Even at the very end, she remembered me.

Pictured here is my Tia Ana, who died from complications related to early onset dementia in April 2018. I was browsing through old family albums when I was in Los Angeles this month and I ran across these photographs.

She didn’t have the easiest life and perhaps because of this, she had a sometimes cantankerous attitude and was relatively quick to anger. Then again, she had a complicated upbringing, a string of unsuccessful and traumatic romantic relationships, an unstable working life, all this coupled with a mother’s nightmare in the form of a less-than-loving child…  

And yet, she was full of a bristly kind of love toward me, the kind where she would grimace at me being a mischievous four-year-old one moment and seconds later, smile down upon me, benevolent, as if remembering something tender that cannot be named.

When I moved to Europe in 2011, everything was fine with her. She had just turned 61 and seemed to be in good physical shape. Her health, though, failed quickly and suddenly: first there was erratic behavior, then a series of strange people who came into and out of her life, followed by a phone call from the hospital in December 2015, saying that she was found wandering the streets.

I so happened to be in the U.S. when we got that call, and I went to pick her up at around midnight. She sat, child-like, in the back seat, as I buckled her in: she tugged at my watch, pressing a hand to my beard. I drove, watching in the rear view mirror as my tia curled and uncurled strands of her dyed-auburn hair, the scent of the hospital still present in the car. We stopped at a McDonald’s drive-thru and I got her food: coffee, two creamers, no sugar. An apple pie. In Spanish, she asked with relative calm where we were going at so late an hour.

Home, tia, I said. I’m taking you home.

That sounds good, she said. Home.

I walked her up the stairs and tucked her in, clothes and all, into her unmade bed. I struggled for a moment with the one hoop earring she was still wearing but managed to pull it off after a moment. She lay very still as I laid the earring on her bedside table and turned off the light, whispering goodnight as I did so.

Nos vemos mañana, I said. I’ll see you tomorrow.

Si Dios quiere, she replied. God-willing.

And then, to my surprise, she said: Goodnight, Carlitos.

She called me by my childhood nickname that family members called me. The diminutive of Carlos, the name I share with my father, and his father before him. She remembered me.

I closed the door and walked back down the stairs to the car. As I pulled out of the garage, I looked up at her window. In the aqueous streetlight, I could see her standing at the window, waving goodbye.

I saw her for the last time in 2018, just a few months before she died. My mother and I sat with my aunt, who is her sister, eating takeout Chinese at the assisted living facility we checked her into just a few days after I drove her home from the hospital a few years earlier. My mother pulled up pictures on her phone as we ate and quizzed my tia.

Who’s this? she would ask.

My aunt would stare at the picture of her son.

Your cousin? she’d tell my mom.

No, Ana, it’s your son, my mom would say.

And so on. My mother would show my tia pictures of their mother, siblings, neighbors in El Salvador or in Baldwin Park, where she was renting a flat before we checked her into the facility. Some she remembered, most she did not.

Then, my mother pointed at me. Who’s he?

Carlitos, she said, beaming. He’s Carlitos.

I was broken by her death just a few months after that afternoon. But I, instead, remember her for who she was to me. A woman who helped raise me and who, in her own way, helped me become a writer—and a better person. A woman who overcame seemingly insurmountable circumstances, including a really difficult immigration to the U.S. in the late 1970s, and established herself as best she could in the budding Salvadoran community.

The woman who, toward the end, forgot so many things, but somehow, even at the end, always remembered me.

Rest in everlasting peace, Tia Ana.