It seems impossible, but it’s been two years since I stepped on Lisbon airport and boarded a plane. In August 2019 I travelled to Madeira, as I’m doing now, and little did I know what would be hitting us in a few months’ time. Looking back, these two years have brought many changes to my life, and I’m not just talking about lockdowns, social distancing, wearing masks and feeling there’s a threat hanging over our heads all the …
Category: Family
Some songs are just nice to listen to; some others, though, carry a strong message that goes straight to your heart. “You’re Not There”, by Lukas Graham, is an infinitely sad song whose lyrics tell a story of pain and loss. From the first time I heard it, it sounded like a heartfelt message from a son to a mother or father (or both) who died prematurely. Years later, the child talks to his missing parent, saying he …
In Britain they call it Boxing Day . No one knows exactly why it is called like that, but the most plausible theory is that it has to do with holiday gifts, handed over in a “Christmas box”. December 26 is also St. Stephen’s Day, an early Christian martyr who was stoned to death. In our family, as in many, I expect, it is a sort of “day after”, a day of hangover, when you try to recover from …
I’m leaving the house I have lived in for the past fifteen years. It’s part of the changing process I’m going through, actually not only me, but the boys as well. We are happy and excited about our new home, a larger apartment with the kitchen and living room of our dreams, and in a nicer neighbourhood, so much closer to most of my friends. Even so, as start packing and go through papers and find old …
Last weekend was the 1st of November, when Catholics honour the dead, visiting their graves, a day when cemeteries all over the country are filled with the bright reds and pinks and yellows of the flowers left there by relatives, showing their loved ones may be gone, but not forgotten. Only, this year, there will be no visiting graves around the country, as the government has forbidden travels between different municipalities, to avoid further spread of the pandemic, which is …
It is a verdant place, surrounded by trees that hide it from those who drive along the road. I parked my car and there he was, his blue eyes bright in a tanned face, not from by the beach but from hours working in the open air, during this almost two-month internship that he loved. Working the land is what my son wants to do for a living, and he has been preparing for that in the last few …
If only I could bear the weight of your pain upon my shoulders, If only it could be me wearing those crutches whose metallic sound on the floor has become so hard to bear. If only I could rip the heartache out of your chest and bring it into mine, Knowing your heart would henceforth be beating peacefully and joyfully. If only I could wipe away the infinite sorrow from your beautiful blue eyes, Whose bewildered look breaks my own …
Six am and the alarm clock rings. It’s been some time since I’m awake. Today my son Afonso is being operated on and we have to be at the hospital for check in at 7.30. I get up and do my ten-minute morning meditation. Need it more than ever. When it is over, I am calmer, I have a feeling all will go well. I get dressed and when I’m having breakfast, I hear someone coming out of his …
It had been a stormy day, with havoc all over – flight and train cancellations, rain, wind…as in the previous days. I thought the rugby match of last Friday night would be cancelled – if not for other reasons, because the green grass field would have turned into mud; but no, it was on, and my son Afonso left for the club with his usual long, confident, strides, the exhilaration of the forthcoming game all around him like a magnetic …
Tomorrow it will be precisely twenty-one years that I received the most precious Christmas gift of all: my son Pedro, “the most beautiful baby she had ever seen” in the words of his proud Grandma, who naturally had already forgotten saying the very same words almost four years before, when my son Afonso was born, on a sunny February day that felt like an early Spring. Christmas baby Little Pedro was born on a grey December day, but he …