Yesterday, after the final goodbye, I bought a book.
It wasn’t a thought-out or symbolic decision. It was a simple gesture, almost automatic. I walked into the Librería Nacional, ordered a coffee with ice cream—as if the body needed something cold to wake up and something sweet to ease the heaviness of these days—and there it was: Mujeres del alma mía by Isabel Allende.
I didn’t look for it. It found me.
The title stopped me. Women. Soul. Life. Impatient love. Good witches. And one of my mom’s favorite writers. I thought of my mom. Of the woman she was. Of her way of being in the world, of loving without reserve, of taking life seriously without losing joy. I thought of her strength, her elegance, her laughter. Of her very own way of inhabiting the everyday.
I opened the book and read a few pages right there. Unhurried. Not to distract myself or to look for answers. I read the way one accepts that life, even after a definitive farewell, continues to offer itself in small gestures. Not as consolation, but as presence.
A book.
A coffee with ice cream.
An ordinary afternoon after saying goodbye.
For years I have thought about life through reason, through effort, through the idea that understanding is a form of control. I grew up trained to read, to learn, to work things until taking them apart. To believe that if I understood enough, I could sustain order.
This week I was going to Harvard Business School and planned to use The Little Prince as a point of connection with the group I was going to lead. To talk about leadership from what is essential, from what cannot be seen but holds everything else together. I didn’t imagine that that phrase would return to me now, in this context, with a different weight: what is essential is invisible to the eyes.
Perhaps that is why death does not allow itself to be understood through logic or medical facts, no matter how precise they are. Perhaps it is not about explaining it, but about accepting it as part of the same fabric we call life. Not as its opposite, but as its inevitable boundary—the one that forces us to look more carefully at what we once took for granted.
Finding that book that day was not a sign or a coded message. It was continuity. A discreet way of understanding that life does not abruptly stop, but changes form. That there are things that do not leave with the body. That what is fundamental does not disappear because it was never entirely visible.
Maybe death is that: the moment when the invisible becomes impossible to ignore. The moment when we understand that what is essential cannot be measured, controlled, or held onto—but it can be recognized.
And as I drank that coffee with ice cream, with the book open in front of me, I thought that perhaps living—truly living—is learning to look better. To see beyond the obvious. To accept that life and death are not opposed, but intertwined, part of the same mystery.
What is essential is invisible to the eyes.
And yet, it is still there.