Remembering Mom: The Fickle Finger of Fate
Looking back at my mother's life, it's amazing how fickle Fate can be. I don't write often about my mom; sometimes I feel as if my heart will break if I even think about her too much. But she was the only parent I really had; my father died in a plane crash not too long before my second birthday, so Mom raised me pretty much on her own. But if I don't write about her and share my memories, she'll probably live on only in the memories of a few people. Mom was an amazingly resilient and adventurous person. After her first marriage failed and she got an annulment from the Catholic Church (there was no divorce in Colombia in the early 1950s), she decided that moving back in with my grandparents and raising my older half-sister as a spinster widow was not for her. Defying convention and my grandparents' wishes, she got a job as a flight attendant in Colombia's flag airline, Avianca. It was not easy for her. My granduncle Bernardo (my grandmother's...