Yesterday my family contacted me frantically because they needed my mother's flight ticket. She lost her newly issued passport to come to Spain, and they could only get a replacement in three months. I felt a kind of despair which weighs me down every time I depend on my family to do something, because they often disappoint me. The last time I bought a flight for my mother about seven years ago, a flight to Canada that was lost because she waited too long to get her passport and it wasn't issued on time (she lost this passport too).
However, what we lack in planning and organizing capacities (I include myself in under this description), we make up in capacity for improvisation. My sister made an appointment at the "Secretaría de Relaciones Exteriores" (a government office dealing with stuff related to foreign countries), and plead our case.
For as long as I can remember, my mother has lost very important documents by hiding them in the most unlikely places. She experiences paranoia, and is convinced that the neighbors what to appropriate our house (our neighbor is a politician), and by obtaining our official documents they will do the paperwork necessary to transfer the house under their name, so she hides this kind of documentation and when it's time to retrieve it, she goes through her usual hiding spots but it's never there, and she will say "see? the neighbor broke in and took our documents". I have a special kind of sigh for this situation, one where I voice the exhale with a little bit of raspiness.
Surely the passport had to be somewhere in our house, but I didn't mention that because I was sure they would have already turned the house upside down. I simply wrote "What a downer. Here's the flight. I hope you can resolve it".
In the end, the passport was re-issued on the same day by getting a document from a doctor that said that she had suffered cognitive decline due to age and that was the reason for losing her passport. My mother is 79 and surely she has some cognitive decline, but not unreasonable given her age.
If no further issues impede us, I will have my mother, my sister, my nephew and his father in Madrid in about ten days.