Eulogy for Carmen Luisa Cabrera
There are two things Cabreras will defend at a high cost: freedom and choice. We have broken our own and others’ hearts for these two things. We inherited that from our matriarch, Carmen Luisa Cabrera. Like many of us, but less to the extent of our matriarch, Carmen was punished for insisting on freedom and having choice. Punishment and consequences never stopped her from choosing. It doesn’t stop us from choosing.
Carmen Luisa Cabrera was born in 1929 to a young mother who did not mother her. Our broken hearts and protective egos will lead us to speculate a story we do not fully know, but we know that Carmen Luisa Cabrera was impacted. She herself became a young mother in 1947, at the age of 17, in Dominican Republic. Freedom and choice were sparsely offered to single mothers in those years. The sack of rough choices she was handed was heavy and brushed her body raw. With it, she made a life out of grievous work, arduous and hopeful love, and a coarse motherhood that would have closed up a man. She paid the high cost of ostracism, judgement, and the need for impenetrable walls to protect her access to an untamed freedom and fought for choices.
She showed us that as a woman, cutting into a room with your voice, centering your desire, and resting wherever you tire can cause the spaces we carve to need constant guard. The constant guarding both tires and hardens us, but towards the end of her life she invited softness into her heart.
Cabreras struggle with vulnerability, but she chose to embody that softness in her last conversations with family. We underestimated the force of that softness and erected the strong version of her we’ve always known in our minds. Her softness was mightier than any virus. When she couldn’t hold all of that fierce and powerful softness in her body, the regret, the need for connection, the desire to be seen in her most authentic moment, she reached out to us to help her hold it. Because we struggle with our softness too, we were too scared or confused about what to do with hers. Towards the end of her life, she learned that no walls, can contain, hold, and cradle a softness as heavy as hers. She made her final choice and allowed the great spirit to carry that softness for and with her. May we all find and learn to respect the weight and might of our softness. May we recognize that we also inherit this superpower. She taught us that it is the only superpower that invites us to see ourselves despite the walls we put up to protect ourselves, especially when we do so against those who could help us share the weight of that power.
My sister Mitzy asked me to pray for the living. I pray that we talk to and remember our softness. It wants us to heal. It asks us to be accountable. It always leans into love. It waits for us.
Carmen Luisa Cabrera, our matriarch, may you rest in all the softness and power our world fell short in offering you, but that in the end, you were courageous enough to manifest.
Rosa Giselle Cabrera
