Her name was Genoveva Fonseca Ganaden, but I knew her as Nana. Born in Panama before later relocating to the United States, Nana was the matriarch of my maternal family line. Gatherings were invariably at Nana and Papa’s house, where reggaetón, salsa, and dembow, the music of her native country, would blast out of the speakers, and she and her sister would vanish only to reappear a minute later, dancing, with claves and maracas in tow. Music was an integral part of her life, and she encouraged my own musical journey. After I expressed interest in teaching myself the guitar by playing their worn-down 12-string, she and Papa surprised me with a brand-new electric. She attended my many performances and recitals for drums and piano; she had me play songs at their house with the electric guitar and laughably tiny Squire mini-amp they purchased for me; when I began writing my own original material and pressing CDs in high school, she’d pop my very first EP into their speaker system so I’d hear my own music echoing throughout the house any time I was over.
In 2017, Nana suffered an accident that incurred severe brain damage. She was in amazing health for her age, but a single fall took all of that away. An emergency vehicle transported her to an ICU, where she was in a coma for weeks, before then being shuffled through various nursing homes for the remaining five years of her life. This marked the first time I had to reckon with the possibility of a major familial death. Even though Nana would live until 2022, she would never be the lively, dancing, energetic force we once knew her as. She was forever changed, and that was a lot to process as someone who, fortunately, had yet to wrestle with grief so directly. Both of my parental bloodlines benefit from longevity. My paternal grandfather died before I was born, but my paternal grandmother just turned 91. The only drawback of this genetic durability was that I’d felt ill-prepared for such a moment, as if there’s really any way to prepare for something like this at all.
Mere months after Nana’s accident, Pixar released Coco. For those unfamiliar with this latter-day Pixar masterpiece, the film follows Miguel, whose strong ambitions as a young guitarist lead him on a journey through the Land of the Dead to find his idol and putative great-great-grandfather, Ernesto de la Cruz. His most popular song, and Miguel’s favorite, is “Remember Me,” which de la Cruz dedicates to his legions of adoring fans. But the movie draws its name from Miguel’s great-grandmother, colloquially known as Coco, the eldest living member of the family and the glue that unites them. Despite her ailing memory, Miguel tells her everything and nourishes a close bond with her, dressing her up in a luchador mask and showing off his single dimple for her. Their love transcended mortal barriers. Within the first 15 minutes of my initial viewing, I’d already begun drawing parallels between Coco and Nana, who retained the sweetness she displayed before her brain damage. Whereas many people with cognitive injuries undergo drastic shifts in personality, Nana’s disposition—prone to laughter, physical affection, and artistic expression—remained perfectly intact. What ultimately defined her proved unbreakable and everlasting.
During Miguel’s adventure, he meets Héctor, a Land of the Dead denizen and former bandmate of de la Cruz, who’s unable to cross the threshold to the living world because no one has displayed his photograph on their ofrenda, an altar that honors deceased loved ones for the traditional Mexican holiday Día de los Muertos. So, the duo strike a bargain: Héctor will take Miguel to meet his alleged great-great-grandfather and musical hero, and then Miguel will place his new friend’s photo on his family’s ofrenda. It’s a deal. Hijinks ensue, and we eventually arrive at de la Cruz’s house, where he’s throwing a self-aggrandizing party celebrating his legacy and prolific output. Spoilers for a nearly 10-year-old movie with an admittedly predictable twist: Shortly thereafter, the audience learns that Héctor, not de la Cruz, is actually Miguel’s great-great-grandfather. He’s also the one who wrote “Remember Me,” which he penned not for a fawning fandom but for his daughter, a toddler Coco, before he went away on tour. We then learn that, when Héctor had misgivings about the tour and wanted to back out, de la Cruz murdered him and stole all his songs for himself, profiting off a collaborator who now lay dead by his hand.
Amid this realization, there’s a flashback scene of a young Héctor performing the song for Coco. It remains one of the most touching, heartfelt, and devastating moments in Pixar’s increasingly dense oeuvre. Whereas de la Cruz performs the song as an egotistical preservation of his artistic legacy, Héctor infuses it with an intimate tenderness for an audience of one. In his hands, “Remember Me” carries a different meaning, underlining the multivalences of art and how our renderings of a certain work prescribe new significance.
This was the first moment of Coco that brought me to tears. The second moment that wrecked me was (more spoilers) when they showed Coco’s photograph on the Rivera family’s ofrenda. Arguably one of Pixar’s greatest offenders in the emotional-gut-punch category, alongside the first ten minutes of Up and the endings of Toy Story 3 and Monsters Inc., the final scenes in Coco struck an all-too-resonant chord for me, given the events in my life that had transpired not long before its release. As the credits rolled after my first viewing, my now-wife comforted me for a solid five minutes in the theater while I cried and tried to regain my composure. I had never connected with a movie this deeply, and it remains my favorite piece of cinema to this day. I am not trying to say my grief is unique, but more so that it bears a particular weight, as I’m sure this movie does for thousands of other people. There are too many commonalities for me to ignore, too many lines to be drawn to not take note of them.
Over the course of my many, many rewatches, I’ve managed to find something new to appreciate on each subsequent viewing. It taught me that death can be beautiful, that we age so that others can enjoy the privilege of youth, that memories are among life’s greatest gifts. Memory itself is a tangible force in Coco, resurfacing through its main song and how Coco’s diminishing memory is reinvigorated once Miguel shows her a photo of her papá near the film’s end. She may not remember Miguel’s name, but she remembers her father and the song he loved playing for her in her childhood all those decades ago. Coco waits to remember her papá before dying, as if she had one final duty to attend to before she left this world.
His name was Morris Ganaden, but I knew him better as Papa. He and Nana were married for 64 years. He would visit her every day and spend hours upon hours by her side. The nursing home staff came to know him as one of the most devoted spouses they’d ever met. He’d bring flowers for his beloved, treats for the workers, and arrive at sunup and leave just before dark so he could see the roads he drove back home. Nana may not have remembered him exactly, but she certainly formed a new attachment with him. She called him “Morrie” and doted on him with besos and held his hand with an unrelenting grip. She looked forward to seeing him, and she would be visibly sad whenever he couldn’t show up.
In early 2022, Papa suffered an accident that damaged his brain, not too dissimilar from what his lifelong love had endured five years prior. At 89 years old, he died on Feb. 13, the day before Valentine’s Day—which was also Nana’s birthday. Nana died exactly a month later on March 13, at 93 years old. Just like Coco waited to remember her papá, Nana held on until she reached her own resolution, until she knew for certain that her dear husband would be waiting for her on another plane. Nana was a devout, spiritual person, and her faith, on a tacit level, must have told her that it was time to meet Papa elsewhere.
Months later, I got my first tattoo, an illustration of flowers that Nana had drawn in her final year, on my left tricep. Before her brain damage, Nana loved to paint watercolors and draw. I recall one instance when it was just the two of us at my mother’s house, and she taught me how to draw flowers, shading and all. Despite losing access to key parts of her brain, she remembered how to draw those flowers. One part of her had lived; another part of her had remembered. Coco and Nana reached their resolutions in their own ways, too. Music was a thread that bound us together, just as it had for Miguel and Coco. I love looking at this tattoo, knowing that, even if my memory someday fades, as memories are inevitably wont to do, there will still be something indelibly linking us. There’s a part of me that will always remember her.
Grant Sharples is a writer, journalist and critic. His work has also appeared in Interview, Uproxx, Pitchfork, Stereogum, The Ringer, Los Angeles Review of Books, and other publications. He lives in Kansas City.