From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home(15)

After two days in the ICU, Saro was in a regular room. Everything inside had the stench of institution, including me. The trench coat I hadn’t taken off in weeks reeked of it all. I stank. I carried the worry of a woman who felt the love of her life slipping away. I walked the halls while Saro rested. The sound of the heels of my winter boots clomping on the floor rose up and pierced my ears. A new father passed me in the hallway, he had an IT’S A GIRL balloon in one hand and takeout from The Ivy in the other hand. In my hand, I had two hospital-issued ice pops for Saro that I had retrieved from the tiny box of a kitchen galley on the fifth floor of the hospital’s pediatric ward—one lemon, one cherry. In my other hand, I cradled my cell phone.

I was talking with his mother, my mother-in-law, Croce. She was a widow, having lost her own husband to cancer three years earlier, choosing to wear black and leave her house only to go to church. Saro called her “Mamma,” but since the birth of our daughter, I had called her “Nonna.”

Nonna’s voice was loud and frantic; it billowed in the space between my ear and my shoulder. I tried to picture her some six thousand miles away in her living room, one small room in the wildness and foothills of a mountain in Sicily.

“How is he?” she asked me in Italian, our only common language.

“I am taking him something to eat.” I stopped to lean against the wall.

It was an answer without being a real answer. But I knew the power of visuals. So I gave her one I knew would let her picture me feeding her son. It meant he was still well enough to eat.

She had told him she was having dreams in which the Blessed Mother visited her to tell her that her son was being called home.

“What do the doctors say?”

“They are watching. They want to see how his liver stabilizes.” I pulled myself off the wall and continued the walk to Saro’s room. “Please tell me Franca is coming.” Franca was Saro’s sister and only sibling. She had never in all our years of marriage come to the United States to visit.

“She is.”

When I got to his room, Goodfellas was playing on the TV above his bed. A red-framed school picture of Zoela sat next to him. The hospital had a policy that children younger than twelve years old couldn’t go past the lobby. It was infuriating, disheartening. One time in those days, I had been able to bring Saro down to her in a wheelchair. They had had to embrace in a public lobby to the sound of a whirring Starbucks coffee grinder and the lobby piano playing “Rocket Man” on a baby grand. The first thing she asked him was why he was wearing a dress, then if she could sit on his lap. The first comment made me laugh, the second question made me cry. When they parted fifteen minutes later, I knew he might never see her again if I didn’t find a way to bring her to him.

As the days turned to a week, I learned how to sneak my daughter into the hospital to see her dying father. When she got there, she kicked off her ballet slippers and crawled into bed with him.

“Babbo, let me tell you about a story I wrote about a wolf who likes ice cream.”

I had watched them in bed, each lit up by the presence of the other, and I wanted to take us away. I wanted to hold on to the tenderness of that moment for all eternity. But things continued to speed up. The end of life goes slowly and then fast and then slowly again. We were in a hospital waiting game.



* * *



Then a chief of staff came to visit Saro. I had stepped away for a moment and returned to find them in midconversation.

“The only option left would be a liver transplant,” she said.

Saro looked away, then back at her. “I don’t think so. Save it for someone who can use it,” he said, his skin sickly yellow with jaundice.

I felt the earth give underneath me and had to lean on his hospital bed to stay erect. The only option left wasn’t really an option at all. Before I could fully process that, she was leaving the room, going on to her next round. It took me a few seconds, minutes, to fully register her absence, take in what had just happened.

I left Saro’s bedside and chased her down the hall, quickening my pace to catch up with the doctor and a resident who had been with her. My boot heels clicked rapidly on the marble floor as I caught up with her in the hallway.

“What exactly are you saying?” When I saw her eyes avoid mine, any lingering hope I had had that he might bounce back or even stabilize disappeared. She had said it all without saying a word. Still I needed to hear it. The sound of my own voice scared me as I asked, “Is he dying?”

She looked up, then down again. She nodded.

Then. Slowly. Finally.

“Yes, he is dying.”

You are never prepared for those words, no matter how long the illness has been. Part of me splintered in that moment.

“And if there is nothing left to do . . . then how much time?” I needed to know.

“Two weeks, perhaps, two or three. At best.”

“What will it look like? Will he be in pain?” With each question that formed in my mouth, I was moving myself closer to a world without Saro, closer to widowhood.

“Liver failure is a relatively pain-free way to die. He won’t have pain, he’ll just get really tired until he is gone.”

That was the first time it was actually said out loud: Saro was dying. I heard it there on the marble floors of a top hospital, expensive art adorning the walls, a meal cart wheeling by.