I woke up to my grandmother whispering to me: “It’s over. She’s passed.”

Like a puppet on strings, I got up and forced myself to send the work assignment I had been working on before the frenzy of organizing a funeral began. A calm sky was lazily rising, as if nothing had happened. In the distance, the roosters were alerting the villagers that it was time to wake up. Their crowing, accompanied by the incessant barking of neighbors’ dogs, was the most precise alarm possible.

It wouldn’t take long until the first horse-drawn wagons passed by on their way to the fields. It was Sunday, but a few sinners would be seduced by the iridescent vineyards and the large corn or alfalfa fields. Only those brave enough to face the criticism of the parishioners on their way to church would work on a Holy day.

I inhaled deeply, bracing for the dreadful days to come. I stepped outside of my grandmother's home, exhaling. I had grown up here, we had no kitchen and no bathroom of our own, but this porch had the most amazing view over the village. My eyes rose to the newly built Russian Orthodox Church where my mother would be buried. The church stood majestically against the lush landscape of vineyards and leafy trees on the opposite hill.

Timid rays of the rising sun illuminated the silver dome of the temple. This apparent silver lining wasn’t in harmony with my family’s situation. The church bell would soon be resounding across the entire valley to announce someone’s nightfall: my mother’s.

It had been only six weeks since terminal cancer had driven Mom and me back to our roots as we left my dad, and my three other siblings behind. I was lucky enough to work remotely for the university I was doing an internship for. She knew this would be her last trip. It was important to her to follow the Orthodox traditions, so ingrained in her identity. Having a Catholic funeral in our adoptive country – Spain – would have been blasphemous according to her creed. She would have fought relentlessly to avoid eternal damnation for parting ways with her religion.

When we lived in Romania twenty years earlier, I spent most of my time with my paternal grandparents. Mother couldn’t cope with the four of us. Grandmother was happy to take us, me and my older brother, into her care. The other two were to be taken care of by my maternal grandparents. Now, many years later, I was lucky enough to have my paternal Grandmother – the only one alive – help me with this rollercoaster.

In my childhood, there wasn’t a church on the hill, and all you could see was never-ending greenery. In fact, the land where the church now stood was where Mom was born, and she was going back home, earlier than expected. A geographical line joining the two hills where each of my parents lived when they were young and drunk with love. That line was capable of uniting hills but not diluting different religions. Dad was Orthodox. Mom was Russian Orthodox. Not only two different calendars but also two different upbringings. Different world views. Two youngsters naive enough to overlook such a division and get married.

Now, on that hill where my mother was born, all that remained was the monumental church piercing the sky with its pinnacle, a stark difference between man’s work and nature’s power. Its chants resounded like a Buddhist gong, and the valley vibrated with each chime that signaled the mass initiation. The bells and the male voices of the religious choir on the loudspeakers raced across the valley. It was only music for those ears who knew how to interpret it, among whom my mother was a connoisseur. For me, it was only a noise.

It had been a month and a week since we made it to Romania after my mother’s epileptic seizure at the boarding gate, followed by a night in the Emergency Room in Barcelona’s oncologic hospital. We boarded the following day because I couldn’t convince her otherwise: “Mom, I won’t be able to tackle another episode like this just by myself! Here, I know how things work, and we can trust the healthcare system, but I won’t find my way around the Romanian one,” but she didn’t care about what I thought.

I clearly remember that night waiting for the doctors with a foreseeable diagnosis on the morgue cold hospital corridors. There was no light at the end of the tunnel, and I felt so ill-dressed for the occasion: I was wearing an off-shoulder summer dress. I felt so stupid for wearing a colorful dress against the mourning backdrop of my life, the realization that instead of summer, I was about to face the harshest winter of my life.

I stood on the porch thinking, feeling the slow-motion rhythm that summer marked in that remote area of the world, where time moves like a cat enjoying a nap in the sun. It stretches out according to the agricultural duties that each season defines. There are no hours in such a place. There are only mornings, afternoons, and nights. There, in my remote, backwater village, everyone owns a patch of land somewhere in the surrounding area, where vineyards, orchards, and alfalfa fields provide food at the end of a laborious summer.

As I went back inside the house, the only thing occupying my head was the project I was supposed to finish. I opened the computer and wrote an email informing my employer that I was sending my last assignment, and I wished everyone a good summer. For a moment, I thought about explaining what had happened, but I didn’t want to go into detail. I didn’t know how. Did I have to stay cool and sane? Or should I have broken down and explained how I felt with an open heart? Actually, I didn’t know if I felt anything. I wondered how I could be so detached and send a work email while my mother’s body was cooling in the next room. I didn’t know. I just knew I had to get that work distraction out of the way. I didn’t like starting things and not finishing them. That was something I learned from her.

I turned off the computer, and my problem-solver self woke up. My mother was still in bed, waiting to return to her childhood home, now a church, and a graveyard next to it. My siblings had arrived from Spain when it had become apparent that Mom would not make it through the week after the incident in Barcelona. Her ironclad resilience had her living a month more despite the doctors’ diagnosis.

Victor, my youngest brother, was already searching for a coffin, Lidia was meeting the priest to prepare the ceremony, Gabi was arranging the other details. I had to call the relatives. I picked up the receiver and dialed the digits my grandmother had clumsily scribbled. I dialed my aunt’s number, knowing she would take care of calling the others. That kind of news always has a ripple effect. One call, and everyone would know.

The ringing tone resonated in my ears; it rang once, twice… “Hello, Auntie, that’s it. It’s over.”

“When was it?”

“Not even half an hour ago.”

“Did she have a hard time?”

“I don’t know. She didn’t want to take any painkillers, but I poured some morphine in her water glass.” I said I didn’t know, but I felt she must have had a terrible time. I couldn’t even imagine the pain eating away at her life.

I couldn’t believe how coldly my aunt reacted, but I guessed that was just the way she was. We had all expected it. We knew it would come sooner or later. And she had been my mother’s confidante all that time. Only then did I understand why my father had always hated my aunt. They always had their secrets.

“When is the funeral?”

“You know what tradition dictates – on the third day. So, it will be on Tuesday.”

“Okay. We won’t get there until tonight or possibly tomorrow. I will attend mass today, and after that, I have to see who’s going to take care of the cattle.”

“Okay. Can you please let everyone else know? I don’t have their phone numbers.”

“Yes. Don’t worry. May God forgive her sins!”

There we were again with those godly wishes. What was there to forgive? Forgive her for not having fought so hard? Forgive her for working like a mule? Forgive her for not having smoked? Forgive her for forgiving her husband despite his cheating?

“Yes, Auntie, may God forgive her – I begrudgingly muttered.” “She had no sins,” I said to myself as I hung up the phone. What kind of religion is it where one is born sinful? Just because you are the descendant of Adam and Eve? How is it possible that your sins are irredeemable? What kind of religion identifies you as being guilty just because you were born? If there is a God, I am sure He is much more compassionate than we have been told to believe.

I wish I could have truly said, “May God forgive her.” If I believed my mother was a sinner, I would have yelled it from the rooftops. I wished she had decided to live her last days on some island paradise, an island where she would experience what Westerners call a vacation. If she had become a sinner, she could tattoo “SIN” on her skin. And live life as it should be lived: fully, without the fear of sinning. I would have prayed for her soul if I was certain she would not be granted entrance to heaven because of a sinful, brimming life. I would have prayed so hard! Because then, I would have known she’d lived. My mother deserved to walk out through the door of life with a sin so large that it wouldn’t fit through hell’s door. Only if that were the case, I would have said: “May God forgive her because she has lived.”

Yet, the only thing left of her was a straitjacketed fear of God’s reaction. The labored breathing had served as an emotional shield that gave her a mental break and relaxed her thawing body. She was a woman who deserved a glorious climax and multiple orgasms.

Instead, her life ended with a timid urinary excretion. It was a vestige, as ephemeral as life itself, in the form of water on my grandmother’s bed where she had spent, bedridden, her last days. A stain so fragile, in contrast to the life force with which she had fought for us: her children. At last, life had freed her from all the pressure and fear of sinning. So, I prayed for her to finally reach the island of sin. She deserved it.