I don't know how to write today like other times. I don't know how to organize memories or choose an anecdote from so many. Today I only know that my grandmother, our grandmother, is gone, and that the words fall apart in my hands, like dry leaves carried by the wind.
I can only try to explain to you, even if you have never met her, who she was in our world, what she still is. Not in the names or dates, but in the light he left on in us, in the way his absence still fills the house, like a perfume that does not resign itself to leaving.
My grandmother was in the summer. Not just any summer, but that eternal season in which the light fills everything, where even the dust seems to shine in the air. She was life at its warmest. It was the hidden pillar that supported the house, the family, the whole soul, without ever asking for an applause, without ever asking for anything. She only gave and delivered the best of herself.
She was behind everything we loved, like the water that supports a riverbed and yet remains invisible.
My grandmother created the place where we grew up: a house lit up by laughter, by cauldrons that never went out, by the music of dishes and glasses that seemed to converse with each other. We grew up so happy that sometimes I wonder if it wasn't an everyday miracle, a blessing poured out on us day after day.
In that home there was always room for whoever arrived. The cauldrons, filled with stews that perfumed the entire house, boiled in the kitchen as if waiting for someone else. And every morning, bags of freshly baked bread arrived, as if the baker knew that no one could stay there without his piece of joy. You could wake up any day and see forty people eating breakfast together, coffee with milk in their hands, butter sliding on warm bread, voices intertwining like threads from the same loom.
My grandmother never raised her voice. He didn't need to. He was respected with affection, with that serenity that only those who have understood the mystery of true goodness possess.
Three times life went through her like lightning. Three daughters were taken from him, and yet he did not bend. He remained standing, like a tree that has learned to dance with the storm. He taught us, not with words, but with his silent example, that the family was the ultimate refuge, that when everything hurt, one could always go home, sit on the terrace, look at each other and find comfort in a shared cafe.
Every Sunday, in the years when we studied abroad, he called us. First to me, then to Eric, then to James, as one who recites from memory the names of his promises. He was waiting for us with a simple pizza and two thousand pesetas in his hand, with a naughty smile: "Don't let your mother find out." And in that gesture there was all the tenderness in the world.
That's how it was with everyone. Each of his grandchildren, without exception, received something unique: a word, a hug, a shared silence. My grandmother Pepa had that rare gift of approaching each one as if she read their heart, of finding for each one a space of their own in her immense affection.
My grandmother never asked who you were, or who you loved, or where you came from. The door of his house was a sacred threshold where all roads were valid. He had inherited that gift from his grandmother Pepa, of whom he spoke with that soft nostalgia that settles in his eyes like a sunset.
Today, wherever she now lives, I imagine her meeting her mother Maye, with her lost daughters, with her grandmother Pepa. Today he returns to the main house, the one where pain no longer exists.
I could fill entire pages talking about her. I could spend my life naming all the good he sowed. But I don't want all of this to get caught up in words.
I want it to live in us. And now also in you.
I want every time someone walks through our door they find a hot plate, a clean bed, a real hug. I want us, every time life hits, to know how to sit on the terrace, as she taught us, and start over.
Because we come from a great woman.
And his love, his way of inhabiting the world, is now our true home.
And when the light fades and the coffee scents in the afternoon, we will know that we are still sitting on his terrace, under his same sky, Pepa's.
