Soledad O'Brien Mourns the Loss of Her Mother,

Soledad O'Brien announced the death of her mother, Estela, on Twitter this past week. Her father, Edward had died only 40 days earlier at age 85.

Estela, Cuba, 1940s

An immigrant from Cuba, she lived with the Oblate Sisters of Providence in Baltimore during college.

Estela (on left) in Cuba in the 1930s

As an immigrant to America, she learned two more languages fluently — English and French - and went on to Johns Hopkins University and became a teacher.

"My dad is Irish-Australian, my mom Afro-Cuban, and they got married in 1958. There was lots of overt hostility, to the point where they couldn't get served in restaurants together. People were intentional about keeping interracial couples apart. 

My older sisters were born in Maryland, which, like Virginia, was under an anti-miscegenation law, and my mom told me people would spit on them as they walked down the street. Even when my family moved to New York, where I was born, it was hard to get housing. But my parents never talked about that while we grew up. They didn't want that to frame how we thought about our community. They were quiet activists but felt they were on the right side of history."

Estela & Edward

Sadly, as Soledad conveyed in an interview, Edward died on February 6. and O’Brien’s mom Esetla, who had dementia, barely remembered.

“She would call me sometimes and say, ‘Did you hear the news about your dad? He passed away,’” O’Brien says. “She never really recovered.”
Estela had lost her ability to walk after falling in the bathroom about 10 years ago. “After being in bed for five days, she was transitioned to a wheelchair and then never walked again,” O’Brien says. “From there she got dementia and it got worse every year.”

Her parents lived together at an assisted living home in New York City and were close through their final days. When her father died, Soledad and her siblings "... knew it was going to be very difficult, if not impossible, for my mom to survive. When my dad died, I think my mom decided when she was done, she was done. She’d go join my dad, and that was that.”