Considerando que la vida es una putada, la mía ha estado muy bien

The expression Considerando que la vida es una putada, la mía ha estado muy bien is Blanca’s father’s reported final assessment of his life. Recalled by Blanca while she tries to persuade Blanca’s mother to accept help as her illness worsens, it first offers a model of composure in the face of death; Blanca’s mother’s response then makes that model uncertain, exposing the fragile boundary between remembered dignity and unknowable experience.

The Saying and Its Transmission

Blanca recalls that her father said the phrase one day in hospital, already very ill. She knows it through Blanca’s mother, who had told her the story; the saying therefore reaches Blanca not as a witnessed declaration but as a piece of family memory passed from one parent to the other and then to her.

Its two clauses hold difficulty and gratitude together. The first calls life harsh in blunt, profane terms; the second refuses to let that judgment define the whole account. The force of the sentence lies in that turn: a life can have been painful, and still be judged, in retrospect, as having gone well.

A Model of Dignity Under Pressure

Blanca invokes her father’s reported words during a painful conversation with Blanca’s mother, whose Parkinson’s disease and dementia have made her increasingly ill. At the residence, Blanca urges her mother to stop rejecting help and to face the end with dignity, calm, and peace. Her father’s saying serves as evidence for the kind of acceptance Blanca hopes they can share: an acknowledgment that life has been difficult without surrendering its value.

The appeal is also personal. Blanca had carried the account of her father’s composure for years, and uses it as a way to imagine how illness and death might be met. In that moment, the phrase is more than a verdict on one life; it is a standard she offers her mother and, implicitly, herself.

The Memory Unsettled

Blanca’s mother answers that her father’s death was not as Blanca thinks. Blanca does not have the courage to ask what actually happened, and her mother adds nothing. The saying remains intact as something her father reportedly said, but its apparent proof of a dignified death is withdrawn: the phrase cannot establish how he faced dying.

Blanca is left unable to know whether her father died screaming and terrified or with the heroic dignity she had imagined. She also says she does not want to know. That unresolved gap gives the expression its lasting tension: it continues to offer consolation, while the circumstances that might confirm or contradict the consoling story remain beyond Blanca’s reach.