Tomorrow is my birthday and I always like to mark it somehow, as since losing a cousin in childhood and two more as young adults, I never complain at another year passing because I am only too aware of the alternative.
And this year this grim reality has been brought home to me again with the news of the death this morning of my dear ex-sister-in-law Teresa.
Teresa was a highly-intelligent, articulate, intellectual who, had she been born in other circumstances or times, would undoubtedly have gone on to forge a career, most probably in politics. As it was, he life, trying her best to bring up a young family in the post-coup d’etat years in Uruguay was hard. She lived without her beloved Jose, her soul mate, and her eldest daughter Martha for almost two years while they emigrated to Spain to build a better life for them all before she could follow on with her two younger children. And there she built a life, which wasn’t always easy; work was plentiful for four or five months but once the tourist season was over the family then had to survive the rest of the year. We used to laugh together during the long winter months at the number of ways she could make a meal out of minced meat! And it was also a life that was somewhat alien to her after the life she’d known in South America. But she didn’t complain, she just got on with it until things got better.
She was kind, she was dynamic, she was loving, she was hard-working, she was bright, she was sympathetic and empathetic, she was opinionated sometimes, but she was a friend for life and I have much to thank her for. She was the glue that held all her family together and they were her whole life and her reason for living. Adore is too weak a word for what she felt for her children and grandchildren and for her niece, my daughter, who she never forgot in spite of the distance between them. How my daughter looked forward to her trips to Ibiza to visit Titi. Even last September, when she’d already had one lot of surgery, she was so pleased to see her and go out with her; so hospitable, so loving.
But now, the vile disease she’d been fighting for years and years finally won and she is no longer with us. And the world is a sadder place for that.
And so tomorrow, mindful of my own mortality and grateful that I’m alive and well, I will raise my birthday glass extra high and shout out a toast to the memory of a truly wonderful woman, the brightest star in the sky. Teresa Martinez Nieves: Rest In Peace and thank you.
What a wonderful tribute to a truy wonderful woman
Beautiful words Elaine x
Lovely tribute.