“I’m going to dance for my son!”
Madonna shared the video in which Maria danced to ease her grief over her son’s death. “Are you feeling hopeless today? Does life seem like one bad news after another? Does the apocalypse seem close? I think a lot of us feel the same way. On days like these, we just have to turn up the music and dance”, wrote the artist. The video is now unavailable on Madonna’s profile.
Pedro Paulo, Maria’s son, had died 3 months ago, murdered. He was also a drug addict. “To ease my pain, I went to Edmar’s bar, on Joaquim Nabuco, in Manaus. Then I asked him to play a song that I wanted to dance to for my son”, he said in an interview with Splash.
Even against Maria’s wishes, the video ended up on social media and went viral. “Wow, when I found out that Madonna had noticed me, I almost fainted. I started crying, screaming, saying, ‘I can’t believe it!’ […] Like it or not, after God, Madonna is responsible for my happiness, for my transformation.”
Chemical dependency and recovery
Maria was a drug user for more than three decades. “AND [o início] it was curiosity, influence, friendship. Marijuana, cocaine and crack. […] I was already around 37 years old when I started using cocaine. I even lost my house, I lost everything to drugs. There in Manaus it was rock bottom. Unfortunately, I lost my son because of this damn drug.”
