I Wait for You, My Love

This story has lived in my mind and soul since my father passed away.

I suspect it always will.

There are moments in life that some people call coincidence. Others call them synchronicities, signs, or miracles. I stopped worrying a long time ago about what word we're supposed to use.

I only know that sometimes something happens that makes me stop and wonder whether there is much more connecting our lives than we can see.

This is one of those stories.

I originally found myself thinking about it around my 50th birthday, one day after my mother's birthday. She would have been 84.

My mother died suddenly in 2003, and her death changed our family forever. It broke all of our hearts.

But it did something different to my father.

It shattered him.

To understand why, you have to go back much further—to two teenagers in Cuba who fell in love.

Cuba, Before Everything Changed

My father was born in 1933 and my mother in 1936. They were young when they fell in love, during a very different time in Cuba.

This was the 1950s, before Castro, and life wasn't simple. Dreams were often secondary to survival.

My father had an opportunity to come to the United States and try to build something here. So he left Cuba and came to Miami.

But he left behind the young woman he loved.

My mother.

The plan was that she would wait for him while he worked, saved every penny he could, and found a way for them to begin their life together in America.

Imagine what that must have been like for her.

No cell phones.

No FaceTime.

No text saying, I made it. I love you. I'll call you tonight.

Just distance.

An ocean.

And waiting.

At some point, my mother apparently began to worry that perhaps my father had forgotten about her.

So she found a way to send him a message.

Not a letter.

A song.

“En Las Tinieblas,” by Nico Membiela.

The title translates to In the Darkness.

The song is about separation and longing—someone left waiting in darkness for the person she loves to return.

And somehow, that song traveled from a young woman in Caraballo, Cuba, across more than 90 miles of ocean to the man she loved in Miami.

The message was unmistakable:

I'm still here.

I'm waiting.

I love you.

Don't forget me.

My father hadn't forgotten.

Far from it.

According to the story passed down to me, receiving that song broke his heart. He loved her desperately and wanted her with him.

Eventually, my parents married by telephone, helping make it possible for my mother to leave Cuba and join him in the United States.

And she did.

The waiting was over.

They were together.

A Life Built Together

Eventually they left Miami and moved north to Bridgeport, Connecticut.

They settled down.

They had three boys.

And they built a life.

Not a perfect life, because there is no such thing. But theirs was the kind of love story people hope for.

They had known each other as teenagers in Cuba. They survived separation. They crossed countries and cultures together. They raised a family.

Years became decades.

And then, in 2003, my mother died.

Her death was abrupt.

My father was devastated.

When I say he lost his mind after she died, I'm not exaggerating what grief did to him. A part of him seemed to disappear with her.

It took years for him to begin living again.

Eventually, he returned to Miami.

Life continued, because somehow it always does.

And my father continued with it.

He was incredibly resilient. Even during his later years, when he was fighting cancer, he kept moving forward. He kept hoping.

Eventually, though, cancer began winning.

It had affected his esophagus, and near the end of his life he was hospitalized. His body had reached a point where living had become extraordinarily difficult.

By then, another wonderful person had entered his life.

A woman who loved him, supported him, and stayed beside him through the end.

An angel on Earth, as far as I'm concerned.

And she would become the witness to something none of us could have expected.

The Song My Brothers and I Never Knew About

Sometime earlier in their relationship, my father had told her about his life with my mother.

He told her about Cuba.

About falling in love.

About coming to America.

And about the song my mother had sent him while she waited for him on the island.

That detail is important because my brothers and I never knew about the song.

We knew our parents' story, of course.

But not this part.

She did.

And because she did, she understood what happened next.

During my father's final days in the hospital, he lay in bed suffering and approaching the end of his life.

One day, a group of volunteers came into the ward.

They had instruments with them and began playing music for the patients.

His girlfriend later told me how beautiful it was.

One of the volunteers was a young woman with long, beautiful hair. She approached my father's bedside and played several songs.

Mostly modern music, as she remembered it.

My father was alert but barely moving.

He lay there listening.

Eventually, the young woman began to get up.

Her time with him was finished.

But then she asked if she could play one more song.

They agreed.

One more.

And she began to play:

“En Las Tinieblas.”

The song my mother had sent my father from Cuba when they were young.

The song about waiting for the person you love.

The song my brothers and I had never even known existed.

Decades later, in a hospital room, as my father was nearing the end of his life, a young musician somehow chose that song as the final song she would play for him.

My father's girlfriend recognized it immediately.

She knew the story.

And my father knew the song.

He couldn't say much.

He didn't have to.

He simply lay there...

and cried.

Coincidence?

I've thought about that moment countless times.

How did this young woman know that song?

Why that song?

Why my father's bedside?

Why then?

Why did she decide to play just one more?

And out of all the music she could have chosen, why a decades-old Cuban song that had once carried a message between two young lovers separated by an ocean?

I don't know.

And perhaps that's the point.

Somebody can look at this story and say it was coincidence.

That's okay.

I don't need to convince anyone otherwise.

I know what it means to me.

The first time that song reached my father, my mother was alive in Cuba, separated from him by water and distance.

She was waiting for him.

She wanted him to know:

I'm still here.

I haven't forgotten you.

I love you.

Come back to me.

And all those years later, after a lifetime together, three sons, countless memories, her death, his grief, his illness, and all the years that had passed...

the song found him again.

Except this time, the distance between them wasn't Cuba and Miami.

It was life and death.

My father passed away not long afterward.

I believe in God.

I believe there is an intelligence to this universe far greater than anything I understand.

And I believe love is much more than a romantic emotion between two people.

Whatever happened in that hospital room, I don't need to explain it.

I only know what I choose to believe.

My parents had spent a lifetime finding their way back to one another.

And perhaps, at the end, my mother found one last way to reach him.

After all...

She had waited for him once before.

Maybe this time, she was simply letting him know she was waiting again.

— Jimmy GonzalezNoēma Hypnosis & Healing

To hear the actual song...https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJREhn8teh4

Thank you for taking the time to read this story.

Raquel & Tomas Gonzalez (my parents)