From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home(29)

My parents had questioned the wisdom of my going to Italy, especially alone with Zoela. I knew we had to do this, just the two of us. Despite my father and stepmother’s offer to come with us, I knew we had to do this without the distraction and pressure of my family trying to take care of me. Without my trying to translate among Sicilian, Italian, and English. And I didn’t want to have to take care of them in a foreign place. They’d never been there, and this trip was not the time for that kind of first. Plus I didn’t want my mother-in-law having the burden of additional guests. Nonna and I needed alone time to grieve together and get to know each other. We had to begin at an ending and make a new beginning.

Still, my parents worried. In the four months since Saro had died, I was still raw with grief. My dad, ever the lawyer and a practitioner of Texas-sized common sense, cross-examined me with basic questions: Can you change your ticket if you want to come home early? My stepmother took a different tactic: What can you take to bring you comfort? Be sure you just rest. Don’t do anything you don’t feel like doing. My mother offered to create a care package for Saro’s mom. Underneath it all, I wondered if my family of origin also held the tiniest traces of resentment about the way the Sicilians had once rejected their daughter.

Everyone could see the physical toll grief had taken on me. Along with his spirit and the comfort of Saro’s body, gone were his pastas and soups. I had dropped fifteen pounds while Saro was hospitalized. Those closest to me reminded me to hydrate, eat, sleep. I assured them I was fine, but the truth was that I needed Ativan to get through the car pool lane at Zoela’s school.

I still woke up each morning in tears. Saro’s absence in the bed beside me gutted me before my feet touched the ground. I pushed through the days by sheer will, the primal pull of motherhood, and a sense that if I collapsed completely I might never stand up again. At night, I prayed that Saro would come to me in dreams. I wanted to make love to him. I wanted to see him. I longed for his voice, his smile. I craved his smell. When my grief became manic, I focused on the practical, such as doing feverish calculations on scraps of paper of how long Saro’s modest insurance policy could last with private school, two therapists, medical debt, and the inherent uncertainty of my work.

I also started writing letters to him, one-sided conversations: Saro, my sweet, what will we do with all this loss? Help me put one foot in front of the other. Show me how to be a family of two, a solo parent, now that you are gone.

But I had also felt a sense of urgency take hold in the months since I had called Nonna to say I’d be coming to Sicily. I had a restless, inarticulate desire that Zoela know home and family as something even greater than death. After all we had gone through to finally become family, life would seem unbearably cruel if it just snatched that away. As much as I wanted this for Zoela, I needed to know it for myself, too. I wanted to test its permanence, the idea that family is about whom you choose and how you love. I needed to prove it to myself and Zoela. I wondered if the connections for which I had struggled so hard, the family I had struggled to make, had the durability of love.

Still, as we taxied to the jetway, for a brief moment I seriously contemplated collecting my bags and boarding a plane back to L.A. Because to continue moving ahead with Saro’s wishes—to both inter and scatter his ashes—would really mean that he was dead. Not just dead in L.A. but dead in Sicily, dead at his mother’s house, dead in the room where we had always slept, dead having morning coffee, dead at his mother’s table. It felt impossible to bear. Yet I pushed forward in the name of love.



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The dry, salt-laden midday July heat confirmed that we were in Sicily. Zoela fell back asleep on my lap, in the back seat of the un-air-conditioned Fiat as Cosimo drove and Franca sat in the passenger seat. Zoela had awakened long enough to run her finger along the baggage carousel, hug her aunt and uncle, and walk to the car. I envied her sleep. I wanted nothing more than to close my eyes and have whatever came next be only a dream.

“Passami un fazzoletto—Pass me a tissue,” Franca said to Cosimo as he drove. She was otherwise silent and wrestling with carsickness as we headed to Aliminusa, Saro’s hometown. We passed the coastal towns that line up eastward from Palermo. We passed the long-ago-shuttered Fiat factory and the new Auchan supermarket. Then we turned off the highway and began our ascent into the foothills, passing a landscape I knew as well as my own back yard.

We curved past the dilapidated Targo Florio car-racing stand, erected in the 1950s for European mountain racing. I watched the smatterings of stone farmhouses that sprang up in wheat fields and small family vineyards. I took in the amber hills that seemed to stitch earth to sky, searching for the familiar sight of sheep grazing at their base. But it was too hot; even the sheep knew when to retreat.

Cosimo passed the time changing radio stations. We tried to catch up on what had transpired since we all had last seen one another in the spring—their first and only visit to L.A., just as Saro was going into hospice. They had left three days before he died, having said their good-byes in that particularly wrought-up way people who live halfway around the world carry the additional suffering of knowing that they will not be there for the final moment of transition, left forever wondering if their good-bye was enough.

“Come vanno i maiali?—How are your pigs?” I asked Cosimo. His chickens, pigs, and olive trees were always subjects that urged him toward conversation.