Talk Vomit

By Belle Habs

On the night I first learned about death, I was ten years old. The static flickering of the old black-and-white TV filled the bedroom, like flies crashing into light. I sat cross-legged on my bed, the faint smell of arroz con pollo still lingering in the air from dinner, while my sister’s laughter drifted in from the living room where she and my mother watched Topacio. The show I had chosen was quieter, slower, about a family on a farm like the one we had left behind in Cuba. The main character was a sweet, older man with a full head of white hair, soft as clouds on the black-and-white screen. By the end, when he died, I felt the weight of his absence as if the air itself had thickened. My chest ached, and I realized that one day my mother would also leave me.

I ran into the other room, the linoleum cool beneath my bare feet, and threw myself into her arms. Her perfume was floral and faintly powdery. It mixed with the smell of sweet plantains from dinner. I whispered “Te amo” into her ear, my voice trembling. She stiffened, pushed me aside, and scolded.

“Lena, esas palabras son para personas enamoradas, como tu papá y yo.” 

The rejection stung like a slap, and I carried that confusion with me, even as English became my dominant language after we moved to the United States.

Years blurred into the rhythm of school bells, the smell of chalk dust, and the taste of cafeteria food. I grew into an English scholar, into books, into the texture of words themselves. But the memory of that night lingered, a bruise beneath my surface.

When I was thirty-eight, my father became the little old white-haired man in that childhood movie. He had spent seventeen years in prison in Cuba for his involvement against the Castro regime, only to be imprisoned for twelve years by his own body after his stroke. In his last days, we ended our visits with “Te quiero porque me da la gana,” which means “I love you because I feel like it.” That was the first time I dared to say “I love you” to either of my parents again. That summer, I experienced the pain of loss I had only empathized with as a ten-year-old. All along, I thought I would lose my mother first, as she was a few years older than my father. 

Decades later, I pushed open the familiar double doors of my mother’s care center. The air smelled of bleach and faint lavender, the kind of scent meant to soothe but never quite succeeds. For a moment, I imagined I was there to pick her up for an appointment, but the fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, and the conference room was arranged in a neat circle of chairs. Posters about “healthy aging” glared in bright colors, mocking the heaviness in my chest. Her medical team’s voices were brief, efficient, their pens scratching against paper. I translated her objections about North Carolina, about missing Miami, where Spanish rolled like music through every street.

She had lived in this country for forty-five years, nearly as long as she had in Cuba, but had never mastered English. I thought of her attempt to learn English at forty-nine, her tongue stumbling over consonants, the frustration in her sighs. I thought of the factory floors she had worked on, the smell of machine oil clinging to her clothes each morning as she woke us to get ready for school. She worked long nights to raise two daughters in a foreign country. 

I glanced at her in the oversized patient chair, the harsh light revealing every crease in her ninety-one-year-old face. Her skin was parched, and her hands trembled slightly as she adjusted the blanket on her lap. She had survived a stroke at eighty-three, during COVID, and still blamed me for worrying her into a frenzy. I swallowed the guilt as I always did. Then the form slid across the table: Palliative care. The words were heavy, metallic, and final. I signed, the pen cold in my hand, and kept breathing.

The next day, at Harris Teeter, the automatic doors whooshed open, releasing the smell of baked bread and citrus from the produce section. My mother looked around with wide, innocent eyes and asked, “You haven’t brought me here before, right?” My throat tightened. I nodded, protecting her peace, even though the lie burned.

The hum of the freezers, the squeak of shopping carts’ wheels, the scent of freshly ground coffee beans pressed against me with the weight of those words: palliative care. My role was to keep her comfortable, to hover as she once hovered over me, and forgive the past. She lived to help others now; her flock of Hispanic women in the PACE program trailed behind her like baby chicks, their voices rising in laughter and gossip. She believed God had kept her here for them.

And I believed it too. Because I was my mother’s daughter. From the night I first understood death at ten years old, to the day I signed that form, time had carried me through all the pain, resentment, and rejection. Facing her mortality now forced me to see her differently, to recognize her gifts, and to stop mourning the mother she was not able to be when I needed her most, and to appreciate what she had given me, my life.