I've never watched someone die before. The official time was 2:21 a.m.

For a couple hours I watched my aunt gasping last breaths, with a thought of urge on her lips that none of us in the tiny room could understand. This was the aunt who sent me $100 birthday cards every year since I was a kid, even though I hardly deserved them. This was the aunt who I liked to squeeze a hug out of when she'd come over for barbeques in the summer. This was the aunt who I'd catch smiling at me across the table, who'd say "Bianca is very beauty-full, she's got the Barcelone looks". This would always make me happy, because growing up I looked like neither my mom or sister, who look like each other with their bright round eyes and heavy eyelids. I always felt like the odd ugly duckling out.

The more I saw her, the less I saw of her.
"Auntie Belen, you're shrinking! Don't lose any more weight," I would plead as I squeezed my arms around her and back to my own body.
She'd send me this half helpless look, and search my face for the right words. Maybe she knew what was going on inside of her. Maybe she didn't.

The last words I had with her were this past Monday. She was so thin, yet tanned dark having come back from her trip to the Philippines.
The painkillers made her somewhat loopy to talk to, but it was still my favourite aunt nonetheless.
She searched my face like always, murmuring "you look beauty-full today," to which I widened my eyes and exclaimed "no! You look beautiful auntie Belen."
Her eyes looked off and out of focus at my words. The drugs must have been making the room spin.
She really was beautiful. Even my dad said she looks like their mother. I've never heard my dad call anyone pretty.

I saw it. That moment, when your life is reeling and re-reeling inside your head, behind your closed eyes, when you can't separate memory from reality. Her eyes were lulled open as she gasped and moaned urgent tones, every 5 seconds, I counted. It was like that for hours.

Eventually her gasps were no longer close and shallow but far and deep. 8 seconds would go by before her chest would rise. I remember hating that she was barely there, in pain, unable to tell us what she had to say, and wishing that her chest would stop rising. Just let go, we all thought. I sat by her bed with my face a finger away from her cheeks, watching the pulse under her thin skin. I loved her dearly, but I wanted to see the pain stop.

When the moans stopped, sighs replaced them. Soft ones, sadder ones, wounded ones. Every 5 seconds. 20 seconds went by with no sound, just gasping.
But just when I thought she would finally rest, back they'd come out, sometimes in twos or threes at a time.
Then they stopped too.
And after that her chest stopped rising. Her entire body braced itself, and with one wave, sank deeper than ever into the bed.
In that moment, I would have done anything to see her chest rise again.


She died with a rosary in her hand.

We visited her twice already. She hasn't eaten in days. She hasn't woken up in days. Sleeping Beauty syndrome, I like to call it when I look at her, with hair splayed out from her peaceful face like a black fan. Comatose, my mom says.

She didn't always have the peaceful face. The other night her face was perma-contorted. But the nurse came by around midnight to hook her up to a steady bag of painkillers, something stronger than Oxycontin.

I sat by her bed in silence for a bit. Went to the bathroom. Looked at her framed photos of past cats, Molly and Oliver, sitting on a shared chair by the kitchen table looking into the camera like a pair of her own toddlers. In her bedroom were photographs, of them are 3 different photographs taken on her wedding day. As cheesey as a prom-date shot but as nostalgic as your own parents. She married a German. He died of lung cancer a couple years ago. He is still the greeting on her answering machine. They had no children. They only had each other. They only wanted each other.

The similarities are fucking uncanny that I'm scared shitless, staring into this one-way mirror of a potential future of mine.

I think it hits me the hardest not because I see her in me, but because I see me in her.