Opinion 51 | Guest Column

Lucca's journey

Barbara Anderson calls it "the verb to travel", I think it is "the verb to be". To be there always, with the mind, with the soul, with the heart.

Your destiny is in others,/Your future is your own life,/Your dignity is everyone's dignity.

Goytisolo

Are we really the architects of our own destiny, the architects of our own lives, the warriors of our own battles?

Amado Nervo left it engraved with indelible ink: "Vida, you owe me nothing. Vida we are at peace."

In 2016 I read a chronicle that touched my heart. Many causes. It reminded me out of the blue, just off the top of my head, of the times I have reneged or heard others curse for a mistake or bad day. It rubbed my soul with the word dignity, the completeness of love and the tireless struggle called solidarity.

It was written by Barbara Anderson, now a columnist for Opinion 51. At that moment I knew that this, her struggle, her journey, had to transcend the publication of the newspaper. I then turned to twitter. With a like he authorized me to reproduce it in the morning newscast in which I was collaborating at that time. I quoted it verbatim not because it was heartbreaking (but it was) but because it was embracing; not because it was emotional (although it was too) but because of the reason, because one reads it and knows that life comes and goes; health comes and goes (sometimes), but love is, as Juan Gabriel wrote so well, eternal. A mother's love, a mother's struggle.

The author of the text transcribed below has mounted an exhibition (along with photographs of Covarrubias) and written a book "(In) VISIBLES, 24 Mexicans with disabilities who fulfilled their dreams", which corroborate her vital commitment to give light and visibility to all those beings who are on the same planet, in the same journey and trance as all of us.

Published in Milenio in 2016 by Bárbara Anderson and reprinted in the Buenos Días Hermosillo newscast with Soledad Durazo. Lucca's journey.

"There are short trips and there are long trips.
There are trips that you don't know you are traveling until you slow down and see that everything around you has changed.
We are journeys. We move from one place to another, we travel from one dream to another, from one heartbreak to another, from one opportunity to another, from one mistake to another."

"Journeys don't start with a plane ticket or in a bus terminal.
Journeys begin within oneself.
In 30 days Lucca and us (his dad, his mom, his brother Bruno and his inseparable Nayeli) will go on a trip.
The longest one any of us has ever taken.
A trip that was postponed three times, a trip that carries within it almost three years of hopes, illusions, expectations and that rare emptiness in the belly generated by adventures that no one knows how they will end."

"We are going to India.
There, in Bengaluru, a group of engineers, physicists and doctors -half Mexican and half Indian- is waiting for us. They created the Cybotron, a device born from the technology of magnetic resonators, which also emits radiofrequency, but not to return images but to activate proteins in brain cells, regenerate damaged tissues and rebalance their electrical charge".
"A full 28-day treatment, requiring no more and no less than moving to Asia. "We are water and electricity," Roberto Trujillo, the Mexican neurologist behind this invention, told us."
"We are water and electricity that travel."

"What are the five of us doing in this warm Indian city testing a science fiction device? This journey actually began a little over five years ago.
On the night of October 14, in a delivery room crammed with doctors and nurses. Andres and I were expecting Lucca (we didn't even know it was a boy: we didn't want to know the sex until he was born, so that the illusion would be complete)."

"On his journey from the womb to the light, Lucca slowed down and became wedged in the home stretch.
The murmur all around turned to silence. Excitement turned to fear.
A short journey, no more than two pushes, became eternal, a marathon of a couple of centimeters left him out of breath and out of strength.

I didn't get to see him until almost 12 hours later, as if I was expecting him back from a transatlantic voyage.
The doctor sat on my bed and told me that this had been the worst delivery of his life, that 'something happened' that night and he still didn't understand what it was."

"Between the dizziness, the oxytocin, the painkillers and the anesthesia... I didn't know what happened either.
Andres didn't know either, traveling through the halls of the neonatal intensive care hospital, to administration and from there to my bed to reassure me. Now, as we prepare for this trip to India, I understand what happened that night: they all forgot one detail, cutting the umbilical cord."

"Lucca has been attached to our bodies and our lives to survive for more than five years.
He depended on us to learn to breathe, he could never eat by his own means (he still eats through his belly button), he gets warm if we keep him warm, he quenches his thirst if we pass a few drops of water with a syringe through his mouth, he communicates with us by movements and little kicks (like in his 9 months in the belly) and with his eyes which are his most powerful weapon to tell us what he feels, what he likes and what he doesn't."

"Lucca's cerebral palsy, the mark on his head from that first trip, became the most difficult, unfamiliar and exhausting journey we have undertaken with Andres. It has shown us the most vulnerable but also the bravest side of each of us. We have added more passengers, like Bruno, who understands perfectly that in this journey we have to work with Lucca every day.
We became his arms, his feet, the support of his head and his voice.
We have learned things from unusual to vital to survive, which has led us to search breathlessly even under the rocks for any medicine, therapy, doctor, device, accessory to make his journey more comfortable and more independent."

"That includes five tickets to fly to the other side of the world.
That includes learning to tame expectations, a mixture of faith and hope, but with high doses of realism to understand that it is 'an experimental treatment.'
Lucca will be the first Western child to try this method.
There is no history, we don't know what he will be able to recover thanks to this technique or exactly what will improve in his current condition."

"It's a huge question mark.
The same one we had when we walked into that delivery room in 2011.
The same one we all carry when we start any journey."

The same journey that haunts everyone who gets sick, who suffers, who suffers, who is born.

The answer is there, clear, plain, and there is only one answer for all to see. It is called struggle, dignity, love.

Pronounced vida.

Sometimes the costs of being alive are not fully understood. Constant questioning,

that has no firm or unique answer, it all depends on how you face adversity. Victor Hugo Rascon Banda, the playwright, upon learning of the illness that finally led to his death, wrote "Why Me", a book without waste.

Barbara Anderson calls it "the verb to travel", I think it is "the verb to be". To be there always, with the mind, with the soul, with the heart. It is to be silent, but not absent. It is to be on a fighting footing. It is not to let your guard down. It is to be alive.

Let me end this text just as I ended it in 2016.

"As I read, reread and share this wonderful testimony of being, traveling, of life...I can only be certain that standing I will await the good news of Lucca's journey which of course brings the return included."

Standing up I have to shake Barbara's hand, soon, very soon.