To my grandmother

It was when she died that finally I realize that distance is a mere illusion created inside ourselves. One that is as painful as feeling that death is an end. I came across with this feeling while facing death, not mine but of hers. The night she died I was sleeping in the expectation of seeing her the day after to say a last good goodbye. It was in this wondrous world of dreams, where life sometimes seems more realistic than real life that I dreamed of her.  We were at Gerês, a lovely protected forest in the North of Portugal. A dearest place in my heart that made part of my childhood and stayed in my heart so fiercely that today I still feel the need to go there at least twice a year. Gerês has relatively big mountains where small rivers are born from the peaks, descending in dazzling waterfalls of pure nature power. When I go to the waterfalls there is always a fair climbing protocol that must be followed. My grandmother was climbing the path towards the waterfall when I said “Grandma, I came from the Netherlands to visit you and seeing how you were. I thought you were weak in the hospital.”. She replied “give me a hand in this rock so I can climb. Don’t you worry. You know them, always worried…I’m fine”. The day after I was in my office in the Netherlands while leaving a meeting that finally I read in my phone a message from my mother saying that she has died. Now at last I see that distance  is not dependent of geographical position but rather of how far a heart is from another. I know now that she wanted herself to also say goodbye to me and that if dreams that are the other face of the world as we see it might not mean anything, I would say that for me would be hard to believe in that. I truly think that we can be with each other only by the longing feeling of missing someone or wishing to be with that someone. Once in a while I guess I’ll be able to see the waterfalls again with her as I still have been travelling a lot overnight with my other grandfather and through this cosmic experiences as distant as they might be, I’m still very close to them and so I’ll continue to be. And I know that for both of them, a rock in the way would never be a stop, but rather an adventure.

21.4.16