Medical ID theft follow-up: Cancer victim at peace with return to Mexico in life's twilight

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Stricken by cancer, she left Chicago—where she was an illegal immigrant—to see her children and her childhood home

After two years of cancer treatment in the United States during which she used another's woman's identity, Mariana de la Torre is back on a dusty plot of land in this tiny town, a refuge that was her world during her early years.

She spent her first six years here in western Michoacan state, in a steamy corner of central Mexico known as "the hot country."

In a journey that Mariana would repeat decades later, de la Torre's mother left this farm to find work in a larger city—in this case, Uruapan, about 60 miles east. While de la Torre's mother worked at a street-side stall selling clothes and other knicknacks, she would send her daughter back to Cenobio Moreno for extended vacations.

Here, de la Torre befriended the pigs, chickens and other animals that roamed freely. She climbed a tree and hid out in the branches until sundown if her cousins were playfully harassing her.

Her fondest memory—in fact, it seems to be everyone's fondest memory here—is of a river that flowed near the back of the property. All the family bathed in it, washed their clothes in it, fished in it. They recall the river as being so clear that they could see coins and small fish while they were standing.

These days, de la Torre can muster a smile even when she recalls a childhood disappointment. She recounts that older relatives once dared her to ride a calf for 10 pesos (less than a dollar). She fell off almost immediately, scratching her face and side. They never paid.

"I should collect that money now, with interest," she says.

Her cousins, aunts and siblings aren't being entirely straight with her now, either. And the stakes are higher. They have told de la Torre that she will be visiting the doctor in less than a week. She is counting the days.

The truth is that the doctors have told her family that they probably won't see de la Torre because there is nothing to do to help her. Privately, her relatives explain that they told this fib to give her something to hope for.

Hope is hard to come by for de la Torre, whose world once again seems to end at the barbed-wire fence that surrounds the plot of land. She spends nearly all of her days inside a stifling concrete-block house.

The horse saddles and bicycles have been shoved aside for oxygen tanks and a set of IV tubes on wheels that follow her everywhere. A spare table now is filled with empty boxes of Tylenol and stronger medicine.

De la Torre sometimes gets chills, and she shivers under layers of ragged quilts. Other times, loved ones fan her with a straw hat when her temperature rises. She clutches a roll of toilet paper in the fetal position.

The reason de la Torre came back is to be a mom again, if only for the short time she has left.

Her two older children, Andrea and Rodrigo, clutch their school homework, eager to show off their A's and B's. They are led into de la Torre's room and led out almost right away. She can't talk or play. She can barely move.

De la Torre feels powerless. Her cocktail of vitamins has run out. The pain has grown more intense.

For the first time, she tells her brother, Jose Manuel, that she doesn't think she can keep fighting.

"I am tired of fighting against the current," he recounts her saying this week.

But relatives say de la Torre's new attitude reflects not so much hopelessness as relief. She had placed her children in an aunt's care three years ago with the specific wish that they grow up here. Crossing illegally into the U.S., de la Torre already had mentally prepared for a scenario in which her children would grow up without her.

"I want them to live here, because you know how many people cross the river or cross the desert [on their way to the U.S.] and just stay there. I don't know if I will ever return," her aunt, Paula Landeros, recalls de la Torre saying before she set off for the U.S.

Now, de la Torre can confirm with her own eyes that her children are happy and well-cared for. Their shrieks during a game of keep-away echo under a canopy of mango trees. These joyful sounds seem to energize her as she emerges from her room for the first time in several days.

As she often does, her daughter, Andrea, gives her a hug with tears welling in her eyes. As the oldest, Andrea most understands the gravity of her mother's condition.

Landeros says Andrea asked her: "When you have cancer, do you die?"

She couldn't lie, but she left the door open for a miracle.

"You've seen movies where people get shot with a lot of bullets and they don't die, right?" Landeros recalls telling her. "If God doesn't want to take her, she won't be going to heaven just yet."

Middle son Rodrigo sits on her wheelchair next to her as she reclines in the late afternoon sun. The children show her their papers.

This is the same Rodrigo who has saved a stack of letters and cards for his mother, including a Valentine's Day note that proclaims, in the unassailable logic of a child: "Mom, you are the best of the best moms in the world because you are the best of the best."

To de la Torre, this place is better than a sterile hospital room with sterile hospital meals. She might as well be 6 years old again, eating the cherries, coconuts and other fruits of the land.

"This is my place, and I am not ready to leave it just yet," Mariana says. "They say you don't appreciate what you have until you lose it. For me, coming back here was like discovering my own desert island."

Indeed, she is getting treatment that no hospital could or would provide.

"What she finds here," mother Maria Elena says, "is vitamins for the soul."

Just a few days ago, during one of Mariana's worst days, a music group from a nearby church came to the foot of her bed to serenade her.

"One day, you'll see us," they sang over a guitar's strums. "Tomorrow, maybe, you won't be here."

Her relatives fought back tears. But, almost instantly, de la Torre revived. "I felt a sense of peace," she would later say. "As if my problems were gone."

Her mother plainly states the family's goal with these sorts of visits.

"We are trying to save her."

That means sprinkling powdered snakeskin in her food because a distant relative in Baja California licked a debilitating sickness by trying the concoction.

That means making a soup of vulture meat because local lore touts the dish's curative effects.

And that even means bringing Mariana to see a local soothsayer to determine whether Mariana's illness is "a sort of curse." It might be a curse, he would tell them, but he had no answers for it.

With Mariana's condition so dire, her relatives wonder whether it might have been better for her to have remained in Chicago and for her children to remember her as the healthy woman they said goodbye to.

They quickly dismiss that notion—Mariana was coming home. Their consensus is that it was the right decision, however painful the final chapter will be.

Indeed, de la Torre's words are free of regret. The only time she grows wistful is when she talks about the river of her childhood.

The local authorities have let weeds overgrow and they now block much of the water's flow. The government has also set up a chain-link fence to block access. The family says the once-clear local waters are now dirty—one young boy was in the hospital for a time after accidentally swallowing the water.

In a lifetime filled with heartache, Mariana muses: "My most, most, most powerful sadness is about that river."

Her relatives miss the river too, but offer an explanation that has helped them deal with the new reality.

"We like to say that when Mariana left this place," aunt Paula explains, "that the river followed her."