My grandmother died in June. I thought I would write about it now that we are still in December, for I will never again live the year of her death. I do not intend to write about her directly—primarily because I cannot. At the funeral home, standing before her body, dissected and displayed behind a glass case, I realized that I had never truly known her. My grandmother, enigmatic as she was, never revealed herself to me. What I knew of her was not so much a person as a pattern—a faint sense of familiarity, the kind one attributes to routines and well-worn spaces.

To an outsider, this may seem tragic. Now that she is gone, the chance to truly know her is gone too. Irremediably. We shared twenty-four years under the same roof, protected by the same walls, yet she remains a mystery. That is why I do not write about her but about what her absence has revealed: the void, the nothingness, the architecture of a life built around her presence.

It has taken seven months of what I can only call absent mourning to distill the abstract realities her death unearthed. These concepts did not seem to exist before her absence forced them into being. In her final years, I tried to break through the surface of her stories, to uncover something more profound, but I failed. Her anecdotes—whether from her youth or her daily life—were always narrated with the distance of a spectator recounting someone else’s story. Her enthusiasm reminded me of the first viewers of Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory—genuine, enthralled, yet detached. The stories felt true because they were extraordinary. Yet subjected to the weight of reality, they revealed their artifice. I realize now that I accepted her words unquestioningly while she was alive, never probing their depth. It was only before the glass box, as I said my goodbyes, that I understood: the narrative I had constructed around my grandmother was meaningless. The woman I mourned was, in every sense, a stranger.

Even so, a small effort—or perhaps its opposite—can bring back that comforting illusion, the false security of knowing her, of remembering her, of loving her. Albert Camus expresses it perfectly in the opening of The Stranger: “Mother died today. Or maybe yesterday; I can’t be sure.” At first glance, it seems a clever literary device, but when someone close to you dies, you understand its truth. Camus captures the indescribable disorientation of grief.

My grandmother died on June 13—or perhaps it was the 14th. Like Meursault, I was far away when it happened. I don’t know how her final moments unfolded. I know she died at night, but night stretches between one date and another, an indeterminate chasm. What was I doing then? Eating dinner? Studying? Sleeping? Reading Weil’s Antigone while she slipped into her last thought? I had planned to take a train to see her the morning after my final exam, to say goodbye—if only silently. But someone else, for whom she was also playing a role, decided to end her suffering before I could reach her.

Her death did not just leave a family in mourning—of which I feel I am not truly part. She also left behind a sea of places I will never return to. Our identities are shaped by the places we inhabit, spaces that, like the lines of a page, hold the words of our lives in order. Her death was a clean cut, a rupture through which an entire reality was lost. Now, there are places condemned to oblivion because my grandmother’s presence was the only thing that gave them meaning. This intricate map of now-forgotten places includes the apartment where she lived for nearly fifty years, where I spent three-quarters of my childhood. It also includes the residence where she spent her final years. Once familiar, these spaces are now abandoned cartographies of memory, emptied of purpose, destined to vanish.

The first time I came across the term “non-place” was at a photography exhibition at the CCCB, in the title of an image depicting a bus stop at night. It became etched in my memory, carrying the implicit promise that one day I would recall the word written on that small white rectangle stuck to the wall and, in doing so, finally understand its significance.

The French author Marc Augé defines “non-places” as spaces of transitoriness that lack inherent meaning and, as such, do not create any web of connections or shared significance. In contrast, Augé’s “anthropological place” is a physical space that, through human interaction and the construction of shared meaning, becomes a reflection of the identity, history, and social relationships of a particular group. It transcends its geographical condition to serve as a point of reference for memory, emotion, and collective belonging.

My grandmother’s apartment, as old and decrepit as it was, constituted a fundamental anthropological place that preserved the coherence of her identity; similarly, the restaurant where we would eat every June 22nd to celebrate her birthday or the care home where she spent her final years carried the same significant function. Even the school next to her apartment, unchanging since I was three years old, which we would walk past without daring to enter, rose on the map like an extension of the territory over which my grandmother exerted her influence.

And yet, now I find myself incapable of setting foot in the same neighborhood where she lived or walking down the street leading to her balcony. There is a vertiginous terror lurking behind this inability—a perception or suspicion that an essential change has occurred, a critical reversal. It is the vertigo born of realizing how easily, after death empties it of all meaning, an anthropological place of such dimensions can become a mere “non-place”—the house of someone else, someone I will never meet.

At the same time, there is the impossibility of conceiving the same place from a singular essence, as neither place nor non-place are absolute or fixed realities. Even in spaces that appear transient or impersonal, there can be moments of connection, memory, or human interaction that temporarily transform that non-place into a place. In the case of my grandmother’s apartment, it is now both a “non-place” and an “anthropological place,” depending on the subject who interacts with it. However, neither of these extremes is ever absolute, as a place never completely loses its significant qualities, even when it becomes a non-place; similarly, a non-place is never entirely devoid of human relations or meaning.

Bachelard compares places and non-places to palimpsests, that is, surfaces where new layers of meaning are constantly erased and rewritten. In literature, Comala is one of the most notable palimpsests in literature: initially an abandoned and desolate town, it reveals itself as an anthropological place full of collective memories and stories that connect the living with the dead.

At the end, despite the explanations and attempts at consolation, there is still one dimension that escapes me: time. Time is an incomprehensible space. Thus, I will never live again the year of my grandmother’s death, but neither will I live again a year where my grandmother was still alive.

“That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again.¹“

1. A.E. Housman’s “Into My Heart an Air That Kills” (part of A Shropshire Lad). ↩︎