From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home(28)

After a round of pictures was taken, including a group photo in the center of the garden with our small eclectic tribe of family and friends, the aging yet stunning villa our backdrop, we went inside to have a five-course dinner among centuries-old tapestries.

Canopied under the moonlight of a summer Tuscan sky, my family had one hell of a good time. They danced the Harlem Shuffle on the garden terrace and cast laughter out into the valley of Florence’s mesmerizing night lights. Back at the hotel, telegrams from Sicily waited for us from various relatives to whom I had sent invitations. Instead of dancing the night away with his sister, uncles, aunts, and cousins, we had received messages on telefax paper that said: “Rammaricati per non poter essere presenti alla ceremonia. Vi auguriamo una serena e lunga vita matrimoniale.—We regret we can’t be present at the ceremony. We wish you a serene and long married life.” There was nothing from his parents.

I read those telegrams privately the next morning, feeling freshly wronged and quietly angry. His family had forsaken him. In the afterglow of the magic of the night before, I felt so many mixed emotions. It was all achingly bittersweet. I began to wonder if I would ever meet the people who had missed one of the most important moments in their son’s life because of me—and if I could ever forgive them for breaking not my heart but Saro’s.

I put the telegrams on top of the hotel dresser in plain view, in case Saro wanted to read them later, alone. Then I looked out the window of our hotel room onto the Ponte Vecchio and the Arno River flowing gently beneath its arches. I wrestled with the truth of the moment: in creating one family, Saro had lost another.





Part Two


FIRST SUMMER


Nun si po’ aviri la carni senz’ ossu.

You can’t have meat without the bone.

—Sicilian proverb





ISLAND OF STONE




“Allacciarsi la cintura di sicurezza.” At first I didn’t understand the flight attendant’s words over the loudspeaker. They were disparate pieces of a jigsaw puzzle I couldn’t quite put together. Then a flight attendant in the aisle next to me said it in English: “Fasten your seat belt,” pointing to my seat belt. As we prepared to land in Sicily, everything needed translation, even a language I had spoken for twenty years.

From the airplane window, I was confronted with two contrasting visions: a lush, sapphire blue sea below me and a mountain of barren stone straight ahead. Water and stone. Fluidity and impenetrability. Nothing in between but me, being flown through the air, descending into a piece of stone confetti in the middle of the Mediterranean, the island of Saro’s incarnation.

All I could think about was his ashes in a duffel bag in the overhead bin and how I had promised his mom, a week after his death, that I would bring his ashes to her. But now I had a sinking feeling in my stomach. How the hell am I going to get through the next month? It wasn’t enough to be a widow in my own home, in my own language, sleeping each night in the bed I had shared with Saro. Instead, I had taken my grief on the road because I had promised to do so. I was hurling myself through space in the general direction of a mountain of more unknowns, more tenuousness, more feelings that had no end. Grief, Sicilian style. I was taking up residence for the next month in a home where il lutto—mourning—hung on the front door like a shroud.

Suddenly my decision seemed like a bad choice. How was I going to keep it together in a place where everything, including the arc of the sun, was different? There was no part of me that could have chosen to leave well enough alone. I could not have chosen the easier way, the way that didn’t lead to concentric circles of grief. I feared I was asking so much of myself, testing my mettle too soon. Saro had been dead just four months.

Zoela was deep in sleep on my lap, her favorite stuffed panda under her arm. Her eyelids fluttered as I caressed her hair. We had crossed nine time zones, and she had closed her eyes for only this last leg of the trip.

In a matter of minutes, we would deplane and travel an hour and a half’s drive east—past the mountain of stone that lay ahead—to a woman, a mother, and a town waiting for my return. His return. Saro was coming back to rest alongside his father, Giuseppe—the man who had once rejected his own son because of me. I was returning with Saro’s daughter, the only person left carrying his name.

The plane touched ground with three gentle bumps, and I held Zoela closer, careful not to wake her just yet. She was the little girl with eyes like chestnuts and a face Saro adored. She was the one who had brought us all even deeper reconciliation and love. She was the reason Saro had been willing to struggle each year, against what was medically convenient, to return to Sicily. Being with his daughter in his homeland healed his heart as much as, if not more than, the chemotherapy healed his body. Seeing his daughter sitting at his mother’s table brought color back to his face; laughter spilled from him effortlessly. He had carved out timeless experiences in the face of the little time that was left him. He had given her memories of him dancing with her at the edge of the Mediterranean. Part of me hoped like hell I could keep giving her Sicilian summers, beautiful memories of time with his family. But I questioned the physical and emotional toll it might take at a time when I was still trying to find my bearings and help her find hers.

I was acutely aware that I was traveling with a seven-year-old child who still grieved so hard that her body shook at night until she fell asleep. A child who pushed dinner away because she wanted to wait for her dad. A child who refused even to speak to her Italian grandmother on the phone because the sound of her voice reminded her of her dad. My choice to come here meant that I’d have to parent her and her mercurial grief almost seven thousand miles away from home. My grief and love demanded all the strength I had and then asked for more.