixties, I will always need my mother. She saw me for who I am now and also for who I’d been through every stage of my life. No one else will ever see me so clearly.

It's no coincidence that I choose to publish Yaminalina now, so soon after my mother’s death. I’ve been writing and rewriting, postponing this day out of fear of failure. Now I realize how limited my time is, and I have nothing to lose.

I don’t regret that my mother won’t see my published book. It wouldn’t have meant much to her. She was too practical to understand the dedication of so much effort on a project of this scope. Mami only studied up to sixth grade in Cuba, and she read little throughout her life, just the letters from Cuban relatives and the occasional bible verse. In the rural town where she grew up, attending secondary school meant walking across the sugar cane fields to the next larger town, and the risk of defilement along the way was too great a price for a level of education that even most males of her generation lacked. For a woman, virtue meant everything, a diploma, almost nothing.

My mother may not have been literate in the written word, but she loved to tell stories more than anyone I know. She grew up in the Cuban countryside, and she moved to the town of Alacranes as a young woman. There, most of the two thousand or so inhabitants were related to her by either blood or marriage. She could recount every one of their stories, interwoven with hers. A part of her always stayed in Cuba when she flew across the sea, and as she moved closer to death, memories of her youth were the only ones that remained.

My mother’s stories were colorful, inspirational, tragic, timeless, and magical, comparable to anything written by Gabriel García Márquez or Isabel Allende. So, I would say that my mother was literate in the sense of an oral historian. In ancient societies, she would have been revered for her precise memory and skills in oral narration. It was she who inspired me to write, this woman with a sixth grade education who could weave a story like the best of them.

As I prepare to publish my second novel (I’m holding tightly to the first until it’s ready.), I wonder if anyone will want to read it. The world is changing so quickly. Technology is syphoning our attention, our memory, our human connections—all integral to the ancient art of storytelling. My mother’s stories were conceived in a place and time when people sat and talked and listened and looked at each other for hours. Homes had no TVs and no phones. A few privileged families had cars and radios, but these they used sparingly. Everything moved slowly. People had time to observe their surroundings and appreciate the passage of time.

 My mother is gone, but I don’t want her stories to die with her. That is why I must make this leap of faith. Faith that our civilization can survive the next era of AI, when books will be written by the click of a finger. Faith that stories are the basis of humanity, written into our DNA, and thus cannot be appropriated by something not human that neither fears nor mourns death (for doesn’t fear of death drive all our artistic endeavors?). And faith that this generation can pause and read for long, sustained sittings and not just scroll an iPhone for evocative images and fleeting thoughts. I don’t want to see my mother’s legacy die. I owe it to her and to that child in me, the little girl she would put to sleep with her harrowing tales of the epic lives of the Alacranians.