Music to My Years by Cristela Alonzo

Author:Cristela Alonzo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2019-10-07T16:00:00+00:00

Courtesy of Natalia Alonzo

I made my mom take these pictures with me at a Kmart photo booth in McAllen, Texas. She never liked taking pictures, but I always wanted to take pictures with her.

Then the moment came. I tried to walk into the room and be as close to her as I could. I made it as far as the door. Every ounce of strength I thought I had disappeared. Every step I tried to take into that room made me feel a pain that I had never felt before. I can tell you that even now, fifteen years after she passed, I have never felt pain like the kind I did in that moment. I kept thinking, What if my mother is a miracle? What if she is one of those rare cases when they turn off the machines and she doesn’t die? My mother had established herself as someone that could make the impossible happen time and again. What if this was on par with everything else in her life? I knew that moment was going to hurt. I didn’t know the exact amount of pain … but I stayed with her. I thought I had to be there with her. She had been there when I took my first breath; it was only right that I would be there when she took her last.

They turned off the machines. The beeping started slowing down. Beep, beep, beep … then a minute later … beep … beep … beep … then another minute later … beep ……… beep …

Then nothing.

I fell to the ground and remember nothing after that. I was later told that I had been admitted into the emergency room, where they ran tests and diagnosed me with a severe case of shock. I lost my hearing and sight in that moment. People were asking me questions but I couldn’t move or speak. Once I started coming back to my senses and realized what had just happened, I wailed.

In all honesty, there are a lot of times when I feel like I failed my mother. This woman managed to somehow raise four children on her own. She took care of me, but I couldn’t take care of her. Yes, I know it’s impractical to think like this, and I imagine that maybe my brain knows better. I just wish my heart could catch up to my brain. The thing I think about the most in regard to my mother is that she made me feel like I let her down. I never got to buy her that brown dream house she wanted before she died. I made a promise to myself that I wasn’t able to keep and it is something that haunts me to this day.

My family started making funeral plans. We decided to bury our mother in our hometown of San Juan. We had to make the drive down to the Rio Grande Valley for the service and the funeral. When we had to pick

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