As a child I lived two stories above a funeral homeand I spent my summers on the other side of the AtlanticOcean, and I need you to know that none of this is a metaphor.I need you to know that when I tell you my Tia Madalenahad a voice that sounded like a hundred church bells andthat she washed my hair one July morning with fresh olive oil,that the olive oil was real and so were her hands in my hair. I need youto know that this was another language for love— pouring azeite overa child’s head and helping the strands gleam into the summer sunlight.Words are only air folded into sound and I do not know how realthey are anyway. I am not writing to you in the language my parentsspoke as children. Our goodbyes are even half English, half Portuguese,a whole other language. What I am trying to say is what I cannot imagine.I cannot imagine my aunt, her voice a hundred church bells, with lungsdrowning in water that would not save her, a treatment that we knew wouldhurt but did not think would kill. I am unable to imagine her breath like that.I can only hear her voice calling my name Carlinha and I think, every yearI am losing someone who calls me by that name, whose tenderness was warmolive oil in my hair and not merely empty words in air. I am an ocean awaywhen she dies and my parents go to the house that is empty without her ringingvoice. Tio Marcelino serves pão de ló, a cake of five ingredients mostly air—the hands that make it need to firmly whip the egg whites and then gently foldthem so the dough contains enough breath to rise. It is careful work. My father asks,The cake is good, where is it from? and then regrets asking. Tia made it the nightbefore she died and I wish this were all some kind of metaphor because then it couldbe a bad poem and not a terrible truth. For a child who grew up only a few storiesabove so many funerals, I am an adult who is so childish about death: I keep makingthis story, that I will go back one day to the home of those summer weekends in Labruge,that I will ring the bell only to hear her voice filling the air. Instead, we keep these echoesof her hands, working firm and gentle into a kindness that still cares for us,                                                                                                                                                that still calls our names.