Tanto

TANTO is a word for me that carries so much emotion right now.

In Spanish, TANTO can mean “so much”, “so many” or simply “a lot”. For me… TANTO was a single word I used to tell my cousin Crystalito that I love her.

But TANTO was more than just a word, it was a whole damn feeling. It was the weight of a love you could not really describe. It was like many words we say in Spanish… depending on the moment, it embodied a whole different meaning.

Over the years… TANTO meant...

I love you so much

I am so proud of you

I hate that you are still in the hospital

You are crazy

You will be home soon

I am so sorry I cant heal you

You are a great mother

I miss Mama too

Happy Birthday

You are the strongest woman I know

Salistes a Mama…

Me duele...TANTO.

other days, it was the simple silence of two cousins that said “I love you more than words can hold”.

I was a young dad, but it was Crsytalito that trained me shortly before I would embrace fatherhood… four times. In exchange, I taught her how to count, how to sing so many baby songs starting with the alphabet. No matter how many years went by, she never stopped being Crystalito.

It was amazing how she can be a whole mom, and I never really saw her much different than she saw her own “babies” Anicia & Giselle.

Just a day before Mother’s Day… Crystalito went to join Mama, Papa and my Mom in Heaven. She fought almost her whole life for just a bit of normalcy. She never stopped that from giving us all… TANTO amor. My family is hurting….I can’t even believe I am writing this.

In the last few years, I struggled with what to say or do as she fought thru the medical visits that became daily dialysis she endured more than half her life, endless surgeries, that became transplants and then hope that she wouldn’t need another transplant… to missed holidays to eventually when the days she was in the hospital weighed more than the days she was home. Believe it or not, we felt her pain but we equally felt that if anyone in the world could beat this… it would be Crystalito.

In tthe meantime, if someone shared that they had a condition that could potentially take their life… I would shut down. In some cases it kept me from saying some of the things I may have wanted to say. In some cases, there are people fighting as we speak…and I honestly have not been there as much as deep down I want to be because… I just do not want to see another person I love in this kind of pain. To accept their mortality, was to accept Crystalito’s mortality. This is something I am actively addressing in therapy and I hope to get past this so I can continue to show people I deeply care for the support they need as they go through the fight of their life… I would love them to know that there still is hope.

I made sure to connect with Crystalito as much as I could… even if thru messaging.and our calls… we always ended by saying TANTO as a reminder of how much we meant to each other. In the last few years and all she has gone thru, I struggled how to deal with her absence at events, so much that I stopped coming around to family functions so I would not have to see that she was not there.

The last gift I gave her a few years back was access to streaming services so she can watch her favorite Disney Movies and her favorite show, Friends. It doesn’t seem like much, but all I wanted was for her to smile and laugh as much as she could given her circumstance. That in some way brought us closer when we spoke. Our last conversation was her telling me how beautiful my granddaughter Eadie is… and how much she looks like Mama.

I never got to tell her that Bella and Eadie are about to be a sister again.

Today, TANTO is how much I will miss her. I think waking up and writing this was the cry I needed… thatI been holding in these last 9 days. I had to let it out… I had to share it.

TANTO is what I feel for her beautiful daughters Anicia & Giselle, her Mom Lissy, her siblings Anthony, Booby and Tiffany as well as her life partner Alex, all of which made sure she knew love, every day they were together.

That’s all I have to say for now. It will be a few weeks before I join my family to celebrate her life and comfort each other but I needed to say something... thank you for giving me space.

Be good to yourselves… and others.

Crystal Valentine…. TE QUIERO TANTO