My abuela never talked about the revolution. Now I understand why.
On silence, survival, and the stories that shape us most deeply, and why the things we don’t say are sometimes the loudest inheritance we leave.
My grandmother came to this country with two suitcases and a silence she never explained. I grew up watching her fold that silence into everything — into the way she set the table, and the way she answered questions about her childhood.
I thought it was fear. Now I think it was love.
When you survive something, truly survive it — not escape it clean but crawl out of it with your faith and your sense of self mostly intact — you have a choice to make about what you carry forward. My abuela chose not to carry the worst of it. She chose, deliberately, to begin again without the weight of what had been taken.
I did not understand this until I became a journalist. Until I started sitting across from people who had survived things and asking them to describe exactly what that felt like, to name it for the record, to make it permanent in print.
Some of them could not. Some of them looked at me with a particular expression — not refusing, exactly, but asking me with their eyes whether I really needed this. Whether what I was asking them to revisit was worth the revisiting.
I think about my abuela in those moments. I think about what she must have known: that some things you say once and they own you forever. And some things you choose not to say.
I am still learning this. I suspect I will be learning it for a long time.