Podcast: Unsung Heroes IV: Maria

Maria was my paternal grandmother and one of my unsung heroes. She was left with four small children to fend for herself when her husband, my paternal grandfather, self-exiled to Argentina during the Spanish Civil War after being warned that his arrest was imminent due to his support of the failed Republic and opposition to fascism. For the better part of two decades,  my grandmother was left to run my grandfather's business without his skill or business acumen and to raise four children during and after the Spanish Civil War and its sad aftermath. As is true of my maternal grandmother about whom I also wrote in this my longest free-verse poem, I never heard her complain even once about her burdens in life, or talk about her hardship, or of her self-sacrifice. I know their stories through my parents and others who knew them well, and through my own experience with them. Both grandmothers were as different as can be from one another: Maria was regal, very soft-spoken and seemingly aloof, while Remedios was gregarious, fun-loving and a people-person. Both shared unspeakable hardships in very different ways and both got along very well in later life when they met for some time in New York, perhaps their unspoken past hardships a bond between them that bridged their differences. It is women like these that built and rebuilt this world from the shattered dreams and other physical and emotional debris left behind by good, honorable, well-intentioned, idealistic men like their husbands who followed their conscience down the road to perdition leaving them to pick up the pieces on their own and rebuild a future from the wreckage of their lives through sheer force of will and hard work.