Mexican Moon

On our first night in Mexico, still ragged from the flight, we piled into Ana Luisa's car on a mission to find the moon.
"Can you see it?" I whispered to the G pointing to the dark sky.
"Se va a ser enorme, a full moon," Alina smiled stroking his arm with the tips of her fingers. We headed for the beach, my Tia Licha's grave site, the place where three years ago her 10 children gathered together to give her back to the sea. Adorned in flowers they swam amongst her ashes, bathing in her body. It was in this very place that moments later a family of dolphins appeared and as they say took my Tia deep inside the ocean's belly.
"It was a miracle," my mom would later tell me. As a child I dreamed of moments like these. A longing for some sort of physical sign that the dead never leave us that they are more than just a spirit. When my grandma passed away I remember shouting to the heavens, "show your face to me one last time,"and I waited, waited and waited for a reply...
Until this night I had never walked this beach myself, though, amazingly it was just as I pictured it from my mother's story. I never said it aloud to anyone but it was my intention to give my own despedida, my send-off to my Tia in the way that it is always done in my mother's family through song. We sang Gracias A La Vida so many times that the G himself began to hum along, all of us facing the ocean as though we were giving her a concert and all the while waiting, still waiting for that full moon. We sang Amigo whose meaning is lost in translation. This time we sang it linking our arms in one long chain.With every new verse I felt as if we were resurrecting the moon she seemed to inch herself up bit by bit through the clouds alert to our voices until... there she appeared in full, a glowing jack-o-lantern.
"Its a pumpkin Mama," the G said pointing. I wanted so badly to take a picture of it, to capture the moment because I knew that my memory would fail to hold the color just right. I tried and tried but the black of night sabotaged every photo.

We must have all been thinking of my Tia as we sang into night because even though I never called out to her aloud she made herself known nonetheless, a shooting star across the sky, a firework so quick if you blinked you would not have seen it.

Gracias a la vida que me ha dado tanto,

Thanks to life which has given me so much,
Me ha dado la risa, me ha dado el llanto,

It's given me laughter, it's given me tears
Así yo distingo dicha de quebranto,

Thereby I distinguish good fortune from ruin,
Los dos materiales que forman mi canto,

The two materials that make up my song,
Y el canto de ustedes que es mi propio canto.

And the song of all of you that is my own song.