While Abuela’s Gift: A Flame That Never Dies was not the first lyric I chose to write, the story behind it had been with me for years. I originally imagined honoring my grandparents through a book, but as life grew heavier over the past year, I found myself drawn to lyric writing and to an unexpected exploration of true authorship and the creative process in the age of AI. Her reassuring voice seemed to call me home from the night, reaching across time and space as I wrestled with my own questions — a friendly voice from the past still speaking into the present.
What began as a deeply personal creative journey became something larger: a conversation between memory, grief, hope, and the enduring light of family.
As one may discern from the length of this reflective journal narrative, brevity has never been my strongest suit, except when carefully drafting talking points for clients. My father and others have affectionately reminded me of this over the years, usually while trying to slow the broken record turning in my head. That refrain may be harder to explain to younger readers raised in the digital age, but for those who remember vinyl, the image still works.
The broad review and advisory partnership I had developed with AI was beginning to have an impact because of the process behind it. That process remained centered on my original writing and revision. I would bring the story, the draft, the emotional direction, and the words I was trying to shape. AI could then help me test structure, pacing, clarity, rhythm, and, later in the process, the expression of individual lines. It did not replace the writing process or decide what the lyric should become. The final judgment remained mine.
With each lyric, the process became a little clearer. The revisions became more disciplined. The final structure came into focus more quickly.
Then I returned to Abuela’s Gift.
Despite the progress I had made with other lyrics, my AI partner must have been disappointed when I submitted my first version of Abuela’s Gift for its structured, rules-based review. I could almost hear the collective sigh as the electrons whirled inside its digital mind.
What is he thinking?
He’s writing too abstractly. He’s trying to fit too much of her story into the lyric. Did he not learn from the earlier discussion?
I know that sounds a bit anthropomorphic, but that is what circled in my head at the time.
I had fallen back into familiar habits: paragraphs where simple phrases were needed, colorful language where clarity was required, and beautiful descriptors, while singability quietly packed its bags for a warmer destination. Somewhere in the process, I could almost hear the question forming:
Could he be writing a novel and not a song?
But the review stayed within the boundaries I had established. Rather than replacing the story or supplying a new one, it helped me recognize what was already strongest in what I had written: the emotional center within the lines that came from my heart, my expression, and the real core of the story.
Her struggle.
There was no need to dwell on everything she suffered, only that she suffered and persevered.
They took your home but not your heart.
Life’s flame still burning within.
The chorus was there, buried within the complex web of phrases. The answer was not to invent a different song. It was to build more clearly around what was already alive in the one I had written.
A profound moment of clarity followed, lifting the fog like a drop of water cutting through oil. The focus returned, and my mind opened through the haze.
Reinvigorated, and as Harry Chapin so eloquently put it in 30,000 Pounds of Bananas, “I went back to my lonely writer’s garret.”
The line struck a chord in that moment: the writer’s constant toil over the right phrase, the right turn, the right way to carry meaning without losing the lyric. The advisory process had pushed me back toward clarity, not by giving me the answer, but by helping me listen more closely to what I had already written and decide what deserved to remain.
That is the whole point of the process — to spark creativity, test the work, listen more carefully, and find the rhythm beneath the noise.
Maybe that is what Abuela’s Gift gave me before I ever finished the lyric. It reminded me that the work is not always about capturing everything. Sometimes it is about listening closely enough to carry one true thing forward.
For Abuela, that truth was the flame she kept alive through displacement, loss, distance, and time.
For me, it became a song, a memory, and a small act of gratitude for a woman whose story still reaches across the years — calling us home when life gets heavy.