By Leeanna T. Torres

When Katrina answers my phone call, I want to say dramatically – in my own Nuevo Mexicana accent – “Katrina de los Dolores, how are you chica!?”  But I don’t.  Instead, I speak calmly into the phone – an excited and yet bland-cream-of-chicken-soup “hi Katrina!” because although I know her, I don’t know her well enough to start-off a phone call with this sudden nickname.  Katrina de los Dolores.

I can’t tell Katrina about this nickname that came to me suddenly but surely – de los Dolores.  When she and I first met, despite her bubbly and friendly demeanor, I sensed an un-named sadness in her.   

Katrina’s last name is Hirt, which could be a play-on, Hurt.  Hurt like pain.  The word for pain, in the Spanish language, is dolores.

Katrina Hirt.  Katrina de los Dolores.

Yet why can’t I tell her I’ve already deemed her a nickname?

*

When Rhonda and I begin exchanging birthing stories, she reminds me that she never went through labor with either of her two children, but rather had C-sections in which they were both cut out of her while she was sedated.  “What was it like for you?” she asks.  I don’t answer right away, but instead gather together the splintered memory of what it was like, raw feeling rather than memory.  “It was a tearing and ripping open of a depth of myself I never knew existed,” I reply, and Rhonda’s eyes go wide.  Maybe she is grateful she didn’t have to endure labor.  But where do I stand in my own experience?  Was it a pain I am grateful to have experienced?  Or would I rather have gone the C-section route from the start had I been given a choice?

Giving birth to my son took seventeen hours.  I was on the 3^rd floor of one of Albuquerque’s largest hospitals, the one whose eastern windows looked out onto the Manzano mountains.  Would I give up that experience so as to not have endured such pain?  What was it worth?  Wouldn’t I love my son just as much having not endured the pain of labor?

*

As we watched cancer in it’s final days, taking Tio Eppy for all he was worth, we gathered in the living room, his body withering on the flowered-couch his wife, or Tia, had picked out lifetimes ago. The room itself was crowded with primos and Tia’s and his own children, many of us still young children, and we watched his death even as it progressed, even as it took his pride and humanity. 

Tio Eppy died on that couch.

And as he gasped for his last breaths, instead of looking at Tio Eppy in his agony, I watched my little brother, who couldn’t have been older than six or seven – I watched him watching Tio Eppy, pain in both their faces.  One man one dying.  One boy was watching his uncle die.  Who held more pain in that moment? 

Tio Eppy dying in the living room, and I watched as my little brother leaned into the table/counter looking over onto Tio Eppy’s dying body.  The body took its last breath.  Tia Isabel and her three children screaming out as they held on to a corpse, shouting at death it seemed.  A crowded room, daylight but dim inside, and Tia’s and cousins cried.

And moments after Tio Eppy’s spirit was gone, more and more crying, but my little brother remained silent and all he could do was not cry.  Instead, I watched his little hands bending the metal of a spoon, pouring this experience, this moment of death, into un-abashed grit and little-boy might that was enough to bend the metal of a spoon, turn it in and over on itself, left mangled, disfigured, un-naturally horrid, laying on the counter as the rest of us cried.

*

My friend Peggy’s grandson was only four when he fell to his death while crossing a wooden bridge in Japan.  Sometimes I wonder about her color of sorrow.  Accidents happen, but how does a soul continue after such an event?  All the days, all the years.  And I think of my own son, now 4, the same age as Peggy’s grandson at his death, who would have been a teenager by now, sending his grandmother love and text messages from across the Pacific.

*

My friend Mary-Alice was strangled by her boyfriend, but a stranger really, a man she’d only known for a few months prior.  They never found her body.  The man who admitted his crime said he packed the body into a trash bag and dumped her body into a local landfill.  Then he used her debit card to take out cash. 

They combed the landfills.  They never found her body.

How did Mary-Alice’s mother endure the days that followed the murder? The months? The years? Did she go to church, or to a grief group, or just sob in the darkness of her own kitchen every night? Did she wake in the morning and routinely pass the day with errands and television shows, or did she tear at her own clothing, helpless with a sorrow so deep it should have collapsed the world? What is it like for her to have never have found her daughter’s body? I imagine her now, at lunch with friends, or at a restaurant alone, the waitress asking her what tea she would like to drink, the ordinary of days always continuing despite a sorrow that should break the world in two.  “I’ll take English-Breakfast tea,” she may reply to the waitress, and her daughter is dead and the world goes on. Always the world goes on.

*

My Nuevomexicano Christ is all blood and brokenness.  The Nuevomexicano Christ is one you can never look in the eye.  The Nuevomexicano Christ of my childhood is always un-approachable, because who would dare approach a crucified and bloodied man, hung there because of your sins, displayed high and center to never let you forget?  The Nuevomexicano Christ of my childhood for me is all blood & fear & sin & sorrow, and his mother always crying softly, Maria de los Dolores.

*

The truth is, I may never reveal to Katrina that I’ve baptized her with a nickname.

Katrina de los Dolores is a friendly and generous woman I’ve only known for a few months. She replies to emails and offers me a place to stay should I ever travel out to Portland.  The parallel of pain is joy & kindness.  The parallel of hurt is generosity.  And I see both in this woman I’ve nick-named Katrina de los Dolores.   

I may never tell Katrina about her nickname, keeping it to myself until, someday perhaps, I know her better, realize the dolores she holds, small or deep.

And while suffering and pain are universal truths, so are joy and happiness.  Pain is pain, no matter how severe or so petty. Pain is pain. Dolores son dolores.  And on days when it feels like I’m unraveling, sure that I will drink again, I call up Katrina, or send her and random email message.  She replies back with kind or funny words, and eases the splintered stars of my heart.

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Leeanna T. Torres is a native daughter of the American Southwest, with deep Indo-Hispanic roots in New Mexico. Her essays have appeared in the New Mexico Review, Blue Mesa Review, Tupelo Press Quarterly, Eastern Iowa Review, Santa Fe Literary Review, and the anthology Natural Wonders (Sowing Creek Press 2018), THINK Journal, and the Journal of Latina Critical Feminism.