Last night I dreamed of a friend who died recently and whose loss I still refuse to accept. There was a party in a room full of people and suddenly I saw him coming. I threw myself on my knees in his arms and burst into tears as I repeated to him: I am so happy to see you, I did not expect to find you again. I hugged him and looked at him, not being able to believe that his tenderness was in front of me again, that smile with which he faced the overwhelming force of the world. It was a cathartic dream of the kind that reminds us how much we need to allow ourselves to feel, even those overwhelming emotions we are uncomfortable showing in front of others.

I remember my grandfather’s funeral, the restrained crying of the family, until I arrived, the woman who worked in my grandparents’ house, looked after children and the elderly, cleaned, fed, washed. His voice filled the silence like a flock of birds colors the gray sky. Musical lamentations brought to his soul from his homeland (El Chota), he wove words like mullet into an endless necklace of poetry with which we could all wear to cry better. I want them to mourn me like this when I die, to sing me a requiem born only from their lips: that the rusty door that we learn to seal what we feel is broken, that the dam bursts and the waters flow to purify everything.

Counting and singing, feeling, expressing, sharing and connecting are acts of hope after all.

Feel, express, share, connect: cry for ours and others. I have seen too many photos of the three girls killed in Esmeraldas. I think of their mothers and my daughters. I see their young bodies and their bright smiles of the future. I want to mourn his death loudly and in groups: smear our faces with dirt, cover our mirrors, tear the shoulder of our shirts, scream until pain becomes melody and despair becomes poetry. There are other people’s deaths that rob us of sleep. The dream is a sea that reflects the sun in a thousand colors, small boats of fishermen returning home with food for their children. The nightmare is those shot fishermen, their blood staining the water, their bodies thrown between the canoes.

If natural or chosen death hurts, violent and unworthy death burns us, nothing can quench its fury. We do not forget our daily colleagues the market —Paúl Rivas, Javier Ortega and Efraín Segarra— killed 5 years ago. And we keep adding horrible and unpunished crimes. Ecuadorian journalist Karol Noroña recently had to leave the country to avoid the execution of threats to her life, which she received after reporting on prison massacres and other offspring of drug trafficking and failed states. Years of investigation led the journalist to realize that “the war on drugs is a failure, and a deadly failure at that” (how many more deaths do governments need to realize the obvious and abandon this failed formula?). In the meantime, journalists know that “he is faced with fear, it is important to denounce, say, say. And continue to face a country that lets us die. The fight for journalism is a fight for life,” says Karol Noroña. Counting and singing, feeling, expressing, sharing and connecting are acts of hope after all. (OR)