Ximena and Matías: I Will Win
Two children, one certainty, a love that continues
This post is also available in Spanish. Read it here
There are stories you don’t read — you recognize them.
They arrive to gently rearrange your heart.
Ximena’s story touched me because it doesn’t try to explain the unexplainable… it simply illuminates it.
Ximena was 10 years old and lived through a very hard battle: brain cancer.
Even so, in the midst of what felt deeply unfair, she carried a quiet strength, as if somewhere inside she already knew something that those of us still here may take years to understand.
Her mother, María Elena Carmona Rodríguez, wrote a book — I Will Win: Life Does Not End Here, available on Amazon — as an act of love and memory.
Within its pages are details that stay with you: the notebook, the pencil, and the way Ximena would look upward, as if searching for something you cannot see, but can feel.
It wasn’t just a look — it was a presence.
As if a silent conversation were taking place.
And that’s when everything connected with Matías.
Matías also speaks to us in ways that don’t always fit into words.
Sometimes through small signs, sometimes through dreams… sometimes through the sound of the giraffe, which to this day still feels like a wink, as if he were telling me, “Mommy, I’m here.”
There is a scene I hold like a treasure:
Matías and us — Andrés and I — playing bingo with a farm animal bingo set.
He would draw the pieces and do something that always caught our attention: he made sure all three of us won at the same time.
And when it happened, he would say happily, “We won!”
The three of us would clap.
It was simple, it was tender… but it held a strange magic, as if he were rehearsing a much greater truth.
When Matías departed, that word stayed with us.
And when we speak to his energy, when we feel him close, we tell him:
“Son… you won.”
Because yes — he won. He won love. He won light. He won eternity.
And deep inside, Andrés and I feel that one day we will say the other thing too — the one he had already been practicing without us realizing it: “We won.”
That is why Ximena’s story pierced me so deeply.
Because her “I will win” doesn’t sound like competition or denial of pain.
It sounds like certainty.
As if some children — those who love in an immense way — arrive with a knowledge that takes us a lifetime to remember.
And there is something more.
In Matías’s last week, Andrés and I have photographic records that still take my breath away: Matías looking steadily upward.
In one of the photos, there is even a small tear in his eye.
I truly feel — I really do — that in those moments his soul was coming and going, as if preparing itself.
As if he were already practicing the journey… while at the same time saying goodbye with immense tenderness.
When I read about Ximena — her notebook, her pencil, her upward gaze — I feel that life sometimes gives us echoes.
Two different stories, two different children, but one same language: the language of love that does not go out.
Today I simply want to leave this here, like lighting a small candle:
Ximena and Matías… “I will win.”
Because perhaps winning was never about staying.
Perhaps winning was teaching us how to love without fear, even after.
And reminding us that when love is real, absence never has the final word.