mami

We got word that Mami Grandma, my great-grandma, passed away yesterday morning. She was 104 years old. 

The feeling I get receiving that kind of news is grief of a certain kind. Not the gut-wrenching kind, or the heart-breaking kind. 

I barely knew Mami myself; due to distance, I probably hadn’t seen her in a decade or more. Outside of childhood visits, I had no real relationship with her. 

But the grief, the small, deep ache, is less of a personal loss than a generational one. It’s like losing a giant oak tree, one that’s simply always been there. It’s like losing a tiny part of myself, part I knowingly took for granted my whole life. 

Because despite hardly knowing each other, we were intertwined. She shaped my grandfather who shaped my mother who shaped me. She was my Hispanic heritage, the matriarch, for better or for worse. 

And so life goes on, reminded as always how it flies by. How it circles and cycles. How the oak trees come and go. 

Goodbye, Mami, Noemi Valenzuela. Thank you for giving life to all of us. We will continue to live it and give it too.