fierce love

R.I.P. to one of the best humans I have ever known.

This week marks 18 years of living in San Francisco. I’ve officially lived here as long as I haven’t.

I had a whole ramble down memory lane ready to go, but instead I’m going to write about my great aunt, my Tía Regina, who died last Monday, April 17 at the age of 85.

If you’re looking at this photo, she’s third from the left, with the blond hair and the cool glasses:

Yesterday I phoned into a Zoom funeral. It was as hard as you’d expect. I watched the eulogies from her two kids, my cousins, while chopping onions and frying up an omelette for lunch. The service left me lacking, for obvious reasons (the strangest part was when they turned the computer to face the casket), but also because there was so much I felt that wasn’t said, wasn’t acknowledged about the depth and breadth of who my aunt was, the life she lived, and the beauty and sorrow of her story.

My aunt and her husband, my Tío Pablo, were a second set of grandparents to me. Growing up, my massive extended family found any excuse to be together, and we celebrated everything. A few holidays were always spent at certain houses, but mostly we rotated through each other’s homes, and if memory serves, rare was the weekend I didn’t see at least one grandparent or an aunt or uncle or one of my million cousins.

My tía ceded all available limelight to the big personality that was my uncle, a Korean War vet who would regale with you with the most far-flung stories with such conviction that you couldn’t help but believe him (or at least humor him). My memory of my aunt is of someone kind, gentle, and so so quick to laugh. She cared about beauty, and the small details, and up to this year she never once missed sending me a birthday card—she kept up with all my different addresses over these years. Growing up, even though we were around each other all the time, every time I’d see her she’d throw her hands up, exclaiming like she hadn’t seen me in years, until I went in for the inevitable abrazote. My throat catches when I try to describe this type of love. I didn’t know that it wasn’t like this for every kid, to have all these built in people in your life who loved you like your mere existence was their reason for being—with my aunt, this often felt true: She was fiercely protective of family, we were the sun around which her entire life orbited. And you know what? This extended out, beyond blood. More than once I saw rogue and downtrodden family friends bloom under the gaze of some elder in my family pulling them in for another bear hug, filling their plate with food, drawing them in to our web like we’d been waiting for them this whole time.

Only now, writing this, do I realize the degree to which I took all of this for granted.

My aunt and uncle grew up on the same street as each other. My grandmother and my aunt were close friends, and my abuela tried to set my aunt up with my uncle (her brother), but at the time, my aunt was uninterested. Once he left Cuba for the Korean War, he began relentlessly sending her letters, and that’s how they fell in love. He even proposed to her over a letter. After the war they got married, but as things began to shift and the country began its barrel toward what became the Cuban Revolution, most of my family left and settled in the Bronx, New York (and then Miami, and eventually southern California). My Tío went on ahead, intending to send for my aunt once he was settled, but her paperwork took forever and they were apart for over a year. When she finally got the OK to leave, she was kept at an immigration center for over a month, as an X-Ray had shown a mysterious shadow on her lung.

It wasn’t until I was much older that I began to imagine into what this must have actually been like.

I mentioned this recently (indelible in the hippocampus, it seems), that I remember my aunt telling me once that if she had known when she left Cuba that she would never see her mother again, that she never would have left. At her service, everyone talked about how important family was to her, and I wanted to unmute myself (ugh) and scream, can we talk about how she left her family? Can we acknowledge what it took to experience all that she did, and for her to still be so full of love, and joy, and optimism?

My aunt’s story is one of loss, and the unique, ambiguous grief of exile. But hers is also a story of resilience, and the fiercest love, and an incomparable loyalty, and God! - so much joy. My aunt and uncle’s motto, through everything, said humbly through the thickest of Cuban accents: “Can’t complain!” We were always laughing. Even through the ugliest, hardest moments. All of these are the lessons and values I hold close, even closer now as we make our way through our own season of ambiguous loss and grief here in the reality of Pandemia.

There is the individual loss here, of this person I loved, who was one of the best people in my life. And, there’s the grander loss, of these people who came from a different place, a different time, a different knowing, of my family elders getting older and beginning their transitions. Their absence is a void in my soul, that for all its hurt I do my best to hold close, as proof of something I can’t touch but is the truest thing I’ve ever known.

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Slow Motion Sober is a newsletter and community for creative types who are sober or curious about sobriety, and all the life-y intersections along the way. It's written by me, Dani Cirignano, a writer and sobriety advocate in San Francisco, CA. 

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