From the moment we are born, life shows us paths, we take them or leave them, but we leave our mark, and we are also marked by the examples we receive from others. I have liked to experience things through other people's eyes. Things don't necessarily have to happen to me directly for me to learn from them.

I had a friend 40 years ago, she was older than me, but we made a nice connection. I moved to another city when I got married. Her life changed and she began to prosper. When I traveled to visit my family I went to see her and we shared as always. She had gotten married too.

One day I learned that she had had a terrible accident, when she was traveling with her brother and mother, at night. My friend was 7 months pregnant with her third child. She protected her pregnancy by placing her right arm on her belly. Her arm was fractured, she also lost one of her eyes, her mother died in the accident, but her baby was miraculously unharmed.

When I went to see her at the hospital she was really disfigured, she called me by another name and said incoherent things. She was really bad, her pregnancy continued to progress normally. She was not informed of her mother's death. I continued to visit her, already at her home when she had been discharged and her baby had been born by cesarean section. Every time I traveled I went to see her. She asked me questions, telling me how strange it was that her mother had not been with her in those difficult moments.

I sensed that she suspected something and that's why she asked me those questions, I didn't know what to answer, I changed the subject. It was not my place to give her that information.

Life went on, she had several eye operations, the prosthesis that was placed on her never fit well, but she had an extraordinary sense of humor and an impressive spiritual strength. She never gave up.

Several times I stayed with her in her apartment, her children had emigrated, but she did not want to leave the country, in the end she had to do so because the situation in our country became very difficult. So we communicated by phone or through the networks. At some point she began to complain about me not getting a visa to leave, every time we spoke it was the same, it seemed like she forgot what we had already talked about before. I perceived her incoherent, she asked me about dead people, she insisted that I leave.

I did not understand her insistence, I had already told her that I could not travel, I had my family here and I was not going to leave them. It never occurred to me to emigrate. I realized that she was not well and she no longer had telephone access or networks. It's been about five years since I last heard from her.

I always think about her, she is an example for me of the strength she had to maintain her optimism, that tendency to see the positive side of life and not get stuck in the negative. On one occasion she told me that it was not true that one has a written destiny, that at the time of the accident her brother did not want to travel, because he felt bad and she had insisted so much, that he decided to travel after 12 at night and she told me if I had not insisted so much, things would not have happened as they did. Sometimes I reflect on that, if we really have a marked destiny or if we insist on twisting the plans that God has for us. This is an unforgettable friend.

This is my entry for the invitation in Memoir Monday №38, by @ericvancewalton.

Thank you for your kind reading.

My content is original.
I do not wish to share its images so I will use the ones from Pixabay.
I used Google Translate.