You’re in Spain. In a hair salon. Speaking a language you once learned when the choice was either French or Spanish and you chose the latter because it seemed less fancy, more cowboy, which is how you saw yourself/see yourself–not fancy, more cowboy. 

This is your vacation, so you ask barber Leo where he goes on his. You guess that vacation is vacación, because so much in Spanish resembles some form of English, and that’s helped you a lot as you resurrect the words you put into your brain half a century ago. You get a kick out of being able to assemble a sentence, like “A donde vas para su vacación?” It must make sense because then Leo responds. “Mi vacación es trabajar.” You know trabajar. 

He’s saying his vacation is work, which makes sense because he has three salons and must work all the time, so you give a sympathetic “awww” because you forgot that you know “claro.” But you didn’t get it clear at all, because now Leo is telling you his husband’s mother is old and needs their help all the time. That is his work. 

You tell him that he and his husband are bien hombres, because those are the kind of people who do things like that. And you know that, because for the past seven years you tried to be a bien mujere to a mother in a similar situation. 

Leo snips in a way that looks fittingly foreign, holding his scissors vertical to the hair he lifts up, and says his husband has two brothers, but, “no ayuda, no speak.” You nod. It’s all indeed claro. No help, no nothing, is too common, from what you’ve seen and experienced. You assemble what you want to share with him. “Mi madre.” You stop there. 

“Mi madre muerte en Deciembre.” 

Leo looks at you in the mirror, says the “Lo siento” that means he’s sorry, and stops cutting for a second. 

You tell him she was 97, and you hope you said the 90 correctly, because it’s a number that can sound like 20, and that would be very confusing. But he got it, because he says 97 is a good age, but not if she was unwell. You say, “Para siete años, tiene dementia.” You’re guessing the word for dementia, but how different can it be in Spanish? Now Leo is the one giving the “aww.”

He tells you what you know: “Es dificil.” Yup, a difficult seven years for her, for you. 

Leo says his mother-in-law doesn’t have dementia; she is 88 and physically failing. You fish out the word for body and tell him your husband’s lovely mom had similar “problemas solo en cuerpo.” Problems in her body, not her mind. You wonder again what’s better at the end—not to know what the heck is happening, or to know and be trapped in your cuerpo. 

“Todo es dificil,” you say, in response to nothing, because it’s true that everything is hard. 

Leo clips and says you have “mucho pelo,” and you tell him your pelo is from your padre, who says he got his Conway Twitty wealth of locks from standing under a waterfall throughout his childhood. You tell Leo that your madre didn’t have the mucho situation. 

You look at the hair collecting in the folds of your cape, and you wonder if the hair he’s cutting off is the last hair that was on your head when your mother was alive. You know that hair grows five or six inches a year, because you once looked it up due to yours always having grown so fast—again, thanks to your padre, and maybe the waterfall. Leo’s taking off about two inches. The coming Sunday, the one just before Mother’s Day, it’ll be six months since your mother died. That’s two and a half inches. So yes, what he’s cutting is the last hair that knew your mother. 

Why does this matter? Why do you feel sad seeing that exact hair brushed off your shoulders with the big soft brush you wish Leo would spend all day petting your face with? 

“Mi vida es muy diferente now,” you tell him, hoping that diferente is correct for different, which is your life without your mother, “sin Madre.” 

He doesn’t ask you, but next you tell him: “I miss Madre, pero no miss the trabaja.” There’s a pang of something wrong about speaking this aloud—shouldn’t the work have been selfless and done with joy, like in books and movies? And here you are, on a big vacation, getting a haircut and telling a stranger that you don’t miss what you did for your mother. 

But Leo doesn’t seem to judge. His repeated “Sí, sí” fades as he keeps working, and then soon you peer into the mirror and you’re looking a whole lot better than you have in six months. Next you look at the floor, at the last hair that knew your mother being swept around a corner by Leo and his broom. 

“Nueva mujere,” you say brightly when he comes back, to lift yourself and maybe the room. New woman, just how you feel some days, though lots of them you still are feeling like the old one you became over the seven years of worry and attempts to do the right thing. 

You pay him and thank him and wish him luck, and when you get to the “with your mother-in-law” part, you fumble, and he helps you finish the sentence. He gives you a kiss, and then he kisses the other cheek, like they do in this country where so much is different, yet when it comes to things like family and obligations and doing right or doing wrong, so much must be the same. You leave Leo behind to cut the hair of the next customer, who’s been reading a copy of Hola and probably eavesdropping because you know you would have been, too, even if you didn’t know all the words. You leave behind the hair that knew your mother, and you leave behind the moment you found the Spanish words for the big fact that you don’t miss the work. 

You hope to return to this city in a year, and you’ll plan to get another haircut from Leo. When you leave the dentist every six months with an appointment card for the next visit, you wonder what things will happen to you in that time ahead. Right now, you wonder what will happen to your until you see Leo again, how it will feel to have your mother gone a year and a half by then, to have a year and a half between you then and the you who went through all you did with her. And you wonder how Leo and his husband and the mother-in-law will do in the meantime, hoping that their days will be as easy as possible as they do the work that is always hard. 

Everything is hard, including the days and weeks and months after su madre es muerte. You feel you’ve learned yet another language, now a tiny bit fluent in the language of those who’ve been next to someone in dementia. Those who’ve witnessed the cruel way it teaches you grief long before the someone es muerte for real. 

There are no tests to come – you’ve been through them all. Like Spanish and Polish, both of which you’ve picked up along the way, this other language will be there when you need it. Maybe when others need it. Like when they’re having a hard time and you want to tell them what it was like for you. From the start, and through the years that you sat and sang church songs with your mother, to the moment you watched the last hair that was on your head when your mother was still alive fall to the floor, soon to be swept up and out of sight. 

Your hair is different now. You are different now. Your life is different now. It’s OK to say that you don’t miss the hard times. You tell yourself that, using that other language you’ve learned, while you walk to the square where other tourists are taking pictures of the statue of Jesus wrapped in the white linen of resurrection from Easter one Sunday ago. You keep practicing those words in that other language, feeling a bit more confident with each attempt. “You are different now. Your life is different now. It’s OK that you don’t miss the hard times.” And then you go back to your apartment and sit and write all this down so you can remember, should you ever start to forget.