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For Greta; Thomas, Marina, and Elena; Alejandro and Carmen; Fernando (and Eri, too); Natalia, Lucio, and Nicolás.
For Ingrid, Manuel, Roberto, Claudia, Rafael, Lianca, and Adriana.
On January 1, 2025, Andrea died – my sister-in-law, my wife’s sister, my namesake, my sister, too.
It was unexpected. My wife talks about it, saying it is as if the moon had suddenly disappeared: she was gone, no longer there; we were left without that star.
I have lived through many deaths, but none has touched me and changed me as much as Andrea’s. The previous ones occurred either at stages of my immaturity, were somewhat expected, or involved dear friends I had not seen for a long time. The death of my sister-in-law was a true blow – never before experienced – to my vision of reality.
Andrea was a beautiful, small, vital woman, a discreet protagonist in our lives. I think of her as a paradox of sweetness and strength, of power and hidden fragility. I always imagined an adult version of Disney’s Esmeralda, the Moorish gypsy, with kind pupils in eyes that are two dark, deep circles, like that flower they call Poet’s Eyes whose pistil sinks into a bottomless chalice… until, suddenly, it begins to sing.
Tender and generous, though imperious and domineering, she often remained silent, waiting for her turn to be present. Then she took the lead, sometimes, as I say, discreetly, and sometimes vehemently, brusquely.
When she left, her last footprint left such a profound mark that all our hearts fit in it, sacrificed at that moment for her, and now, over time, voluntarily offered to her memory.
*
For me, this process has consisted of a deep embrace of my wife and in-laws, and of reflection and writing (including some attempts at poetic expression). Every day of this challenging year, I have articulated text after text, thought after thought, with the need to understand my pain and to find something that can comfort my wife and all our peers in suffering. I even conceived, always attentive to my readers of The Observatory, in whom I find support, the possibility of offering something to those who have suffered such a special loss. Finally, I allowed myself, in good faith, to fantasize that I could develop points on a pedagogy of support for the members of an educational community who confront experiences like this.
As can be seen in what follows, such a pedagogy would not remain in the school environment. It would mean a radical social change, a true utopia, and, for me, the only valid one – the complete refabrication of the ties that unite us as a collective, since those that currently govern us seem not to bind our solidarity with life and our compassion and love in the face of death.
I share here, then, some of those points and reflections gathered during the year.
*
First, the unprecedented pain, which no one can silence or hear. Then, little by little, the certainty that its weight in the sad corners of our mouths will never cease, nor the emptiness of our daily footprints.
Tears come that demonstrate strictly their biological function, devoid of human feeling. Our gaze, which used to extend into the distance, now serves only to avoid stumbling over nearby objects because their reality would obstruct us. The earth quickly swallows up our tears; everything returns as before, just as empty.
Without you.
Why continue? Only death remains. There is no feeling of life. There is no floor or memory.
“If I had died, if you had died, it wouldn’t matter. But you died… wife, mother, daughter, sister.”
After the news, pain echoes in the phone calls.
“What happened?”
Everyone wants to know (although few ask, out of modesty).
As death approaches, there are always facts and circumstances that accompany it: these are known by a specific path: “How did it happen?” In Andrea’s case, there was a history of recent surgery, with abnormal postoperative pain, and medical management that was never clear and, ultimately, fatal.
What happened?
Nothing, only that absolute novelty that we call dying.
Nor does the body testify that it has died. Not even the ashes prove that she is gone or betray her absence. Memory says she remains; we don’t know where. Nothing indicates that she is no longer there.
Articulating the phrase “Andrea died” is an impenetrable act of speech, a state of anguished dreaming. It does not belong to this reality.
Now (I’m writing for my wife),you’re halfway through a world of unfinished objects, without a part, like a ghost in a real world, like a real entity in a spectral world. You try to hold on to something, and you only find air. Not her hand.
What is missing is her hand and her breath that, together with yours, created the world.
“I can’t believe my little sister is there,” she says in front of the coffin.
*
The funeral in Mexico City occurs quickly; in two days, everything is over: saying goodbye to the body, the rush to abandon each other to our fates, without accompanying one another, as if the pain were too personal, something to ruminate about alone, without an audience, only with the family. Not a collective event.
The collective is the prompt fulfillment of obligations, clinging to the world of achievement, the absolute separation of the private and the public; mourning is something personal, almost pudic.
The private is the absence, the voiceless presence, the omnipresence of her image without a body, of her voice without breath; and her touch that is lost and must be satisfied with one’s own hands.
I restrain my wife’s impulses to send her sister WhatsApp messages as usual and to call her constantly. I deprive her memory of what happened, of what she could have done and did not do, of what she failed at… although, in reality, it is as if everything had failed, as if the only thing that had succeeded was death!
The invisible has become present. The present – the objective reality – has become visible.
“I can’t believe it; I still can’t believe it.”
*
No one will ever believe it.
I think about some philosophical fantasies of mine in recent years, with which I have managed to embrace some terrible childhood experiences, not associated with death but with the contradictory structuring of the world. Now, the pain opened by the death of my sister-in-law requires using those philosophical tools – spiritual, too – to express it. And so, I see myself delving into a mystique that helps me confront the torn world to which I have once again been exposed.
The mystique accompanies me like music. It begins by explaining that disbelief in the face of death, emptiness, stems from childhood, from those first moments when my egocentric heart was the author of the world; and it opened, little by little, to share its act of creation with other hearts. As a child, I gave my parents and siblings – and later other great loves – the opportunity to share this mission with me. I extended the meaning of my life – its completeness – to others, entrusting them with their support.
That shared sense – nurtured with each new relationship – was sustained, to a large extent, by love, and yet, where it was lacking, it resorted to somewhat artificial ways of explaining reality, learned meanings, ideologies at hand, games of understanding and language, which did not exclude disputes among peers to reach agreements or violent attacks against people who held – or were held by – another truth.
But one day, death came.
One day, death came to take away one of those pillars that supported my reality. Andrea, one of my loved ones (not, as I say, the first to leave, but the one in whom something essential was present), revealed her inability for the impossible mission of sustaining my world. She left. I was left ( me too!) without that star.
I had… well, many of us had borrowed meaning from a being who, no matter how hard she tried, could not remain. Her death put our reality at stake. All the world we had entrusted to her eyes was no longer seen.
How can we complain that she did not fulfill our order? Nor will we be able to satisfy the trust some loved ones place in us. We will not be able to give meaning to their lives, to our parents and children, to our partners and friends. We will not be able to.
And perhaps, too, they will reproach us.
*
Back in my annihilated life, in my mortality, in my fragile immortality, I try to forget… forgetting, the only status in which I can continue walking.
But there is no forgetting. What remains is not a past to be forgotten but a new and newly opened present, the one that my wife compares to a cosmic accident, to the disappearance of the moon, something like the sudden arrival of another universe into this one, the intrusion of an alien plot into the script of our film. I see it as a script that I suddenly understood, a movie that I could not understand, and that suddenly becomes clear to me.
The light of this wound has clarified reality for me.
I lived, going from the past to the future without seeing, and now the distractions, the evasions, the pretexts are over! Death is here. “This is the real world, the world that is too real, too raw and true,” it says. A world that – I, like everyone else – had never been able to completely hide, not even by superimposing on it all those dreams that we created together. A real, shocking world that I could not see straight ahead, or hear ahead, or be silent, a world which I preferred to avoid so as not to suffer.
The impertinence of asking the bereaved “What happened?” lies in not recognizing that a part of them is now going hand in hand with the deceased, that both already inhabit the non-place of death, partly diluted in life. “You have died, and you have killed me a little,” says the poet Jaime Sabines.
Those who look at the bereaved from the outside are afraid to approach; it hurts to get closer, and they resort to established formulas (such as giving formal condolences), perhaps because they intuit the ghostly being they have become: a being open to a strange reality.
Whoever looks at the bereaved from the outside does not know either that the inaugurated reality is the same, the one we all share, but now stripped of many meanings, of many purposes that adorned it. Without those veils, reality, the present – which is love and death – has been left on the surface: exposed, red hot, so to speak.
*
“It has opened up an opportunity for faith,” Simone Weil would say, perhaps. In Letter to a Religious, this French philosopher and mystic wrote, “Faith is not adherence to a creed, but an act of total attention to reality.”
I myself, I confess, have come to experience this kind of faith thanks to strange strokes of unity, of attentive contemplation, of profound experience. Outside of these, I also admit, I seem to limit myself to partial experiences, whether intellectual, physical, or emotional; to fragmentary ways of seeing.
Today, together with my wife and my in-laws, I have lost someone who sustained, to a large extent, my reality. Now that I struggle to fill that void and rebuild the axis, the center of the world, seeking protection, I intuit that only by removing myself from that axis, from that center, and seeing reality head-on and with surrender, can I overcome my fear and discover that the support is elsewhere, in a center that has always been there and from which I emerged, long ago. It is a center that means nothing because nothing can be said about it (as Hegel affirmed). Still, it fills the void and helps me to understand life, leaving aside one of the ideas that most terrifies me and the bitterness that devastates me the most: that this reality will vanish with the death of my loved ones and will be a definitive shadow when I myself die.
It will not happen that way. This reality, in which I have glimpsed love and beauty in luminous moments, will remain.
*
For my family, the New Year has become a sad date. I am sure that it does not always have to be like this; that we can accept a recovery (not in any way!) due to forgetting but to the resignification of death in our lives. I would certainly like the terms that I have wanted to describe here, and about which we can all continue to think and feel, to help a little in this regard.
Likewise, as a writer attentive to education and its power to harbor even mystery, I allow myself – as I have expressed above – the fantasy that this resignification will be integrated into a pedagogy capable of reaching every space of education and re-establish the communal sense of death and a deep and loving accompaniment in our journeys.
It would be a pedagogy that I will call devotional because of the very personal meaning I give to this word: Devotion, for me, consists in listening to one another like we attend a candle’s flame, i.e., in that tender and hopeful way in which we lean over it, examine it, and protect it. It is with this devotion that I think we should hear those who have lost someone speak; so, too, to our own hearts.
For many of us, that deep faith, that absolute trust in the common reality, protected by the collective, lies in Love, which is the deepest and most solid chalice of our certainty. There is much to be said about how to reach its bottom. Such has been the primary work of the great philosophers, lovers of wisdom. Karl Jaspers, a German philosopher, trusts human communication, which he calls existential. On the other hand, Byung-Chul Han, a South Korean, describes a type of community that he calls “without communication” because it exists without the need to agree or share messages or meanings; in it, the mere attentive presence of others unfolds its most significant meaning.
In the end, whatever kind of community we believe in, it will be – that is our hope – one in which the encounter will be more vital than the loss and capable of diluting it; in which human love will go “beyond death”, as the Spanish poet Francisco de Quevedo invoked, today turned into “dust in love”, as he himself wanted; a community in which it is possible to readmit and admire, all together, even if trembling, death.
To speak of a “devotional pedagogy” is nothing more than to describe an educational, family, and social community capable of containing its members at all times, those of joy and those of extreme pain.
We are all in this world, and the greatest injustice is to overlook it. As I said before, the only utopia I really value is that of a society that sets aside promises of a better future life and strengthens the protection, today, of our profound weaknesses; that bets – in a radical, even brutal way, if you like – on present compassion, on concrete daily actions in favor of others (family, schoolmates and workmates, neighborhood), and on the joy of sharing this brief moment in which we live together. It is like John Lennon’s utopia of imagining all people living for today.
Talking about support requires, of course, many clarifications, and they must be made. In the case of a school community, it is not a question of formulating institutional criteria for support, but of the institution accommodating and sheltering the varied solidarity and spirituality of its members, encouraging dialogue, individual expressiveness, and freedom, these so characteristic of our times.
With the above – I repeat it – I am not talking about circumstantial changes in the school environment, but about dismantling education as we know it and making room for a new spirit. It is, therefore, a question of changing the world, a utopia that we must realize, not in the future, but in the present reality, this one in which we embrace our dead.
Andrea is sitting
in her home,
the one we all inhabit.
The Light of Eternity
which enters through the window,
blinds us.
Only she sees what is ahead.
Translation by Daniel Wetta
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This article from Observatory of the Institute for the Future of Education may be shared under the terms of the license CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 
