000003. - Forty Years Late: The Headstone That Finally Came Home

March 8, 2026

by Adrian Fernandez

Boy, it had been a while. Hello again to my readers. This is what happens when life gets in the way. You stop blogging as often. Here is a story that has taken most of my life to complete. I have a hard time letting things go. It is part of my organic resiliance.

On Friday, March 6, 2026, I finished something that had been left unfinished since January 1, 1987.

If you count it out — and you bet I did — that’s 39 years, 2 months, and 5 days. Or roughly 14,310 days. Or about 343,440 hours. It is a LONG time to wait.

But the truth is that this story really began long before 1987. It began across the Atlantic, in the rain-soaked hills of Galicia, a beautiful stubborn and beautiful corner of northern Spain where the soil is thin, the weather unforgiving, and for generations opportunity was scarce.

That’s where my great-grandmother, Casta Somoza, was born on April 12, 1906.

At the time, Galicia was one of the poorest regions in Spain (Even today it is Spain's poorest province). The country was still staggering from the aftermath of the Third Carlist War, a conflict that left deep scars across the countryside. Industrialization bypassed the region. Farms barely fed the families that worked them. For young people with ambition, the horizon always seemed to point somewhere else.

For many Galicians in the early twentieth century, that “somewhere else” was the Caribbean.

So as a teenager, Casta did what thousands of young Spaniards did at the time — she crossed the Atlantic to Cuba in search of a future.

That’s where she met my great-grandfather, Ramiro Fernández López, a man from Asturias who worked as a chauffeur. Asturias and Galicia share the same rough Atlantic coast — proud, resilient people shaped by rain, mountains, and hard work.

Somewhere between the sugar fields and the dusty streets of early-20th-century Cuba, their lives collided.

They married.They built a family.And eventually, that family would cross another ocean.

The First Memories

By the time I entered the story in 1981, the family had already made its way to Los Angeles, California USA. Back then this was the state of opportunity in the country of opportunity. You could throw a rock in the street and a one hundred dollar bill would pop out.

I was VERY lucky enough to know both of my great-grandparents. Not just as photographs or stories — but as real people with voices and smells and habits.

They were kind to me. They took care of me. They made me learn Spanish at home. They babysat me.

That mattered more than anyone realized. Because I grew up without a father.

The man who stepped into that role — quietly, without ceremony — was my maternal grandfather, Ramiro Fernández Somoza, their son.

He was the kind of man who carried the weight of the world without ever talking about it.

He raised three daughters as a single father.He took care of two aging parents.He raised me, his grandson.And later helped raise my sister Demi, sixteen years younger than me (who was born in 1996).

All while working a modest job for the Los Angeles unified school district and when we relocated to Florida years later at the Miami-Dade County Public School building in Downtown Miami.

He didn’t make much money.But he made things work.

January 1, 1987

When my great-grandmother Casta died on January 1, 1987, I was five years old.

My grandfather took me where he had already purchased a burial plot for my great grandfather Ramiro Fernandez Lopez (similar name, different vintage) at Angelus-Rosedale Cemetery, one of the oldest cemeteries in Los Angeles.

The place dates back to 1884, when Los Angeles was still a dusty frontier town surrounded by citrus groves. Over the decades it became the final resting place for thousands of immigrants, pioneers, and dreamers who helped build the city.

I remember walking into the cemetery office with my grandfather in January of 1987.

It’s strange what sticks in a child’s memory.

The smell of paper.The quiet voices.The wooden desk. The painted over brick walls.

And my grandfather sitting there, trying to figure out how he was going to pay for everything.

Funerals are expensive. Especially for a one income household.

He managed to buy the plot.

But the headstone for my his mother Casta — the permanent marker that says this life mattered — was something he simply couldn’t afford at that moment.

Life moved on. Bills had to be paid. Children had to be raised. Grandchildren had to be raised. We moved to South Florida. We went through multiple recessions.

The headstone NEVER came.

The Regret Years later, when our family moved to Florida. Time did what time does. It kept going.

But that unfinished task never left my grandfather’s mind. He mentioned it to me often. He cried to me about it.

On October 18, 2014, I sat beside him as he died from cancer. He was my best friend in the entire world. My hero.

And even then — with everything else in the world fading away — he brought it up again.

The headstone.

He had regrets.

He felt he had failed his mother.

And hearing that from the man who had carried so many people on his back his entire life… it stayed with me.

The Search

About eight years ago I started trying to locate the grave again.

You would think that finding a burial plot would be simple. He taught me where my great grandfather was buried. But, he didn't tell me which cemetary.

It wasn’t.

Los Angeles has dozens of cemeteries. Records get archived. Offices close. Staff changes.

For months I called cemetery after cemetery across Los Angeles.

Eventually, I found it.

Angelus-Rosedale.

And just like my grandfather had shown me when I was a child, I walked the grounds and located the graves once again.

My great-grandfather had a marker.

My great-grandmother did not.

Just grass.

The Hardest Part

Getting the headstone made wasn’t the hardest step.

The hardest step was family.

My grandfather’s three daughters — my aunts — do not always see eye to eye.

In fact, “not getting along” would be a polite way to put it.

But legally, they all had to agree.

That took patience.Phone calls. Conversations that weren’t always easy.

Eventually — somehow — they all said yes.

March 6, 2026

And then came this past Friday.

I walked back into the same office at Angelus-Rosedale Cemetery that I had stepped into as a five-year-old child nearly four decades earlier. Credit card in hand.

Same room.

Same purpose.

Only this time I wasn’t watching.

I was finishing the job.

I purchased the permit for the headstone and ordered the marker for my great-grandmother, Casta Somoza.

The task my grandfather couldn’t complete.

The task that had haunted him until the end.

A Full Circle

There are moments in life when time folds in on itself.

Standing in that office, I could almost see it all layered together.

The little boy in 1987.The worried grandfather trying to pay for a funeral.The dying man in 2014 whispering regrets. And the grown man in 2026 finally closing the circle.

Forty years late.

But finished.

The Lesson

My grandfather didn’t leave a fortune.

Working for the Miami-Dade school system doesn’t exactly build generational wealth.

What he left instead was something else.

Responsibility. Honor.

And sometimes the most important inheritance you receive isn’t money.

It’s a promise.

One that takes 39 years, 2 months, and 5 days to keep. Pretty soon this marker will have a companion.