By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo

 

 “I love you!” is too loosely said these days. Some say it and mean it. Others say it without thinking. It is sometimes shortened to “Lab u!”, when one is rushing, quickly ending a conversation. “I love you!” used to be sacred, intimate, shared on a hallowed space.

And so, I listened. He was there, he said, on her last moments. He had an animated conversation with her hours before. “There was no indication she was going”, he added. He went outside the room at six o’clock, to take a breath. At eight o’clock, the caregiver said to him, she was gone. So, he quickly got inside, held her hand. According to him, he said “I love you!”, and she was able to mutter, “I love you!” demonstrating how she said it, gesturing with his mouth. I wonder how she could have said it, when she has already left. But maybe, he was clairvoyant and heard her in his mind.

There was no doubt in my mind that she meant what she said. She loved him. I knew this for a fact, like her sisters and her niece who tried so hard to fulfill her wish to see him, saying his name at regular intervals and finally deciding to go, without him. But he came, three hours after being informed of her last breath, from a city just thirty minutes away. That is the story I was told by those who were physically present to honor her passing.

Love has no conditions. We love for no reason. And she did love him. She loved him with a devotion I can bear witness, having visited her regularly with some friends during the last years of her life. She loved him with his omissions, and his distance, which she tried so hard to understand. After all, he said “I love you!” at the end of every conversation, on rare occasions that he calls. It is enough, she said, even without the visits.

She was lonely without him. I could feel her pain, her longing. I remember verses in a poem by a friend Luz María López: “He threatened a vacuum, a kind of vacuum that takes everything, sounds, letters, even the bedroom window….”

”There is no indication that she was going.” That was what he said. But in April, it was clear to me, what was left unsaid, but expressed clearly in the next verse of the same poem:

And i want, i want to leave.

To a place of few words, of some transcendent emotion.

Remote.

A sea in between.

Where you breathe without rushing, walk without rushing, look without rushing, until you realize what circulates with your shadow.

She is gone now. I did not have the chance to say, I love you. I did not say I love you when I had the chance. But she knows.

With her death, we bury some truths.

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