When we met in college I knew we would be great friends for life. You, Olivia, Mariela and I were inseparable. We even started to look alike, my mother used to say. We coordinated our classes so we could go together, went out to drink cheap wine in the parks on weekends, liked the same guys.
When you got pregnant we all cried, we thought it was a tragedy but to you it seemed perfectly normal. "I'm from the countryside," you said. David, who was your boyfriend, didn't stick around long, though you decided to give the baby his name in the end anyway. Just like his absent father.
We threw you a baby shower, danced like crazy and laughed with your aunts, who told us horror stories about motherhood. And of course we were young, and we wanted everything to stay the same. The baby was born, and you were busy. It was natural that we drifted apart a little. You didn't come to girls' nights out as much anymore.
By then social media had arrived and it was easy to see photos. Your David was a gorgeous baby, and then suddenly he was walking. He had no hair at all. He was a cheerful baby, like you. We visited you a couple of times and of course we invited you, but we knew it was harder for you to get out, because being a single mother isn't easy.
I remember a photo you posted on David's first day of first grade. What a handsome baby!, I left you a comment, look at that precious face! More photos of David, of his birthdays, of vacations. You stopped posting for a while. Hard times, I imagined.
By then it was our turn. First Mariela got pregnant with the twins, then Olivia, and I didn't want to but I ended up with Pablo, who already had Gaby. And so motherhood surprised us all, in different ways. We were all always busy. We stopped seeing each other for a while, because back then it felt like we were all drowning a little, always running.
I'm writing this because up to that point everything was normal, the ordinary run of things. One day I noticed you started posting again. First a photo of your boy at school. Of course, how handsome he looked in his uniform with his long hair! I liked it.
A little later you posted a photo of David heading off to college. We called each other to get together again, to set up a girls' night, a firm commitment of once a month. On those nights out you'd tell us David was studying civil engineering (how wonderful!) and that he had a lovely girlfriend.
They got married very young, you told me, a little alarmed on the phone. But he'll be fine, Cata, don't worry, he's a very serious boy, very clear about what he wants, don't work yourself up. He has a job, he knows what he wants, those grandchildren will pay off. And it was true, your grandchildren arrived right away. You were a young grandmother, you looked like the mother of those little ones. That's the advantage of having children young, you used to say, happily.
And so the years went by, Catalina, and we'd see each other on girls' nights, but then Mariela got sick and we stopped seeing each other. And of course I had my problems with Pablo, I pulled away for a while. Each of us got tangled up in her own timeline, and it became harder and harder to untangle it long enough to see each other.
One day on your profile I saw a photo of your son on a boat, with a fishing rod and a fish. A middle-aged man, a little weathered. Poor guy, I thought, what a stressful job he must have. These young men have so much to worry about now, life is so different.
Then I saw him in the Christmas photo you posted of the family. "Happy Christmas from the Jiménez family." And there's your son, bald again. He had hair and now he doesn't anymore. A genetic tragedy, I thought, his father's gift. Still handsome, of course. And next to him some teenagers who I later understood are your grandchildren. How, Catalina? You look exactly the same. It can't be, I thought. But I didn't dwell on it.
One day I came across an announcement from your son's company that caught my attention: we congratulate Engineer Jiménez on his retirement, after a lifetime of professional dedication to this company. A lifetime? He's just a young man, I thought. How can he be retiring? Well, how lucky, I thought, he'll have more time to spend with his kids, he'll take up his hobbies, do some independent consulting, travel, spend time with Catalina, who knows. But when I asked you, you clarified that your grandchildren are already in college, that your son and his wife had sold their house and were setting off on an endless series of expedition cruises — Antarctica, Alaska, the mangroves of Asia, the islands of the Pacific. What an adventure!
And then, of course, the hard part came. At girls' night you confessed that things were bad, that during one of his routine prostate exams something irregular had turned up, that he had cancer. And of course the whole family threw itself into care and recovery, and your son seemed much better. He looked well, with a little more energy, after the first rounds of radiation.
Not long after you told us, very alarmed, that he had fallen at home and broken a hip. Perhaps the radiation had weakened his bones. He was confined to bed trying to recover, very depressed. "At this age it's hard to come back from something like that," I heard Olivia say. What do you mean, at this age?
Last night at the funeral when I saw him in the coffin he looked small, wrinkled, bald, the way he was when he was born. A hundred-year-old man. How did this happen, Catalina? Around him there weren't only his children but his grandchildren, and in their arms there were also tiny babies. When I came up to you, you were calm, and all you said was "he's rested now," the thing people say when an inevitable hour arrives that had been approaching slowly, and not at full speed.