Grace & Chris’ Camino 2025

Stopped in this museum on the Camino. It had a nice room about local archaeology, but what really struck me was the temporary art exhibit. The writing by Maria de Miguel and art by Emma Remis really moved me. Here is the English translation:

Walking through art, pain, overcoming, and the heartbreak of a word that breaks you in the first three seconds someone utters it in a hospital room. That simple word that settles in the air and suffocates the future. You don't believe it. It can't be. The fragility of days. The practical joke of DNA when your cells multiply alongside doubts, alongside the desire to cling to the thread that holds you, to the heartbeat of a corridor of white coats that, suddenly, is inert. You hate it when they tell you: now you have to be strong, brave, and put your back into it. F*cking life, f*cking cancer.

You have the right to shout, to be silent, to not tell or to share, to explain in order to let go or not say, or not show, or to feel like you can't take it anymore, to live in capital letters, to make yourself pretty, to squeeze the months digesting and going through in your own way an illness in which it's not a matter of being heroes: it's a matter of luck, of faith, of prevention, of research, of treatments that destroy you from the inside, and it's happened to you. I hope we get more budget, fewer assumptions, fewer taxes, more oncologists, more investments, less fear

You never imagined entering an amusement park without paying admission for the roller coaster. Swallowing and clenching your fists. Colorful scarves. So many people like you, numbers going up, going down. From the decorated cells of a hospital. Your body, a prison trying to free itself from the jailer. Trying to escape, confront, pretend everything, pretend nothing. Not losing your dreams, not missing anything. One more step. A smile. Resilience, the science of kisses, the placebo of a WhatsApp at midnight. Their warmth, the strong hugs, the light rain on your cheeks, and the paint of your scar. One more test. The challenge of not looking back. Living with dignity. Dying with dignity

For those who have survived uncertainty, for those whose destiny marked a date. There is no date on which we do not remember them, that we do not stumble upon their laughter, upon the echo of the desire that did not end with their desire. There is not a day when their hands remain tangled in yours. But there is a lump in your throat that won't let go. First and last names that had plans.

I don't want to romanticize the idea of an illness that arrives anchored with a GPS, a different hope in each city. That geography is part of the pain and the budgets are different. May they not forget us. I don't want any more waiting lists or to wait any longer. I don't want the lack of oncologists in my city to lead me to become bedridden

For all those reflected in "Memoirs of a Battle." For those who wanted to dance one more song on a sunny May afternoon. And for those who can dance it today, enjoying every chord, every ray of sunshine caressing their face. For every stroke, photograph, streak, battle wound, pigment on the canvas of a gaze that invites us on a terribly beautiful journey, full of love, full of rage, full of sap, of flowers in the throat that whisper that almost, almost make a word disappear, which, from so much naming it, painting it, speaking it, silencing it, treating it, should disappear: its accent, its folds, its claws, its haste and return joy to us in every cell of a journey of Life and back.

María de Miguel,Lue lisää