In the course of five days, I would receive texts to let me know that two Aunts had died.
These are the moments when the ~35 degrees of latitude on each side of the equator distancing myself from my family feels like the roughly 6,000 miles it is.
These are also the occasions when language falters.
I could purchase lettuce but the first time I was asked "Which type?", I stumbled, not knowing if I wanted romana, francesa, or hola de roble. Learning a lot of words broadly was the easy part. It is the depth of a topic that is my "tell" in Spanish.
And so it was with death.
It would be the first time that I would need to share this type of news and answer questions: Was it sudden? Was she sick? Was she the oldest? The sister of your mother or father? How do you feel?
Some questions I was better equipped to answer than others, but "how are you feeling" was one that I could not quite escape. My vocabulary limited me to the basics and so there was no flowery descriptions or vagueness that I could use to skirt the issue, forcing me to say the obvious: I feel sad.
And there was no Spanish lesson that prepared me to receive condolences.
I had a friend on the Camino who liked speaking in English because it gave her more freedom to say things that she could not say in her native Japanese due to norms in culture. I think about that sometimes as the tears leak from using another language to express the feelings of the heart in a very base way.
I am also grateful for laughter through tears moments when I try to answer these questions, invariably using at least one wrong word causing the questioner to both want to give condolences and a Spanish lesson. I think both Aunts would have gotten a kick out of that.
Remembering Aunt C here.
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