Adamari López and Her Mother Fight for Their Lives Together

      In our special Mother’s Day issue, Puerto Rican actress Adamari López, 36, and her mother Viladina Torres, 70, talk exclusively to PEOPLE EN ESPAÑOL about winning their battles against cancer. The resilient actress and her mother posed for photos and talked about how an incredibly terrifying ordeal made them closer than ever.

      “What happened to Adamari is the most painful thing that has happened to me in my life, because she had such a desire to live,” her mother says of how her daughter’s cancer diagnosis impacted their lives. “I thought, ‘my God, Adamari is so young, and she’s lived so little. She hasn’t had a family, she hasn’t had children. I would rather it had been me who had the cancer,” she says.

      In a sad twist of fate, her words turned into a reality just a few months later, when she found out that a chronic pain she had been suffering from in one of her legs due to a recent car accident was actually a lymphoma that was affecting the bones in her waist and leg. López recalls how it felt to see the roles reversed. “When it happened to her, I was already strong. I wanted her to fight it. It hurt so much to see her lying down, not able to move, and seeing that each time she tried to move her leg she would scream from the pain,” says the actress. “It was inconceivable. I kept wondering: How did all of this happen? I didn’t understand it, and it didn’t make sense in my head,” she shares.

      Torres is now in rehabilitation, and has gained back the 30 pounds she had lost from chemotherapy. She says she is grateful to God. “The Lord has saved me twice,” says López’s mother, explaining that she had a brush with death before, during the birth of her daughter.

      Also in this special Mother’s Day issue of PEOPLE EN ESPAÑOL, stars and their children express their love for each other in a series of letters. Prepare to get emotional when you read Eduardo Verastegui’s words to his mother, and Susana Dosamante’s letter of affection to her daughter Paulina Rubio. We also have a letter from Thalía, who writes affectionately to her mother.

PEOPLE EN ESPAÑOL, May edition, available on newsstands now.