<![CDATA[Ara Balears in English - godmother]]> 10 <![CDATA[Vertical]]> They won't even ask for whom the bells toll, because they haven't tolled for the dead in this town for a long time. The heat clings to us under our black clothes. The sun rises indifferent. My glasses fog up with sweat and tears. I don't know how to say goodbye to her this morning. There are people who do not only die once. My father has his face covered in a harsh sorrow, which does not spill from his eyes. I don't want to enter the room with the coffin. I don't know how to look at death from so close. My aunt cries for all these heavy years, she cries for her childhood, she cries, she cries, the deep cry that says goodbye to a mother.

]]> <![CDATA[May death find us on vacation]]>

My grandmother passed away suddenly. She started to break down without warning, in fact. But dying did not take so long. How much time do we need to die? At what point can we say that we are already dead? She was diagnosed with a type of dementia that in a few months reduced her to a thousandth of what she had been. Or so we would say from the outside, those of us who did not witness her evaporation on the front lines. My cousin Cristina, on the other hand, knew how to find her in the most unexpected corners of her personality – in a wink, for example – cornered by the minimal capacity for expression that was still available to her.

]]> <![CDATA[We are no longer the granddaughter you loved, nor you the grandmother I loved]]>

There was a time when I loved my grandmother very much. And then, a time when I didn't, when I felt I had stopped loving her.

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