Remembering my maternal grandparents

January 15, 2023

Day 15

Oh, Sunday but I'm actually feeling very happy about it mainly because tomorrow is a holiday for me, the second one of the year (if we count new year's day) but the last one until May 29th, 2023, for Memorial Day, so a few months of pure work ahead. That said, so far, the weekend has been amazing and chill and the temperature in Miami is quite cool, and it will definitely get better considering that The Last of Us on HBO is coming out in less than two hours.

Also today is my dear Tia Yeya birthday, she is turning 82 and is my dad's oldest sister, a woman full of life and with an amazing heart. She has been living in NYC for the past 30 years or so and it is someone who I visit mostly every time I'm in the city. She hosted me in the summer of 2001, when I was 16 years old and is the trip that I can definitely say was my first independent travel experience, much like my nephew's one. Thinking about my aunt and how old is she, had me thinking a bit about my maternal grandparents, who are not with us anymore and haven't been for quite some time already.

Mamá and Papá (as their grandchildren used to call them), at least in my memory, where pretty amazing people, I loved them to death, and I always looked forward having them visiting or visiting them. For whatever reason, I cannot recall any bad memory of them (like being called out for misbehaving or anything like it) and all that is in my mind is pure joy, but a bit of history first, but please note that some details might be factually incorrect because I'm going with what I remember. They were both from the countryside, from a small town called Jima Abajo, a municipality of La Vega in the Cibao region of the Dominican Republic and they were very poor.

Just to give you a quick perspective, my mom tells me that many times living in the countryside, all they had to eat was "casabe con mambá" - Casabe is a type of "bread" made of casava root, a staple of our taino culture, and mambá is our version of the peanut butter that definitely has its origins in our african heritage. Every time I see casabe for sale I cannot help but to think of that story, and even back home, where eating casabe is fairly common, my mom would eat it with regular peanut butter as a snack and get a bit nostalgic about that the fact that sometimes it was all they had to eat.

Looking for a better life and opportunities, they moved to the City of Santo Domingo with their 6 children, my mom Gladys, my aunts Ysabel, Lourdes and Luz and my uncles Jose and Giovanni (real name Gregorio Alexander). They lived in a very small house in the barrio of San Carlos, but I can't recall when they moved there or for how long they lived there. What I do know, is that my grandparents did their best to take the family out of the cycle of poverty, my mom and their family became professionals through hard work and study, but tragedy would eventually strike with the death of my young uncle Giovanni.

I wish I could write more about him, but all I know is that he fell ill, and died at a fairly young age due to the disease way before I was born. Imagine, if being poor today can mean a death sentence now, just think of it then. At my grandparents place they always had a picture of Giovanni on the wall, and I think that today, my oldest brother has it up in his house (I may need to confirm though).

As the years went by, eventually my mom would meet my dad in San Carlos and start a family together. I had many family members in the barrio and would be around there fairly frequent until my aunt Lourdes (the one who stayed living in the barrio) moved, after that, I would go back less frequent to visit family friends or just hang out with my dad and his best friend.

But going back to my grandparents, they were both the center of my maternal family, especially Mamá Carmen (real name Braulia). Eventually they would move out of San Carlos to Villa Consuelo, another barrio nearby and would then migrate to the USA with the help of my aunt Ysabel. They would eventually move back to Santo Domingo and live their last days at home, and you see this is where the sad part of the story starts, but I won't go deep in it today.

Both of my grandparents would pass away in 1996, my grandma affected by a lung cancer that would eventually metastasize to her sciatica and grandpa also a few months later from a lung disease and both of them are the reason why I promise myself to never pick up on smoking. The passing of my grandparent was the first time I ever had to deal with death so close and I was old enough to process most of it and I would not have to deal with it so close to me until Dec 2020 when my dear friend Carlos passed away.

Anyways, there's much to talk about my grandparents, about what they did for living, how was their lives, how my family remembers them, the hobbies they had, how the illness happened, and how it affected the family, how fun they were and how amazing my Mamá used to cook to the point where I can still savor her stewed red beans. Out of my aunts, only Tia Lourdes would cook as amazing as Mamá.

I'll leave room for the next time but know that I miss them very much and I dream of them fairly frequent; I just remember I still have to cover my uncle Giovanni and for that there's some research to be done.

Have a great night.