A Message From A Brother In ICU In Spain: "My Brother Told Me, Go Out And Tell Them What Mum Was Like."

This man Fidel has left me, and millions of others around the world, stunned. I continue to be more interested in the last expressions of “ordinary” humans than all the rest combined, which none of us have a prayer of “figuring out” anyway.

Fidel’s brother in ICU, their mother either confirmed dead or presumed dead—I’m not sure.

Nephews (plural) in the hospital.

And he manages through tears to say something on live TV that rises as if out of a García Márquez novel, yet more real than that.

The line that struck me, struck us all, was this:

”My brother told me, go out and tell them what Mum was like.”

“Go out and tell them…

what Mum was like.”

The equally remarkable brother (my best ability to understand at least portions of the interview clip) that he “tells the town” (I think) about the importance of family, “how to show them love,” that you shouldn’t get angry over small things because “life can end at any moment.” He said he just came from seeing his brother, who had just been taken off the ventilator and is stable. “He managed to get my children out, feet first, through the window…Fidel is telling Mom’s story, how good we had it, how good she was, how devoted she was to her family, that they were the driving force of her life, that the Lord wanted to take her this way, but that she has left a very big mark.”

“Let us give more thanks to God. And as Catholics, we know we will see them again,”

Watch the clip here, and feel free to fill in the blanks of my missing Spanish.

(Roger?)

He’s crying and so is the interviewer,

More victims:

“A gap in the road (rail?) measuring more than 20 centimeters focuses suspicions on the original cause of the Adamuz accident.”

—El Mundo