From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home(19)

“Ti amo, amore mio bello.”

I repeated this like a poem. A mantra. A refrain of my love. Over and over. When I tired of my own words, I read Rumi out loud. I caressed his feet. I stroked his hair. I climbed into the bed. I got out of the bed. I adjusted the covers each time he kicked them loose. And when his body seemed in distress, I called the nurse. Then I whispered, “I love you” as she dropped liquid morphine from a baby dropper into his mouth to ease his breathing and relax his muscles. With each drop, I felt the shiny sting of betrayal. Morphine. He hated drugs.

I knew he wanted to stay clear and unburdened by the fog of sedatives for as long as he could.

“Is it too much, do we have to do it?” I asked Cathy. My voice was low but full of new fear. Am I doing this wrong? I knew that morphine was necessary to ease dying. All the hospice pamphlets said so. Yet nothing about dying was easy. Not for him nor for me. It was labor, as much labor as coming into this world.

“Yes, it is for the best, and I’m giving him a small amount,” Nurse Cathy assured me. I watched her crush half a white tablet. It dissolved quickly in water before she put it into the dropper. “It will ease the respiratory distress.” And it did. His tongue released the swell at the back of his throat.

By 3:00 a.m. I was exhausted. I asked my sister to stay with Saro. I went upstairs to lie down next to Zoela.

In my room, Zoela’s body felt warm and small. She was peaceful, emitting a gentle snore. She seemed to me in that moment both angelic and strong. I thought for the first time that it was us in the world, just the two of us. Then I allowed myself to close my eyes. To savor the respite. Just for a moment, I told myself. I’ll sleep just for a minute.

The next thing I knew, my sister was standing in the glow of twilight at my bedside.

“His breathing has changed a lot. I think you need to come now,” she said.

I took the forty steps from my bedroom to the hospice room.

When I pulled back the pocket door, his face was looking toward the door. He was staring straight at me. I could hear what I knew were his final shallow breaths.

Oh, my love.

I crawled into bed with him. A single tear had formed in his eye.

“I am sorry I made you wait. I fell asleep. But I am here now. I am here.”

He had waited for me to be at his side. I kissed his tear away. Then there were only a few more breaths. They were shallow, faint, then faded into nothing as I lay beside him. I was breathing in new air, air in which he was gone.

He had waited for me, the same way he had waited for me in Florence, standing by the lamppost in the winter rain. He had left this world characteristically tenacious in his love, and I couldn’t help but feel he was telling me he’d also be waiting for me in the next.

I lay there in silence for a long time. The air was pregnant with an energetic pulse. I kissed him again. Maybe I needed to be sure of his physical goneness. Twenty minutes passed. No breath. Finally I felt oriented enough to stand up. I was willing to brave my first step into a new life. I had to go tell my daughter her babbo was gone.

I turned the knob of my bedroom. It was just after 7:00 a.m., and sunlight filtered softly into the room. The day was carrying on.

“Sweetheart.” I rubbed her back. I didn’t want to wake her, because when I did, her life was going to be completely changed. My words stuck like glue in my mouth. Saro’s tear was still on my lips. But I willed myself forward because what happened next, how I handled everything from this moment, would stay with her for the rest of her life.

“Zoela, amore.” I pulled her close. I kissed her cheek. “Zoela.” She turned over. I kissed her again. I wanted to bring her from the sleep state to reality as gracefully as I could. That morning was one she would remember forever.

When her eyes were sufficiently open and she was folded into my body as we had done so many mornings since she was born, I said, “Babbo has died, sweetheart.”

“When?” Her eyes were barely open.

“While you were sleeping.” She stared at me expressionless, flat of understanding. “I think we should go down and see him. He wants us to say good-bye.” She didn’t protest. I hoisted her onto my hip, and we walked out.

When we got downstairs, I did all the things the social worker had told me to do. Zoela read a poem. She put a flower on him. We told him we loved him. Twice I reassured her that he was not just sleeping. As hard as it was for me, I didn’t rush her. The whole process lasted fifteen, maybe twenty, minutes. Then I told her that her grandparents were in the other room. Her grandfather would take her out for breakfast. She would get to pick the place.

I sat with Saro for another hour. Then I called Nonna.

“è andato via—He is gone,” I said.

Her voice wailed before I could form more words. Then it went silent. I could hear her on the other end of the line as she cried. Silence conjoined us, and we stayed like that for a while until she asked how Zoela was doing.

“Così così,” I said, and we let silence shroud us again.

Then I heard her rise and push her chair over the ceramic floor of her kitchen. “I am going to church to pray. Everything now is in the hands of the saints.”



* * *



The logistics of death took over. I called and spoke to my mother-in-law in Sicily every day. She told me about a dream in which Saro had appeared to her, and she reported who in her Sicilian town had stopped by to offer condolences. They were hard, brief three-minute conversations in which every day she would ask about funeral arrangements. In rural Sicily, the dead are buried within twenty-four hours. From the moment of Saro’s death, Nonna had been asking where he was. “Ma dov’è il suo corpo?—But where is his body?” She couldn’t imagine her son suspended in limbo between death and final rest in a foreign country. She couldn’t picture his body being attended to by strangers, his American wife not even sure where he was. I could only tell her what I knew. That his ashes would be ready in ten days for pickup or delivery and that there would be no funeral but rather a memorial service a week later. I tried to explain the concept of a memorial in Italian to a woman for whom no such ritual existed. Still she kept asking about his body.