Everything that you desire

Alzheimer's was taking the best of her. She had already had two strokes and now her words were difficult to find in her brain, so she held to the ones that came to her like the only thing of value left and she put in them all her heart. Yes, everything she felt was in those 5 little words that she repeated to me with increased intensity every time she saw me: "todo lo tú quieras" (everything that you desire) and she repeated them until there was no more breath: “Jarita, qué la vida te de todo lo que tú quieras, todo lo que tú quieras, todo lo que tú quieras, todo lo que tú quieras” (Jarita, I hope life gives you everything that you desire, everything that you desire, everything that you desire.) I can’t ever hear or pronounce those words anymore and not be inundated by her memories and her love for me. A love that I fall short of comprehending. That love still holds me today when life hasn’t given me necessarily all that I’ve wanted.

As I exercise every morning nowadays in the middle of a very difficult transition in my life, I think of her words and her hopes for the life that I would live. What would she think if she knew my pain? I also think about her and the life she led: was it all she ever wanted? Or what she was pouring was the desire of what life wasn't for her. The truth, though, is that life does have a way of changing our plans and establishing new concepts. It is definitely giving me something that seems to be what the mind of life has thought for me: a completely different concept of the family I wanted, an incomparable desire for life and enjoyment, an intense way of loving, an insatiable learning drive, and an unparalleled background of knowlede.

A lot of the time I find myself struggling with those huge dreams that people had for me and for the dreams that I had for myself. It certainly wasn't this broken home, this withstanding of mistreatment, this lack of a job position where I can display everything I have to give, this unsolicited crumbling of my dreams, this consistent "bad luck." However, I still think about her words, and they give me hope. They are still there in a loop in time, repeated over and over again, like a beautiful pronouncement made by this person who embodies for me all the love in the world. They repeat themselves for me so that I never forget that, no matter, how strange my present is to my desires, there will forever be a love big enough to sustain me, that I'll never be alone and that even when people are not present, love never ceases to be nor to sustain me.

Amen.