From Scratch: A Memoir of Love, Sicily, and Finding Home(33)

The whole process had been an epic exercise in Italian clerical madness. Not to mention its costs, the equivalent of three months of private school tuition. I had to have two death certificates (English and Italian), a funeral home certification, travel documents, and birth certificates all translated into Italian and then certified with an apostille (a legal certification that makes a document issued in one country valid in another) and then stamped again by the Italian government. Every piece of paper and signature carried a fee and a tax. On more than one occasion, I told myself that if Saro had known how much it would cost me in money and stress to take his ashes to Italy, he would have told me to dump them into the Pacific and be done with it. But that was not what he had said. Take part of me to Sicily.

Had he never asked me to inter his ashes in Sicily, I don’t know that I would have done it. I might have scattered them on our favorite stretch of beach in Santa Barbara, the exact spot where we had gone so often to lift his spirits during the years of treatment.

Zoela roused gently, stretching her lean frame against me.

“Sweetheart, Mommy’s going to church soon and then to the cemetery this morning with Babbo’s ashes.” It struck me that I was speaking of myself in the third person.

In my heart, I was hoping she wouldn’t want to go. I was exhausted from the hours of air travel and the winding car ride to Saro’s family home. I didn’t think I could handle being an attentive mother while sitting through a Mass. It was well within reason to imagine that I’d have to carry her along the cobblestoned streets through town to the cemetery. She would be tired and overwhelmed. Motherhood has its own demands. That morning bereaved wife and foreign daughter-in-law were the only roles I had in me.

“Can I see them?” she asked wiping sleep from her eyes.

“See what?”

“See the ashes.”

That was not a question I had anticipated. I sat up in bed and let my feet touch the marble floor.

“Sweetheart, they are downstairs in the blue box on the table. You’ve seen them.” I began to smell the scent of stove-top espresso emanating from the kitchen below. “Let’s get you something to eat.” I was punting, my classic parental redirect.

“But I want to see them. I want to see what’s inside.” She sat up in bed, clear-eyed and determined. The expression on her face told me that tears were waiting at the ready. “I want to see Babbo.”

She had been asking to see her father for months. His death, his complete goneness, was inconceivable to her young mind. When I spoke of his death, it reminded her of when she had said good-bye to him, of his memorial service; when I tried to tell her about his body being gone but his spirit being with us forever, she balked. She hated this new world in which he was inaccessible to her physically but somehow still with her invisibly. At seven, she was fiercely literal. Invisible was equal to nonexistent. My child, who had not yet entered the second grade, was cutting her teeth on the great mystery humans have pondered since the dawn of time: Where the hell do we go when we die?

Ever intuitive and exacting in her wants, she was also the kid who, three days after her father died, had told me she was done with a house full of grieving adults.

“Everyone comes over here for you. He was my dad. Why don’t they come for me?”

They had. In their adult way, family and friends had checked in on her, brought her toys and gifts, then marched out of her room and came and sat with me. Three days of that had been enough for her to see a pattern and call my attention to it. I want to see my own friends. Three days in, and she was teaching me what she would need.

The next day I invited five of her friends over. They played. They wrote messages to Saro at her urging. They created art in the room where he had died. They put flowers near the candle I kept burning. They sang, they danced. In short, my daughter had orchestrated her own elementary school–style wake.

“You can’t see his ashes. They are sealed in the box. It can’t be opened.” I knew that wasn’t true, but I needed to give a concrete reason for which her brain couldn’t conjure up a workaround. The real reason, that I would rather eat nails than open the box on your grandmother’s dining table, was too aggressive for a child of her temperament.

And as her tears were making their Sicilian debut, I added, “But I have some here in this locket. You can see those.”

For the next few minutes, we sat on the bed and stared into the locket. On one side was a tiny picture of Saro I had cut from a photo, on the other side was a small sealed plastic bag that I had taped to the heart-shaped form. We stared at the locket until Nonna shouted from below, “Tembi, sei sveglia? Caffè è pronto.—Tembi, are you up? Coffee is ready.”

An hour and a half later, I crossed the threshold from Nonna’s kitchen into the street on our way to the church. Zoela had chosen to stay home with her teenage cousin Laura after all. She had in fact fallen back to sleep, and I hoped she’d stay asleep until I got back.



* * *



That morning the heat rose with determination. My mother-in-law and I walked arm in arm, striding in slow unison down her street and toward the main road that is the only entrance and exit to town. She held Saro’s ashes and pulled me close as we passed the baker and cheese maker. We’d have bread and cheese made inside those shops when noon came. I wasn’t sure what she had prepared, but we’d eat the food of mourners. Of that I was sure. It would be soothing, easy to digest. It would be the kind of food to give you the strength to go on.