Todas las flores de abril

When my dad was a child he had the habit of burying small animals he found dead around his house so he could dig up the skeletons for his collection. My mother has always claimed to feel presences and even to have heard the dead talking near her. At home there has always been this strange relationship with death and a mestizo spirituality that pretended to be catholic but was full of other rituals and traditions.

The night my sister died, in her hospital room were my father, mother and me. We watched as they tried unsuccessfully to resuscitate her, while my father (who is a doctor) counted compressions and looked at his watch, his face sinking lower and lower as the seconds ticked by. Then I had to go out and get my brother and tell him the news. It was a week before her birthday, she was about to turn 21. All the flowers in our garden withered after we lost her.

My sister's death was as if the sun had disappeared, leaving us without the gravitational field around which our lives had orbited since I was a four-year-old kid. This work explores the ramifications that this event had on our family and the effects that the long process of accompanying and caring for a person with serious health issues for almost two decades can have. It is a journey of living through grief and understanding it, reconnecting with the dead: my grandmothers, my uncles, the friends lost along the way. A journey to find a spirituality that honnors that of my ancestors, but also makes sense for my present at the intersection of all the realities and identities that exist within me. Only in this way can the flowers in our garden grow again.