Ha sido un honor conocerte

Ha sido un honor conocerte is the understated farewell Blanca’s mother offers months before her death, in the middle of an ordinary visit. Blanca initially treats it as a ridiculous remark, but later hears in it a recognition that their relationship was approaching its end. Its significance comes from that gap between the casual moment in which it is spoken and the finality Blanca eventually understands in it.

The Remark and Its Setting

Months before her mother’s death, Blanca is at her mother’s home, talking with her. As her mother stands and goes to the bathroom to fetch something, she says, without looking at Blanca, “ha sido un honor conocerte.” The words arrive without ceremony or an announced reason, embedded in the practical movement of an ordinary conversation.

At the time, their love has become painful. Blanca believes her mother no longer loves her and is unsure whether she herself still loves her mother. The phrase therefore falls into a relationship already marked by uncertainty and hurt, rather than serving as an easy expression of mutual affection.

Blanca’s Immediate Response

Blanca asks her mother to repeat the sentence twice. She laughs and tells her not to say such foolish things; within two minutes, the two are arguing again. The quick return to conflict makes the exchange easy to dismiss in the moment: neither woman pauses to treat it as a formal farewell, and the conversation resumes its familiar pattern.

That response also preserves the uncertainty around what the mother intended. The remark is not accompanied by an explanation, and Blanca does not understand it then as a direct announcement of what is to come. Its weight develops retrospectively, not through any immediate change in their behavior.

Retrospective Meaning

After her mother’s death, Blanca interprets the sentence as evidence that her mother already knew their time together was nearing its end. She connects it to the end of what her mother called the era of ellipses and the beginning of final stops, which Blanca figures as daggers and oxygen cylinders. The image turns a seemingly casual courtesy into a marker of approaching closure: the unfinished, painful uncertainty between them gives way to an ending that cannot be put off.

The phrase does not resolve their estrangement or erase their arguments. Its force lies instead in how it becomes legible only later, when Blanca can set the ordinary scene beside the final days of her mother’s life. What first sounded absurd acquires the shape of a goodbye that neither daughter nor mother could openly sustain at the time.

Echo in the Final Illness

In the hospital near the end, Blanca tells her mother that she and the children will be all right. Her mother can no longer speak; she looks at Blanca and cries silently. Blanca takes her hand and repeats that everything will be all right, understanding the look as another goodbye. Read alongside the earlier sentence, this final exchange gives the words spoken at home a delayed resonance: the earlier farewell had come in the midst of ordinary life, while the later one is conveyed without speech.