From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home(20)

I hadn’t yet told her I’d be bringing some of his ashes to Italy, a final promise I had made him. I hadn’t told her because I wasn’t sure about the details. I needed time to process everything. Moreover, I wasn’t sure when I wouldn’t be riddled with anxiety about just leaving the house, let alone leaving the country with my daughter in tow.

I couldn’t even imagine making lunch.



* * *



I turned on the gas and lit a tiny flame in all that darkness. I wanted to set fire to my grief, I wanted to bring him back. Maybe water boiling in a pot would bring him back to me, even for a second.

As I stood in Saro’s kitchen, I caught a glance of my family as they gathered around the dining room table. They were navigating burial arrangements, hospice wrap-up, and memorial details. They did it with vigor while I was struggling just to drink a full glass of water.

Earlier that morning, my stepmom had knocked on my bedroom door after Zoela had left for school.

“Yes, come in.”

Aubrey appeared in the doorway, all five feet of her, with a cup of chamomile tea.

“I’m doing a final proof of Saro’s bio for the memorial program. Would you like to reread it once more before I send it?”

I had forgotten that I had somehow written out his life story the second day after he died. Flashes of manic productivity followed by hours of total incapacity seemed to be part of how the initial impact of losing my husband was playing out. She handed me a typed piece of paper, his life in six paragraphs, single-spaced in Corinthian font.

I had never imagined writing what amounted to my lover’s obituary. But I had. I had in fact pulled quotes from his journal, his letters, and the backs of postcards. Things he had jotted down piecemeal in the final year of his illness. Things he wanted to be known to himself and others, things he wanted our daughter to know.

My eyes fell on words in the second sentence, Saro’s own words about his origins: “from a lineage of peasant farmers that reached back to Byzantium. They labored for olives, lemons, garlic, and artichokes from an impervious soil, hillside and rocky.” Farther down, he called himself “an accidental chef.” Even farther down, in a paragraph about his fatherhood, I had added an excerpt from a poem he had written on the occasion of Zoela’s birth. He had described the arrival of her love in his life as a “seasoned vessel” steady enough “to cross tormented waters” and “bring a seaman to his native home.”

An invisible trapdoor opened up beneath me, and I felt a part of me fall in as I handed the paper back to Aubrey.

“It’s fine,” I said.

She showed me two pictures of Saro and asked which one I wanted to use. I didn’t want either; I wanted him. But I chose the one I had taken of him on our tenth anniversary—the one in which his smoldering eyes seemed to promise a lifetime.

She asked me about white flowers and whether I wanted a soloist to sing. I rallied all my focus. I tried to summon answers through the gray fog in my brain that made it difficult to finish thoughts, and then I collapsed back into bed. I wept into his pillow until my eyes were nearly swollen shut.

An hour later, I had come downstairs and found my family seated at the table. “I don’t think I can go to Saro’s memorial. I don’t think I can. I’ll stay home. You go,” I declared.

My family gently convinced me otherwise. They promised to shore me up. Friends stopped by daily in small groups and alone. They hugged me, then we’d sit on the couch and stare at the walls in disbelief. Death is like that. The specter of its possibility was grand and had been on full display for years of Saro’s illness. Then, when it happened, there was only disbelief. And for me, there was fatigue and its companion, disabling anxiety. I felt as new in the world as I had been the day I was born. And just as vulnerable.

Aubrey, in a gesture of grace, had decided to move in with us temporarily. She had been with me three days earlier when a grief counselor had advised that we not be left alone for at least the next three months. I don’t think the woman meant it literally, given that Aubrey lived four states away in Texas. But Aubrey had heard the call. And being who she is, what she could see before her eyes, she knew I was in no way capable of caring for myself, let alone a child. We were raw, and simple tasks took mammoth effort. The mere sound of running water hurt my ears, Zoela cried from 8:00 p.m. until nearly midnight each night, asking for her father back. When I attempted to get behind a wheel, it took me upward of ten minutes to back the car out of the driveway. Space and time disoriented me and flooded my memory. Panic rose in my chest before I even attempted to get out of bed. Eating was perfunctory. So Aubrey was there to make sure I took a bath, to prepare Zoela’s lunch, and to turn the sheets down for me to crawl back into once I dropped her off for her first day at school.

Zoela’s school and former preschool community had circled around us and organized meals during hospice and in the immediate wake of Saro’s passing. It was a steady stream of southern California fusion, mostly vegetarian cuisine. High-quality food from serious home cooks surrounded us. Yet when Zoela and I sat down to eat it, the texture and taste of it on our plates were unfamiliar and difficult to digest.

Grits were the fallback Texas comfort food. Hominy was in the ancestral lineage. In times of need, keep a pot of it on the stove. Aubrey’s grits with butter were the only thing I could stomach. Every time I went to spoon some onto a plate, I thought of it as Saro’s polenta—but leached of its natural color and flavor. Yet under generous pats of butter and seasoned with salt, the grits went down smoothly. Though I deeply appreciated all the food gifted to us in those weeks and often wept at the bottomless generosity of our close circle of friends, in all honesty, it was emotionally indigestible. Much like my new life. Quinoa, in particular, had become my personal grief aggressor. Whereas I had loved it before, in grief it took work to eat, work to digest, work to make it into something that soothed. Takeout wasn’t any better. I would sign for it, take the bag, open it, and look down at lukewarm food whose aesthetic and texture has been undone by moisture trapped in plastic and tin. I’d move it around my plate because everyone around me kept telling me to eat. The thought of a lifetime of this hung at the back of my mind, a different kind of loss not easily explained to anyone who had never been loved by a chef.