From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home(18)

“Where is Zoela?” he asked. He had forgotten.

“School.” I smoothed his coverlet, then walked over to turn up the volume on his iPod at the other end of the room. Then I returned to sit at his side. Over the years, I had given thought to the eventuality of this moment. It was one way I wrestled with the anticipatory grief. I’d be driving on the freeway stuck in traffic on the overpass of the 405 near the Getty Center en route to an audition, and instead of going over my lines in my head, I would think of what music I might play for Saro in his dying hour. I knew that sound is the first sensory connection humans have in utero, and I had seen a documentary on the Tibetan Book of the Dead that explained that sound is also the last sensory connection we have when dying. Saro would be able to hear me, hear everything around him, even if he couldn’t eat, see, or speak.

The theme song from Cinema Paradiso played in the background.

I could sense him drifting toward the infinite.

“Sto passando una primavera critica, la più critica della mia vita—I’m passing the most critical spring of my life,” he said to me as the music played.

For a flash I could smell the eucalyptus and spring grass. I saw Zoela running around laurel bushes, her honey brown skin glowing in the spring Sicilian sun. Spring. He had called this moment his “spring.”

“I want you to know love someday. Another love. Your love is too beautiful not to share.” He said it with ease, not a trace of distress or ambivalence. As if it were the most natural thing for a husband to say to a wife. “I want you to live your life.”

“Don’t. Please. Don’t,” I said. But I knew he was saying what he needed to say. He was strangely lucid. Clear as a bell. Then he became less so.

I felt the shift of energy as I lay there next to him. From the moment we met, his body had anchored me. Now I could feel it transforming, searching for a new axis.

“Where am I going?” he asked, looking at me but through me.

“I don’t know, but I think it is beautiful. It is full, you will be peaceful.” I caressed the back of his hand, let my fingers massage his.

“Wake me when Zoela comes home.” He closed his eyes.

“Of course.”

I left the room to let him rest.

Two doors down I heard the church bells strike 11:00 a.m. Sometimes I hated that we shared our street with a church. The bells punctuated moments that needed no punctuation.

In the dining room, my dad, my stepmother, Aubrey, and my sister, Attica, were gathered at the table. They were heading up what can only be described as a hospice command center—receiving all the phone calls, notifying family, coordinating visitors. Between the Friday night when we had brought Saro home in an ambulance and that morning, a world of change had happened. My mother had left L.A. to return to Houston for work. My dad and Aubrey had arrived to take over the family support role in her place. My sister shuttled between her own home and mine, picking up food, running hospice errands, offering care, and making sure that Franca and Cosimo had food and anything else they might need. One of Saro’s cousins had flown in from Buffalo, New York, to share a final good-bye. Franca and Cosimo had gathered around Saro’s bed for their own final good-bye before they boarded a return flight to Sicily, petrified with grief. The comings and goings of family and friends were dizzying.

When Zoela came home from school that day, she went straight to her dad’s room. She called him “sleepyhead” and asked if she, too, could have an ice pop.

Later we ate dinner at his bedside while he rested. Then Zoela watched Puss in Boots and painted her grandfather’s fingernails because it was what she wanted and no one wanted to take more away from her. She said good night to Saro, she told him she loved him. Then I put her to sleep.

She had been asleep about two hours when Saro’s breathing changed. I called Nurse Cathy in immediately.

“Is this what I think it is?” I asked. The hospice nurse had given me a pamphlet about what to expect in the final stages of dying.

“Yes.” She was calm, solid, a lighthouse in my darkness.

The oxygen tank whirred.

“How long?”

“Depends. Everyone is different. Could go on like this for a while, even a day or two days.”

I leaned forward onto the bed rails. The chrome was cold despite the heat that rushed to my head. I can’t do days.

I took Saro’s hand in mine. He didn’t reach back. But his touch still contained his presence. His aliveness. I massaged his index finger and looked toward Cathy. She knew us well enough to know to leave the room. The pocket door rolled to a squeaky close behind her, and I turned to him.

This was the moment. It had arrived.

“Saro, go easy on me. Please, honey, make this easy for me.”

Over the next six hours, as night pushed into morning, I sat at his bedside. I held his hand, kissed him incessantly, kisses not unlike ones I had given him for nearly twenty-one years, quotidian but rich. And I talked to him.

“You have been an extraordinary partner and an incredible father. You have honored my life. I will love you for all eternity. It is okay to go, my love.”

I spoke softly into his ear. I felt the warmth of my breath come back to me.

“This body has served you well, but now you will leave it. Amore, I will always welcome you in my dreams and look forward to our next time together.