Eva Mendes’ brother, Juan Carlos Mendes, passed away from cancer earlier this year. While his death has brought her family closer, the actress has had a hard time as she gave birth merely days after his funeral.
The Training Day actress also admitted that the situation, while painful and intense, was also “kind of beautiful” due to the whole family coming together during such an emotional time.
Mendes revealed to Latina magazine: “Losing my brother brought our family closer, and we were already close to begin with. So to just see everybody be there for one another and show up, I feel so lucky to have them. And then they were there for me when Amada was born. We had a funeral service for him and that same week I had the baby. So it was really, really intense and obviously beyond heartbreaking, but also kind of beautiful.”
The actress, who is married to Ryan Gosling, named their second child Amanda as an acknowledgment of their older daughter’s middle name. She explained that this is normal practice in Latin culture and the name is of significant importance to her family.
“My grandmother’s name is Amada, and Esmeralda Amada is the name of our oldest. We had a few names picked out for our new baby, and when she was born, we didn’t feel like those names were her,” she explained.
The actress further revealed that after trying multiple names with her husband, they both kept going back to Amanda.
“We came up with a few more, even that morning, and tried them out. We were like, ‘What about Viviana?’ But we just kept going back to Amada. In true Latin fashion, we reuse names all the time. I used to know five sisters that were all Maria del Carmen, Maria Elena, Maria Liliana.”
She continued: “I actually told Ryan, ‘This is common in Latin culture, so it wouldn’t be crazy.’ So we went with Amada because it was something we kept going back to. And it was an emotional time with the passing of my brother.
We thought how beautiful to go with what made us emotional and with what felt like her. When we looked at her, we thought, ‘Aww, Amadita.’”