MARIA LISBOA by AMALIA RODRIGUES. Story by N.T. McQueen. [Video]

Belem, Portugal. The summer of 2024.

Before she died, my mother always wanted to travel to Portugal.

Her grandmother immigrated over to America as a young girl, hopping on a ship from the Azores and, somehow, winding across the Atlantic and continuing west until ending up in a small town in Northern California. Along the journey, our language died off in favor of becoming all-American.

The summer before she passed away in a hospital bed, she had been coercing my dad into taking her to where her family came from. To find where the roots had been established, pull off chunks of Portuguese rolls, and savor pasteis de nata along the shoreline. For her, it may have been to connect deeper with her blood or something like that.

Just as her body slowly faded in a sterile hospital bed from sepsis, the dream succumbed as well.

Nine years later, I woke up in an apartment with …