Speaking of Anita

Anita Lombana has been dominating my thoughts lately. As I write this, her birthday is coming up - it will be the first one since she died (would have been her 97th birthday). The day after that  it will be two months since she passed away. 

At no time did I ever anticipate (correctly anyway) what the separation would feel like. Today I'm a little focused on what it sounds like. Something is definitely missing.

I spoke Spanish to my mother in law, daily - especially near the end of her life. It became the best way to communicate  with her through the mental decline that accompanied her experience of dementia and later, Alzheimer's. 

Speaking Spanish with her let me listen to her stories, some of which I've recorded, but have yet to play back since her death. Others I've "recorded" here. Our shared Saturday outings, the moments that were difficult, and the ones that were sweet. It is how you got to know her as I did. 

Why then, does it surprise me that I feel such loss at having someone to speak to in Spanish? 

It's a connection on a different level. It's communication in a different language, not the one that I grew up with. I don't know if she felt happy about being able to communicate with me in English. 

Now that I've lost that connection, I must acknowledge how special that was to me. I don't have that connection with anybody else in my family. I don't speak Spanish to my husband or to my daughter or bonus daughter and son. No one else in my immediate or extended family speaks Spanish to me. 

We can, but we would have to be in conversation with a fully native speaker for the bilingual Spanish speakers to speak Spanish to me. The default is to English when I'm around. That makes sense. I'm hardly fluent. I always say, I know enough to get into and out of trouble. Full of those "gringa" mistakes, but effective enough.

Given that I learned Spanish in high school, it took practicing every chance I got throughout college to be able to still carry on or understand a conversation in Spanish. I loved the challenge of learning new phrases or picking up on nuances of another language. I miss how we spoke Spanish to each other, even though it was a challenge for me to communicate with her in any language sometimes. I think you know what I mean.

Still, the language offered a connection to her. On my daily gratitude practice list there is an item that says, I'm grateful for what I learned from being a caregiver. I don't think I've been open about it, even to Huz, but I have tried to first of all figure out what that means. Caregiving. 

Caregiving takes on so many forms, so to stick to the thing I'm most grateful to have learned is this. It's scary not to know how to express yourself. To struggle for the words. Scary too, and definitely harder to move through life when you're misunderstood. So, knowing how to speak and be understood in more than one language is a superpower. Definitely it's a superpower. Granted, mine is a low-grade level superpower compared to Anita's.  

I miss having the natural inclination to speak Spanish to someone in the way I did with Anita. As things got harder in terms of her care, I did understand that she was not to blame. Nothing she said or did could be her fault because Alzheimer's is abject cruelty. 

She became child-like and dependent - so it made sense that the language of her childhood could break through. It really wasn't worth it to even try to speak English to her. 

I am grateful for being Anita's caregiver - because I learned that even though sometimes it seems like you need superpowers to communicate with someone - we all have the ability to listen and learn. We can combine our superpowers. Caregiving in this way helps us be our best selves to one another.