Before getting out in front of her house, she said something that filled me with dread:
“Diego… when I die, don’t let them throw away my things without checking the wardrobe.”
I felt a blow in my chest—the kind of physical reaction that comes when someone you care about speaks about their own death as an inevitability rather than a possibility.
“Don’t say that,” I said.
“Promise me,” she replied.
That word again. The word that had started everything.
And again, I nodded, making a promise I didn’t fully understand but understood well enough.
The Final Days
The last two weeks were very hard in ways I hadn’t anticipated.
She could hardly eat anything. I would prepare nutritious meals—soups, soft foods, things that wouldn’t require much chewing—and she would manage a few spoonfuls before pushing the plate away. I moistened her lips with water when her mouth became dry. I tucked in her blankets at night and adjusted them again in the morning when they had become tangled. I read newspaper headlines out loud to her so she could feel that the world was still entering through her door, that life was still happening somewhere beyond her bedroom.
