1. Brittney Cannon
She Feels It for Me
1.
College, FreshmanYear
“I only let you go to school in Texas because you have your Pita there,” my
mother scolded me over the phone. “She says she hasn’t seen you in over a month.
Just go visit her, please,” she pleaded. Pita had moved to Texas when I was in high
school, city life becoming too much for her and holding too many memories of my
Tío, her son who had died in a bus accident when he was thirty-three. My cousins
lived in small town Texas too, Nashi, Tati, Tiffy, and Larry. The oldest girl of the
redheaded branch of our family had recently had her third child, and moving out
there she could be their Pita, too.
“I’m going today,” I complained, pulling on a pair of boot cut jeans and a t-
shirt. I reeked of alcohol from a Sig Ep party the night before, and punch was
probably still in my hair. There were giant X’s on my hands from going in under to a
bar two nights before. Whatever, I mumbled in my head. There had to be one clean-
ish shirt on my floor. I picked a baggy spirit jersey off the ground with a paint stain
on the front of it and threw it on. Good enough.
“Thank you, Baby,” my mom cooed.
“Alright, walking to my car. Love you. Bye.” I waited for her I love you too
before pressing the end call button repeatedly. My phone read 10:30 am, Sunday
morning.

2. I trudged down the stairs of Milton Daniel Dormatory towards my car, which
I sped off in toward 35E South, pausing on the way to grab a biscuit at Whataburger,
knowing I wasn’t about to wait until I got to Cleburne to get food. My speed
averaged about 85 the entire hour drive, and my music averaged max volume.
Finally, I pulled through the gates of my grandparents’ retirement
community after punching in the code to get in. I pulled my car into a space in front
of her small apartment sized structure. As I got to the door, my foot knocked against
a free standing wind chime and set off a discordant clash of sound, not aiding my
hangover.
“Pita, I’m here,” I yelled, opening the door to the 5 room development.
“Finally,” she huffed in that way that meant she wanted extra love and
attention to make up for my lack in presence, yanking me into a soft embrace. “I
know, I’m annoying.”
“You’re not annoying,” I grumbled, clearly annoyed. Before my grandpa
could exit his bedroom, I plopped myself down into their black leather couches and
turned on HBO, relishing in their premium channels and massive TV. “Hi, Bibi.”
“Hi, Princessa Linda.”
“Sweetheart, where’s your wallet?”
I hadn’t realized I’d drifted off during the movie until she woke me up
insistently. “In my car,” I barely managed before falling back to sleep.
Following a prolonged nap and raiding my grandparents’ insufficient kitchen,
I told them I had to head back.

3. “I have homework,” I shrugged guiltily. “I have to get back and do that, and
then I have meetings.”
“I know, Baby,” my grandma told me. She demanded a hug and a kiss, and my
grandpa’s silent presence came up beside me to receive them as well.
“Here,” he said with stern authority, his English not as skillful as Pita’s by any
means. “Por gasoline.” His tone carried the weight of a patriarch who took great
pride in his ability to take care of everyone, as he handed me seven dollars in cash.
“Oh, thanks, Bibi,” I said, before giving him another kiss on the cheek. “Love
you.”
“Te quiero mucho.”
Before even leaving their apartment community, I fished a pack of cigarettes
from the center console behind my cup holders. I lit one while holding the wheel
steady with my knees. Oh yeah, I remembered and swerved suddenly into a gas
station. My car swooped in and came to a sudden stop.
“Can I have twenty on six?” I asked the attendant. Not knowing what to do
with my receipt, I unzipped my coin purse and noticed a wad of folded up cash. I
pulled it out and counted the bills and realized Pita had put two hundred dollars
into my wallet while I was sleeping. A warming sensation washed through my chest
and I moved the cash from my coin pouch to where the rest of my cash went. I
laughed amused to myself. With a deep puff of a new cigarette, I took off toward
TCU, dialing Pita to tell her she was crazy, and thank you.

4. 2.
Childhood
Mom’s hand pressed against my forehead. I knew it wasn’t warm, but I also
knew that if I played my cards right, that wouldn’t matter.
“You don’t feel warm…” She flipped her palm over on my cheeks and neck a
few times. “Are you sure you’re sick?”
“Mom!” I snapped, with disproportionate vigor to my claim of weakness. “I
have a headache, a stomachache, I feel literally awful. If you make me go to school,
I’m just going to get sent home anyway.”
She sighed briskly, before turning toward the door out of my room. “Alright,
well if you call your grandmother and wake her up, she can watch you and you can
stay home sick.”
Music to my ears! I sprinted to the house phone, dialing my grandma’s phone
number. My clumsy ten-year-old fingers flew across the handset, navigating the
numbers with shocking familiar ease and dexterity. First call rang and went to
voicemail. Second and third did too, as I knew they would. It always took a few calls
to get her to wake up this early.
“Hello?” The thick Puerto Rican accent resounded after the fourth ring on the
third call.
“Hi, Pita,” I groaned, attempting a tone of intense misery. “I don’t feel good,
and I don’t want to go to school. Can you come babysit me?”
“Oh, of course,” she insisted, her best doting voice. “Mi muñequita preciosa.”

5. And just like that I’m in the clear. My grandma, standing at five foot nothing
tall and five foot nothing wide, she waddled into my house at a surprising pace to
meet me where I had moved to lay on the couch in front of the TV. My mom, now
late for work would run over and give my grandma a kiss on the cheek.
“Mamí, call me if you need anything. I left forty dollars on the table for lunch.”
My Pita was always at the ready.

6. 3.
Names are a funny thing in my family, because no one goes by their real one.
It started with the oldest grandchild: Larry. Being raised in a Hispanic family, you
get a lot of big words thrown at you—abuelito, abuelita—and toddler Larry was
having none of that.
“Listen,” he leveled with the family after sitting everyone down. “Those
words are just too long. From now on, you will be Pita, and you will be Bibi.” And
that was that.
From then on, given names were only temporary until a nickname stuck.
Tiffany became Tiffy, Tatiana became Tati, and Alec became Kiko. That last one
might not seem logical at first, but in Spanish “Little Alec” is “Alequito,” and with
Larry-esque determination, I deemed that Kiko was much easier. This was all until I
caught Pita calling him Kiko, or worse—Kikito. Indignant, I stomped to my mother’s
room ready to tattle.
“Pita called Alec Kiko and that’s my name for him. Tell her she can’t do that
anymore.”
My mom lit up with her melodious laugh and scooped me into her lap. “You
don’t want to share your brother?” I shook my head adamantly, crossing my arms
obstinately across my chest. She tugged me closer to her chest and rested her chin
on the crown of my head, as if she could wrap my entire tiny body up in her
embrace. “Sweetie, it’s family. We share everything with family, you know that.”
I accepted her answer, but I still was not very pleased. This may have been in
large part to my bias against nicknames. To Pita, I was Maclovia Kuchufleta, not the

7. cutest in the world. My dad called me Fluffy, because once I fell out of my chair at
dinner, but to my family’s distressed reactions, I replied, “It’s okay. I fell on my butt
and it’s fluffy.” And it took me years for my family to stop saying, “Hey, Acorn,
you’re a nut!” after ill-advisedly declaring myself Agent Acorn during a game of 007.
However territorial I might be, if I must share Alec’s nickname with anyone, I
suppose Pita is the lesser of the evils.

8. 4.
There’s a memory I can’t quite say if I actually remember or have fabricated
vivid scenes from countless retellings. Pita was famous at the Northrige mall. Every
summer, when my brother, my cousin Tiffy (who would spend most summers
visiting us), and I were stir crazy children in my house, Pita would drive us to the
mall in her white minivan. Sometimes we would forget, even though we looked it up
every time from the parking lot that the mall opened at 10:30 am, and would arrive
at 10 am promptly and wait in the car, amused only by the endless contents of her
purse while Pita would be on the phone with some relative from Puerto Rico, be it
Titi Delia, cousin Jujo, or her brother Pancho.
Alec and I would surface Mentos and old church programs that we would fold
into an origami piano while Tiffy would doodle on scraps of receipts with the
expensive pens that Bibi would always bring home for Pita until the clock on the
dash would strike 10:30.
Cinnabon time.
Our parking was always tactful. See, if we let Pita park by Macy’s, she would
engage in twenty minute long conversations with the Russian ladies that worked the
Estēe Lauder and Lancôme counters. No. We had to park facing the colorful
NORTHRIDGE sign that indicated behind those automatic glass doors laid the food
court.
I would sprint forward, followed by Tiffy, eight years my senior but roughly
the same age in respect to maturity. Alec would be tugging at Pita’s hand, urging our
overweight grandmother to shuffle faster, please! Before we even glanced toward

9. Tommy’s or, Alec’s personal favorite, Donatello’s Pizza, where the slices were bigger
than our heads and cheaper than a dollar, we were in line for a Cinnabon, extra
frosting please.
When it came to food, the answer was never no with Pita.
After we had our fill, it was time for Pita to get a little bit of her shopping
done.
This memory continues as most do: I’m spritzing sample after sample onto
the strips of cardstock on the perfume counters, and maybe hours went by before
Pita and I realized we had lost Alec and Tiff.
What happened next haunted the rest of Tiffy’s adolescence and early adult
life. Pita had them paged over the intercom: “Will a twelve year old boy who looks
like he’s eighteen and an eighteen year old girl who looks like she’s twelve
please report to the Chanel Counter.”

10. 5.
Food was one of the greatest parts of being so close to our grandparents as a
kid. One time we bought Pita and Bibi that cliché magnet as a Vegas souvenir,
“When Mom says no call 1-800-GRANDMA”.
Pita and Bibi lived in a Pepto-pink apartment building where the code at the
gate was 6948, the last four digits of that phone number my fingers still know by
heart, the one that hasn’t been active for years. In my eyes, they were always
important people, because they lived in apartment number 1. It was the first door
past the lobby and to the left, right across from the pool I can’t recall ever swimming
in.
I can still remember with discordant vividness the grating buzzing noise that
we could hear through the door while we restlessly pressed the doorbell over and
over again while our grandparents caught up to us. That door housed an interactive
family tree, with literally thousands of pictures covering every possible surface of
the two bedroom, two bathroom apartment. A picture in a black frame on the door
to the bathroom of Tiffy and I getting our first mani-pedi; a wrinkled picture of my
oldest cousin Larry and his bright orange hair in a magnetic casing on the
refrigerator, and my favorite: a portrait of my mother in her graduation gown,
looking off into the distance in one of those posed pictures where you’re supposed
to gaze into the future, but with her it didn’t look posed. She knew who she was and
was ready to go out and show the world. She was beautiful.
Bibi would always come home from work when we got to visit their
apartment. Until his late seventies, my grandpa worked in a lumber warehouse.

11. This blows the minds of anyone I let it slip to, but to us it wasn’t anything out of the
ordinary. After all, he was the Puerto Rican Superman, words I can still only hear in
his thick accent—Poo-er-toh Rrrr-eekahn Tsoo-pehr mahn!
“Bey-bee!” Pita would yell through the apartment, sound often getting lost
between all the large frames and baubles we’ve crafted her throughout our
elementary careers. She never called Bibi anything but Baby—not the classic
petname, but a name he’d picked up in his family despite being the oldest of seven
children and six years her senior. “Bey-bee, the children are hungry!”
Odds are we hadn’t said we were hungry, but Pita had an instinctual need to
be providing us with food at any point during which we were in her care. He would
rise from the red pleather recliner—I had once sat on his lap in it and placed band-
aids all over his face, before calling 911 because he was “injured”—and in his silent,
doting way, would disappear and reemerge with bags and bags of food before my
brother and I had even figured out how to find Nickelodeon on the cable remote.
It was always shortly after this that my mom would arrive, insisting we let
our grandparents get to bed. I sprinted up and hugged my grandma around her
wide middle. Grandma’s should always be fat. Without fail, I would give my
grandpa a hug and a kiss on the cheek, “Bye, Bibi, I love you.”
“I love you too, Princessa.”

12. 6.
There’s a picture in my house of my mom and me. It’s in my parents’ room,
right by the door to the bathroom, and I can’t be more than six years old in it. I have
long, brown hair in a palm tree ponytail right on top of my head. Behind me
stretches a soccer field, no doubt at one of my brother’s soccer games as a kid. This
picture must have been taken as my mom swept up behind me and wrapped her
arms around my shoulders, and there’s a mischievous grin in place, lighting up her
entire face, a few strands of hair falling across it. In the excitement, I shrieked and
made a face at the camera, overcome by giggles.
“Do you know what my favorite picture is?” my mom asked me once, and I
immediately answered.
“That one in your room where we’re hugging.” It’s my favorite picture, too.

13. 7.
By profession, my mother is a dietitian. She has done everything from design
meals for patients with AIDs through the non-profit Project Angelfood, to being the
head nutritionist for the Las Virgenes Unified School District in Los Angeles, to
catering lunch to my high school everyday at the request of our Vice Principal.
However, if you asked childhood Waleska what she wanted to be when she grew up,
it was a mom. She wanted to have a baby boy and a baby girl, which is exactly what
she got.
Her baby girl was exactly that—the baby. I loved every opportunity to steal
any of my older cousins’ attention. The summer I was six, JJ, the cousin my brother
was closest to, came to visit us. Always jealous of them and trying to be one of the
guys, I got very excited when JJ asked me if I wanted to go in the pool with them.
Unable to contain my excitement, I sprinted to my room, grabbed the closest bathing
suit, and flew into the bathroom.
Our bathroom door moves very quickly—quicker than I did apparently, as
the next thing I knew there was blood on the floor and my finger was a little shorter
than it was before. I. Am going. To be. In so. Much. Trouble. Cupping my hand under
the blood, I slowly crept down the stairs until I came upon my mom ironing her
clothes in our TV room.
“Mom?”
“Yes, Sweetheart.” Her eyes never left the pleat of her pants that she was
creasing decisively.
“I closed my finger in the door.”

14. “What?” She spun around and dropped to the floor, putting pressure on my
bloody stump of a middle finger. “Come, follow me.” I could hear the urgency in her
voice—I had a feeling I was going to bed without dessert that night. She dragged me
back to the scene of the crime and wadded up toilet paper and pressed it to my
finger securely while she located my nail and missing tip, which somehow had
become separated in this process, all the while screaming for my dad to start the car.
As we drove to the emergency room, traffic laws be damned, my mother
repeated over and over, “It’s okay, Baby. You’re going to be fine. You’ll be okay,” as
she held firm to my finger in the backseat. I think “Baby” must have been herself,
because other than being embarrassed that I ruined pool time for everyone, I was
doing fine. I felt like I was supposed to be scared, but I was just along for the ride.
Maybe it was the adrenaline or maybe it was God, but I felt no pain—maybe my
mom felt it for me.
I did not get to go swimming that summer.

15. 8.
College, FreshmanYear
Mom’s weekend comes every Spring Semester, and I was eager to share my
sorority experience with my Mom. She could see what meant so much to me, and
why she was shelling out so much money for T Shirts.
Unfortunately the first day was a bust, as her flight landed late, and my
cousins ended up picking her up from the airport at 11 pm, so she would go sleep at
their house and rest up for our full day the next day.
Saturday morning, I woke up to the first beep of my alarm and called my
mom instantly.
“Are you on your way?” I asked her eagerly.
“I just woke up,” she would tell me, the hair drier in the background. Heat
rose instantly through my chest up to my face. “I’ll be ready in five minutes. Do you
want to come meet me here?”
“No,” I snapped, falling back in a heap in my bed. “I don’t want to meet you
there. You were supposed to be here in ten minutes, then we were going to get
breakfast. I don’t want to drive forty-five minutes to Keene and back, and we always
just end up sitting on the couch doing nothing with the family. This is my Mom’s
Weekend, you’re here for me. Not them.”
“I know,” she cooed quickly. With a laugh, “You know, I was just so tired from
my flight, I completely overslept.”
Unappeased, I agreed to drive down to Keene. After way too long on 35, I
pulled into the grass in front of their farm house, slamming the door.

16. “Moooom,” I called through the house. Passing cousins and my grandparents
who were seated in the sofas of the living room, I had to act like I wasn’t a complete
brat, and respectfully smile and hug each human, before I could go to the bathroom
and hurry my mother.
We missed every event with the sorority and ended up getting dinner and
watching a movie in Fort Worth, before just stocking me up on groceries.

17. 9.
The next morning we didn’t have any plans until lunch, and I adjusted my
expectations, not expecting to see my mother until around sunset. Just before noon,
she called me and I answered.
“Baby, your grandma is really sick, and we’re going to have to take her to the
hospital.” My mom’s voice shook over the phone, alerting me of the seriousness of
the situation. Despite this, I couldn’t help but feel cheated. This was my mom’s
weekend for my sorority, and every other girl’s mom did all the fun events they
planned for us, but we had to spend the entire weekend sitting on my family’s couch
doing nothing.
And now I was going to have to spend it in a hospital.
When my car pulled up to the house, I saw my mom crying, being held by my
Uncle. They were seated on the front porch, hunched over. I took a few breaths
before getting out of my car.
“Sweetie, Pita died this morning,” she managed to get out. The words hung
heavy in the air, and I knew her “sickness” had just been a device to let me know
something was wrong; Mom wanted to tell me the truth in person. “I found her in
the bathroom on the floor, and when I called the ambulance it was too late.”
My gaze moved upward toward my grandpa talking to a balding man with a
pitiful comb-over standing by the door to the apartment. He’s the man who’s going
to dress my grandma, make her look lifelike while we all stand over her.
Discussions bloomed on who knew, how the adults were going to let all the
other kids in my generation know. I barely registered that my brother would have

18. to hear this news over the phone. Incapable of emotional thought, I went into Pita’s
room and laid on the bed. I curled into a ball and listened as my grandpa picked out
her favorite dress that he wanted her to be buried in. It was a simple red dress, with
buttons down the front. I thought it was too plain, when she had so many beautiful
dresses that she used to wear for Church, and in that moment, I knew that Bibi was
losing an entirely different Pita that even her precious grandchildren didn’t know.
She wanted to be buried next to her son back in California. With every shift of my
body, I felt the cold air hit the skin that had been pressed so firmly against the other
parts of my body.
It didn’t feel like she was really dead; none of it felt real, except for the anger
that this could happen on a weekend that was supposed to be just my mom and me
having fun.

19. 10.
Frommy Eulogy for Monsita Medina, Pita
“Behold, I send an Angel before thee, to keep thee in the way, and to bring
thee into the place which I have prepared.” Exodus 23:20. We have all had an angel
sent before us to welcome and keep us.
In explaining this sudden trip to California to friends and teachers, I came
across a problem. “I have to be there for my grandma.” Grandma isn’t enough. The
words “family emergency” aren’t enough. JJ and I shared how Pita would call us to
remind us birthdays and anniversaries, but she was more than just a calendar. At
church we would dig through her purse in search of Mentos, but she was more than
just a pack of mints. She picked Alec and I up from school every day, but she was
more than just a taxi. She raised my mom and uncles, but she was more than a
mother; married Bibi, but she was more than a wife. There is only one word that can
adequately encompass all the ways she impacted us and showed her love; only one
title great enough to define her, understood by a privileged few. She was more than
just my grandma; she was my Pita.
Likewise, we are left with more than memories, but a legacy—one fueled by a
love unparalleled. It is in that way that I bear my name with doubled pride: Brittney
Monsita. In the words imparted to me and others amongst us, “Be nice, be good, be
forever as you are.” I love you, Pita.

20. 11.
Sitting in the pews of the worn and familiar San Fernando Church was the
right way to say good-bye. I sat beside my mother dry-eyed, having already cried
myself out before the service. Her arms trembled continuously and it brought my
attention to the empty feeling in the pit of my stomach, so I looped my arm through
hers, and she clutched at my forearm immediately, her fingers hooking onto the
bones.
When my mom cries, it’s not a sob, or a single tear. She is neither composed,
attempting to dam the flood of tears nor is she wracked by sobs with her face in her
hands. When my mom cries, it’s devastation. Her eyes are wounded, betrayed and
her face is a dark crimson like it’s giving all that it has not to shatter. It was in this
moment, seeing my mom look, for the first time in my life, utterly lost that I saw my
mother as a daughter.
A daughter who messaged her mom on Facebook for a couple hours a day
while they played online Bingo together. A daughter who only trusted her mother
to watch after her own children. A daughter who needed her mom to tell her, “It’s
okay, Baby. You’re going to be fine. You’ll be okay,” who needed her mom to feel her
pain for her.
My mom shifted the papers in her hands, papers detailing Pita’s life and
history. “Will you go up with me? If I can’t finish reading, can you read the rest? I
can’t go up there without you.” Her vulnerable eyes fixed on me, and I nodded
before setting my chin on her shoulder.

21. 12.
College, SophomoreYear
After Pita died, Bibi was lost. Pita and Bibi met in Puerto Rico when she was
a middle school girl, and he was six years older than her. Their love story is my
favorite. He used to tell all his friends, I’m going to marry that girl some day. The
Korean War pulled them apart, as Bibi was drafted for the Marines, despite not
being able to swim. He made it through the war without ever learning how, taking
home with him a collection of Korean words, an affinity for their food, and dark
memories of rat poop tainted water causing him to spend more time than he would
have liked in the hospital. At least, that’s the story I was told. Sure enough, when he
got back, he married that young girl, now seventeen.
They spent every day together for over fifty years, and now she was gone. He
had no one to bring food home to, clean up after, take care of. Our overbearing
grandmother had given Bibi a sense of purpose, and now, finally retired, he had
nothing.
He got indescribable pleasure out of every favor I would ask of him, and thus
I would ask many. He would drive up with my Tío Larry, my mom’s oldest and only
remaining brother, and they would take my car to change its oil, fill its tires, once he
even insisted on refilling my wiper fluid.
Winter of 2013, TCU experienced what its students like to call “Icepocalypse,”
where the roads were too precarious for the inexperienced winter drivers to
traverse, and the Bluu was serving frozen chicken nuggets in every way they could
come up with for the sake of variety.

22. Desperate for food that wasn’t half defrosted, I called every cousin within an
hour, begging for someone to come up to Fort Worth to take me to dinner, but none
were willing to risk 26 miles on 35.
Except Bibi. “Okay, Baby, I’ll be there.” Tío Larry tagged along, afraid of my
grandpa’s already questionable driving in these less than ideal conditions. Sure
enough, a truck pulled up outside my dorm, and they took me to Chuy’s, the only
open restaurant near campus, and I was able to order excessively outside my college
student’s budget, knowing I was being treated.
“Are you okay with money?” he would always ask to end every visit.

23. 13.
Bibi spent a few months after Pita died at my house in California. He never
really liked Texas very much; he had moved for Pita, and now he wanted to spend
time back in LA. It was difficult on my family, because they all lived busy lives, my
brother now almost done with college. He lived at home still, but wanted to spend
most of his time with his friends and enjoying being an adult.
However, Alec would always take the time to drive Bibi wherever he needed
to go, whether it was to talk to the friends he had made that worked at El Pollo Loco
or to San Fernando to spend time with the other Church Elders.
The time I spent home during these months, I remember holding my tongue,
never wanting to talk back to my parents in front of Bibi and reveal that I was
anything but his Princessa.
Trouble arose immediately, when he was forced to live with my obese black
Lab Cleo and Alec’s Pitbull-German Shepherd mix Boo. Bibi did not like dogs.
However, by the time I got back from school, Bibi had already spent time with the
dogs and adjusted.
“I like your dog—Cleo,” he told me; hearing her name in his accent made a
smile tug at the corner of my lips. “She is my companion. I will sit on the sofa and
she will sit by my feet.” Then his face would turn sour, “Ach, but I don’t like that
other one. She is trouble. She is too much.”
As much as I love Boo, I felt proud of my lazy dog, and loved her that much
more for giving my Bibi a companion.

24. 14.
Spring semester rolled around, and another Mom’s weekend came and went,
uneventful and frustrating. I can’t even remember the events the sorority invited us
to do, because I spent the entire time taxying my mom back and forth from my
cousins house, hearing second hand what a great time everyone in the Sigma Kappa
house was having meeting each other’s moms.
This year, I tried to hide my frustration, knowing Texas made my mom
uneasy since Pita’s death.
“Sweetheart, I know you want to be with your friends, but Bibi spends so
much time in the house alone,” she had told me. “Let’s just spend some time with
him, I promise you and I will have our alone time.”
I wasn’t thrilled, but I understood, and tried to be jealous as little as I could of
my roommate who was getting wine drunk with her mom in our room.
A week later, I found myself missing my mom, and needing familiar
stimulation. There are days where I just want to call everyone, anyone, just
someone that will listen to me talk. Sometimes I’ll sit for hours and go down my
family tree calling each of my five cousins, three second cousins, Tío Larry and Tía
Violeta, and Bibi. I sat in the Sigma Kappa house pacing, wanting to talk.
I started with Bibi, who’s phone went straight to voicemail. Then JJ, my
mother’s deceased brother’s son and one ofmy closest cousins in age and affection,
but not distance, but he didn’t answer either. Finally, I called Larry, my oldest
cousin, who I rarely talked to, as he lived in Florida, but the bunch of us in our
generation are all like siblings, even if we don’t talk as regularly as we should.

25. “Hello?”
Finally, someone answered. “Hey, how are you?”
“I’m okay.”
“Just okay?” I asked, trying to strike up a conversation.
“Well, all the stuff with Bibi, you know?”
My heart dropped. “What about Bibi?”
“He died, Britt.”
I hung up the phone without saying anything, before calling my mom.
“Is Bibi dead?” I demanded.
“I’m sorry, Baby,” she responded, her voice breaking. “Go to their house,
everyone is there. I don’t want you to be alone.” I hung up the phone and knelt on
the ground.
Was someone supposed to die every time I flew my Mom out to Texas? What
was she supposed to think? Cool liquid filled the pit of my stomach, how would my
mom think of me now that every time she visited her daughter I stole one of her
parents?
My phone vibrated without pause, but I stayed crumbled on the floor of my
room, refusing to move, and refusing to cry. No concept of how much time had
passed since I’d been on the floor, before my roommate came in with my cousins.
“Hey, Britt, let’s go get food.”
My two cousins took my two hands and led me out of the Sigma Kappa house,
where I selfishly felt like my sorority experience was being stolen from me one
death at a time.

26. My cousins had called my roommate to let them in, everyone being worried
that I was refusing to answer the phone. At Macaroni Grill, we sat and talked about
what had happened.
“He passed away in his sleep, and we all found out this morning,” Nashi
explained.
Apparently when I called Bibi’s phone, they all assumed that I had found out
somehow. JJ could tell from the voicemail that I left him that I didn’t know—I was
too happy, and just wanted to talk. Larry, on the other hand, assumed that was why
I was calling.
“Your mom was going to tell you, but we were all figuring out how to tell each
other when you called Larry.”
I nodded, hurt and angry that I had to find out that way.

27. 15.
Frommy Eulogy for Lorenzo Euliquio Medina, Bibi
This was a different experience than what we suffered less than a year ago
with Pita, because we are all still in mourning. It revisits the pain we’ve been
burying while adding something new.
With Pita, the loss was more apparent, as our phones no longer rang off the
hook, but Bibi’s passing is much harder to internalize, because it seems like he’s
waiting for us back in Texas.
Despite the loss of our patriarch, the family remains strong and reliant upon
each other, because the legacy of familial loyalty that Bibi instilled into us knows no
rival. He taught us that while it is important to tell your loved ones that you care
about them, words are empty testimony without actions.
Even as his health diminished, he was selfless to a fault, as he would always
insist on carrying my bags at the airport, and there was no telling him no.
Bibi taught us all the true meaning of family, and that makes him immortal in
the bond that we all share. Our family is unlike any other and it is because of the
unique loyalty we all have.
Blood is thicker than water.
More than anything, Bibi was always there. Always with a silly noise to make
you laugh, playing little jokes, making jokes about Pita, Bibi was always there no
matter what. You had to half believe he really was the Puerto Rican Superman,
because he could and would do anything.

28. I see so much of him in all my cousins, and especially my brother, who I know
is there for me like no one else, and puts this family above everything.
And while I don’t want to lose him, I am happy that he can rest next to Pita
until we all get to see him again, and I know that when I do, he’ll hug me and call me
Princessa, and we’ll again get to see our Puerto Rican Superman.

29. 16.
College, Junior Year
I drove my car to the DFW to pick my mom up, speeding so she wouldn’t be
left alone at the terminal to wait with her thoughts. Our itinerary sat printed in my
lap.
“Mom, you don’t have to come if you don’t want to,” I had told her the night
before.
“I want to see you, and I want to give you the Mom’s Weekend you haven’t
been able to have,” she had responded. “Plus, there’s no one that can die this time. I
promise.”
So I had meticulously planned our Mother Daughter weekend adventure.
Her short red hair stood out when I pulled over to the curb, and she threw
her one bag into the backseat of my freshly cleaned car.
“I missed you,” she breathed into my hair, hugging me warmly.
“I missed you too, Mommy.”
I asked about her flight as we made our way out of the airport, and reached
across the center console to take her hand. After the small talk expended itself, the
car was quiet.
“Thanks for coming, Mom.”
“Of course, Baby,” she told me. “You’re all I have left.”