Walking Cuba: El Camino del Cimarron

Epilogue

The best thing for memory is time. Time preserves the memories. When you try to remember something from more recent times, you can’t. On the other hand, the farther back you look into the past, the clearer you see it all. — Esteban Montejo

My mother passed away on April 19, 2017, around a year after the walk. Hospice workers facilitated the transition and she passed in a heroin haze punctuated by bolting screams. I stayed with her some nights in her hospital room and ejected out of the chair where I slept each time she screamed and hinged up at the waist with strength she did not really possess, and sat gasping and wailing on the bed.

I calmed her the best that I could but wondered what made her scream. What drug induced dream could have organized so much adrenaline for her to do a six-pack sit up, eyes wide open, staring at what? Only death itself could induce such fear in my mother.

We talked, during that year after my return, about the trek in general terms but she showed limited interest, politely, in the details of my experience. Recounting the stucco brightness of Remedios, the eternity of cane fields, the beauty of the palms only turned her inward, to memories of the Cuba she knew, of the Cuba she remembered so vividly during her last days, even as she failed to recall what she had for breakfast or whether the medications had been taken.

Time, said Esteban, is the best thing for memory. She did not…