Dad and Mom took care of each other with a love and diligence I’ve yet to see in other couples. Our family even joked that in death they’d continue to look out for each other, and that if Dad happened to go first, he’d be waiting to accompany Mom in the transit from this world to heaven.
Part of the reason we said that was that Dad’s life was filled with anecdotes of encounters with the supernatural. One in particular, famous to everyone he met, stood above the rest: since I was a little girl, dad would see dim lights in the corner of our backyard, underneath the bushes between two palm trees.
Back home, in Venezuela, that’s a well-known sign of a treasure that was buried during the colony. But no one believed the story, and my father was not about to dig through his well-kept garden to prove it.
My brother, in cahoots with my cousins, used dad’s tale to scare me. They’d tell me that the treasure’s dim lights were created when a slave buried their master’s morocotas, golden coins, only to be decapitated and buried alongside the precious metals. Their soul then protected the gold, and no one else would know its whereabouts. I was terrified at the idea of a headless ghost roaming around our house at night.
Years later, as my father’s dementia advanced, we were forced to sell my parent’s house and move them in with my husband and I. Dad kept insisting that someone “should dig out the morocotas” before leaving, but no one listened.
That’s how the new owners, while redoing the garden, found the gold coins underneath those bushes between the two palm trees. And much to our surprise, they gifted half to Dad; what we believed was a kind gesture towards an old man forced to abandon his beloved home.
On June 25th, 2009, at 2:26 a.m., years after Dad's passing, I woke up with anxiety and left my room. I found my eldest son and two daughters in the living room; their faces showed the same unease which had cut my sleep short.
“Did you feel it?” I asked as we were joined by my husband.
Everyone nodded, then the house phone rang. The call came from the floor below, where my mother lived and endured the final stages of lung cancer. Her caregiver, Gladys, was on the line.
“She just left us, ma’am. Mrs. Leyda has died.”
We all cried as we went downstairs to see my mother’s body. We kept crying long after her death.
After many melancholic months, Gladys (who stayed working as a housekeeper) told us about something she witnessed the night my mother died.
“I woke up feeling anxious, agitated,” she said. “I’m not sure why, but I felt that I needed to check in on your mother. And when I walked into the room, I saw someone carrying her. A tall man. I turned the lights on, but he was gone. The only person there was Mrs. Leyda lying in bed.”
Tears of joy welled up in my family’s eyes. One of my daughters said what everyone else was thinking:
“Grandpa came for her. They rest together now.”
I believed her. Not just because of how deeply Dad loved Mom, but because of his closeness in life with the world of the dead. Remembering all of his stories, including the mythical discovery of the golden morocotas in his garden, filled me with a profound sense of peace. If someone would come back to pick up the soul of his beloved, it would be my dad. No doubts about it.
Soon after, our household began to cheer up, alleviated by time and the news from our beloved housekeeper. But Gladys’s mood hadn’t changed. She seemed stuck in her sadness -- similar to the one we experienced on the eve of June 25th.
Well, not exactly similar. At first we deemed her heaviness as a natural part of grief, but as our spirits lifted we suspected it came from something else. She was quieter than usual. Nervous, almost fearful. It seemed as if the peace that she gave us hadn’t reached her at all.
I couldn’t ignore it, no matter how hard I tried. Seeing a joyless face, in the middle of my joyful house, quickly became a splinter that kept me anchored to the thought of my mother’s passing. And it unsettled me. Something in Gladys’s temper, previously so bright and jovial, made me shudder in ways I could not comprehend.
So one evening, in the midst of my husband’s birthday party, I took her aside and asked what was going on. She tried assuring me at first that everything was alright, fake smiles and all, but I managed to open her up.
“Look ma’am, I didn’t want to tell you this, since your family seemed so happy and I thought you all deserved a little tranquility . . .” Gladys said.
She looked over her shoulder, making sure no one was listening.
“The night Mrs. Leyda passed away, I woke up to the sound of her calling me, begging for help. And the person carrying her wasn’t your father, but another man.”
My blood ran cold.
“How do you know, Gladys? Didn’t you say the room was pitch black?” I asked.
Her reply taught me that everything has a price. If you take a treasure, you must also lose a treasure.
“Yes,” she said. “But even with the lights off I could clearly see it: the man didn’t have a head.”
