"You came to shine and you left shining"
Claudia
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Two years before she died, Nora González wanted to take the tests to join the Sant Cugat Volleyball club.
I was ten years old.
He had been fighting cancer for six years. She had a neuroblastoma in the adrenal gland, a condition with a poor prognosis. Jerónimo González (53) and Laia Travesset (46), his parents, said to each other:
-So, what can we do now?
Well, the girl, who until then had been playing on her school team, Turó de Can Mates (in Mirasol), jumped onto the court with the Porth a Cat on her chest (intravenous line for medication) and a machine. immunotherapy, the size of a cell phone, hanging from the hip, and the nurses, upon hearing it, repeated: “Don't hit him with a ball!”
–I, inside, thought: 'It would be better if they didn't catch Nora in the club.' She would not have been able to train regularly – her mother said to herself.
They didn't catch her.
(...)
Even so, the girl did not collapse.
He kept trying things.
While she was in and out of the hospital (now a crisis, now another access, more morphine to inhibit the pain), Nora González also paraglided, drove go-karts and practiced taekwondo, and she didn't like to fall asleep, she fought against the sleepiness of the morphine and On his bad days, he attended to the ESO teachers who were going to give him classes at home.
–And if it seemed to him that he had been rated low, he would protest and ask for his grade to be raised – his father tells me.
–And in the last two years we put out the fires as best we could –the mother tells me.
Well, in every emergency, the family had to divide. A parent, with two children (Christian and Nil). The other, with Nora in the hospital.
The last relapse came in May 2021. They had to admit Nora to a kind of lead bunker at the Vall d'Hebron hospital. For three days, no one could approach her. Fever occurred and Laia, her mother, said to herself: “I hope it's Covid.”
It was not.
The Vall d’Hebron Palliative Unit was activated. While they were preparing the child, the child threw a surprise party for the mother's birthday.
–While full of morphine, he designed a t-shirt with an inscription: Faves no. He sees it, he didn't like beans. At three in the morning, we were both, she and I, in the room, designing the t-shirt. She didn't want to fall asleep. And we celebrated the party, but no one tried the cake – the father tells me.
–The palliative unit helped us understand that the illness was over and that we had to prepare for death – the mother tells me –: we couldn't avoid physical suffering, but we could avoid emotional suffering. As? Being clear about where we were. Which funeral home we preferred, what the box will be like... You talk about that and two rooms away is your living daughter... At the end of the path, they helped us say goodbye. We had to tell our daughter that we couldn't help her anymore.
–¿...?
–She was very mature, she appreciated it.
On May 12, the girl was already semi-conscious, with morphine and fentanyl, but the mother continued talking to her and that is why the doctor reprimanded her:
–You're not letting her go.
The mother leaned back, obeyed. She gave the girl her space.
The next day, Nora wanted to see Nil, the little brother. She let him into the room and gave him her inheritance: the iPad. The rest of the family came to say goodbye and the parents put on their Spotify playlist.
“He left with his music,” says the mother. And I could feel the moment we let go.
A year later, Ari, the palliative psychologist, called the parents and gave them the letters Nora had written, one for each of them. They were not to be opened until that year had passed, Nora said.
Nora González left on May 13, 2021. Today she would be fifteen years old. Nil, the little brother, tells himself that he is already past the age at which Nora left.
That's how he remembers her.
(Next Saturday is World Palliative Care Day.)
