May death find us on vacation

My grandmother, Hortensia, faded away, blurring even further the line between life and death. Since when was she no longer here? Has she truly come to an end? Her existence has been growing wider and wider, as if goodbye had diluted her in small doses, completely volatilized. I believe in her omnipresence and that of her walking stick, which always manages to catch us all. Finally, she has managed to live within us, the only place where we know we can still look for her, in all her versions, before she was a sketch of herself.

Within me, I find her preparing me a plate of soup, of which I will first drink the broth with a straw and then eat the pasta; stirring the logs in the fireplace, enchanted by the flames of the fire; or sunk in the garden up to her ankles, turning the earth, hoe in hand. Within my father, I know she is younger, walking down Jaume III, with her seven children on both hands, like two bunches of balloons; and also much older, gifting him one of her last moments of lucidity, also with her fingers intertwined.

I don't know how long this limbo lasts between when life is lost and when we are dead. At the funeral home, who are more expert in these matters, they must have calculated between three days and a week, which is how long the procedures after calling the insurance company last. This is what I think on car trips from my home to my father's and from my father's to the funeral home, during the five working days it seems a person needs to die completely, at least on the physical plane. Figuratively, I calculate that the deadlines are more lax and extend between a week and a whole lifetime.

“Yes, today the wake, tomorrow cremation, and Friday burial. How tedious these days are”: whether life seems short or long to us, at least we have this inconvenient week, which roots us in loss. Because even death, like a Christmas holiday, has to fit well into the calendar. Not even death is exempt from the tyranny of belonging, like an unannounced call, like a surprise visit. “This doesn't suit me at all right now”. We have ended up equating the importance of death with that of a work meeting or a trip. “How lucky it was now, that it coincided with you being here, and not in Barcelona, or on vacation,” I've found myself saying to myself, to a friend, seeking solace in the possibility of watching over our dead.

Procedures, errands, paperwork. The coldness of bureaucracy forces us to be emotionally available. Who would have told us. A long and tedious process that creates new routines only to never use them again. Schedules, people, and routes placed at times of the week that don't belong, where there's normally only room for work, school, gym, shopping, laundry. But not now. Life twists into unknown shapes, oppressing us against reality, so we have it right in front of us. We get used to it, we keep quiet. And all for what? Death is the most anti-capitalist thing that can happen to us. Everything we can do is unproductive, at first glance: a sunk cost investment. That's why it's also the thing that best calibrates our humanity, our decency.

In a final acrobatic display of opportunism, my grandmother managed to have the news of her death reach us between half an hour and an hour after the World Cup final ended, as a deference, as if that mattered a lot to all of us. It's curious when life has these things and reminds you that you're always a phone call away from turning back towards Son Espases. That we can leave very soon, but that dying is something else entirely.