Longtime Ago people

Tag: grief

  • I Wrote Our Story So My Sons Could Understand

    When I sit down with Miguel, I’m reminded that grief rarely arrives as a single moment. It comes as silence and the pressure to keep going. His story begins with a life shaped by movement: born in California to a Spanish family, pulled back to Madrid and raised around diplomacy and travel. That background matters because it explains the way he later tries to cope with trauma, searching for meaning, structure and motion. When he meets Nadia while working in Abu Dhabi, the relationship is immediate and intense. They marry within six months. It is romantic, dramatic and real, and it becomes the foundation for a family life that later has to absorb the shock of metastatic breast cancer and all the uncertainty that follows.

    Caregiving during advanced cancer is often described as “being strong”, yet Miguel puts words to what that strength actually costs. He is still working, still parenting and still trying to keep hope alive while watching the person he loves suffer. He starts writing at night, not as a polished project but as a way to vent and make sense of what is happening. That raw, real‑time account becomes his book, The Boxer’s Corner, a memoir of caregiving and anticipatory grief that speaks to anyone supporting a partner through cancer treatment. Writing becomes a survival tool. If you can explain something clearly, you can begin to understand it, and if you can understand it, you can endure the next hour.

    One of the hardest parts of terminal illness is that the caregiver often has no margin to fall apart. Miguel describes the loneliness of having to stay optimistic while also quietly preparing for what might come. When Nadia dies in his arms, the next task is unthinkable: telling their sons the following morning. He frames it with tenderness, focusing on the end of suffering and the idea of rest, because the children have seen too much pain already. This is the hidden work of bereavement and widowed parenting: translating loss into language a child can hold, while your own body is exhausted and your mind is trying to keep time from moving forward.

    Healing is not a straight line, and for Miguel it involves an audacious choice: a five‑month trip around the world with his boys and a travelling tutor. The idea lands suddenly, sparked by a taxi driver’s casual suggestion, and it becomes a deliberate form of grief therapy through travel, wonder and shared experiences. He remembers moments of pure awe, like hearing his children react over helicopter headsets above a glacier and realising they are breathing again. Music becomes a bridge, pinning memories to playlists and bringing Nadia into ordinary days when an old track plays. Alongside that tenderness sits a sharper lesson about cancer‑care communication: constant positive spin can detach families from reality and dump the burden of truth onto caregivers.

    Miguel’s rebuilding continues in Madrid, mixing new work, a Real Madrid YouTube channel for English speakers, and a renewed respect for simple family rituals that deserve to last. It is a story of movement, memory and the courage to rebuild a life from the inside out.

  • Made in Harlem: Growing Up Fast, Surviving Even Faster

    When I sit down with Mumu, I realise that Harlem is more than a postcode. It is a lived map with edges, rules and memories. He starts by placing Harlem from 110th to 155th, river to river, then pulls me back into 1990s New York street life, where outside means everything: block parties, basketball, water fights, loudspeakers on hot days and winter streets that feel emptier but never truly quiet. The nostalgia sits beside the afterimage of the 1980s crack epidemic, a crisis that shaped what children saw, what adults feared and how neighbourhoods learnt to survive.

    That wider history becomes personal when he talks about how the crack era slowed down rather than vanished, and how family members were caught in it, recovered and carried the scars. Growing up in Harlem also meant growing up fast. He tells me about taking buses alone to school in Spanish Harlem, getting lost as a child and ending up in Washington Heights at night, terrified and crying. A police officer becomes an unexpected guardian, a reminder that safety sometimes arrives through strangers, even in systems that can also threaten families. It is a vivid picture of urban childhood, where independence looks brave right up until it turns dangerous.

    Family sits at the centre of everything. Mumu describes a father shaped by Islam, connected to Black Panther organising and the Muslim Islamic Brotherhood, and determined to keep a large blended family together. That faith brings structure, but it also brings fear and violence, including being pulled out of church and punished for crossing religious lines. Alongside this is deep tenderness for his mum, who is “sweet” and beloved, but becomes seriously ill with kidney failure. He speaks with the intimacy of a carer, remembering routines, TV nights, jokes and the everyday labour of love that fills a home when illness becomes normal.

    The most painful thread is what remained unsaid. Mumu knew he was gay from early childhood, asked the questions out loud, then learnt to hide the truth from nearly everyone, including the person he felt closest to. He describes the pressure of being Black, Muslim and a young man in a time when HIV stigma and homophobia were everywhere, including friends who threatened violence. That context explains why secrecy felt like survival, and why grief later carried an extra weight. The conversation holds the complexity of identity in conservative environments without reducing it to a single moment.

    As the timeline moves forward, music becomes a bridge between memory and identity. He names the artists and sounds that scored his youth, from Slick Rick and Big Daddy Kane to dancehall and reggae, painting a picture of Harlem culture that is joyful, loud and communal. Adult life lands with a different rhythm: living near the same public housing development, working as a station supervisor in the New York City subway system and preparing to enforce fares and face the daily aggression that comes with public‑facing roles. It is a grounded look at the invisible work that keeps a city moving.

    COVID‑19 changes the tone again, turning the subway into something eerie and dangerous, with fewer riders, more vulnerability and stories of violence that never fully reached mainstream news. Loss becomes immediate when he speaks about his brother dying during the pandemic, and how that fear helped him stop drinking when he reached the same age. Yet the episode does not end in despair. Travel to Madrid and dreams of London reopen possibility, juggling returns as a surprising turning point, and the future becomes practical: save, invest, retire, buy land, grow fruit and veg and build stability on his own terms.