In this absenceAnna Baeza

to my mother, who always believed in me.

At that time I was too young to really understand her as a per-son, as someone with emotions, ideas and thoughts. Someone with a life. A life I took for granted. Now, I know she took all of that with her. She went away with her secrets.

All that is left is a small collection of memories, some of which are poisoned by her absence and a sort of guilt feeling I have never been able to shake off me. I regret every single minute I was doing something else while she was agonizing in that basement. Not being strong enough to break all that sadness and go beyond it, to simply hold her hand on the last days.

I remember it was very hot. People were dying all over Europe because of the heat. It was the summer of 2003. I remember going to an empty apartment on an elevator that would never bring her back to me, like every other night of my childhood. I remember oppressive hospital rooms, dark and moist with the scent of death. I remember my family speaking in whis-pers.

I remember thinking nothing would ever be the same.

when we were kids

22:45I thought you would never come home

I hear the doors opening and closing again and then the sound of the keys and then her steps along the corridor.She is home. I can sleep now.

we travel all the time

morphine

The scars of my brain are opening, cracking, pouring old memories into recent ones. I see my mother under morphine, and the mother of my mother,and the daughter of her daughterit is the same compulsive, busy hands: scratching, shaking, cleaning imaginary stainscrazy, clumsy fingersI should not forget I am writing (…)Yet each time I pass by a TV, I see people swimming in Greece.One feels the world is sinking.

August 10th, 2004.

(...) current myths about cancer suggest everyone is responsi-ble for their disease.

Susan Sontag Illness as a metaphor.

I need to know what is in this absence

terminal oncology pavilion, 9 years later

the woman in me

everything starts and ends in your mother