by Tembi Locke
At first I didn’t understand what was going on as she began to show me the contents of her dresser drawers. Then it became clear.
The top drawer of the dresser contained nightgowns—six sleeveless summer shifts in floral prints, never used. She told me that they were for if and/or when she had to go to the hospital. Hospitals in Italy (and in Sicily) do not provide gowns. She had prepared enough for a six-night hospital stay. That way, Franca would not have to wash and iron them every day of her stay.
The second drawer held the same contents but for a spring hospital stay, when the nights are cooler. The third and fourth drawers held clothing for a winter hospital stay. They contained fleece garments, wool nightshirts, even pajama bottoms, something Nonna had never worn, but they had come with the fleece set and she was willing to wear them because the hospital might not have enough heat on a coastal winter night. The fifth drawer contained handmade lace pillowcases. Pillowcases, too, I learned, were not provided in the hospital.
When we came to the final drawer, I had to kneel down on the hand-painted floor tiles to help her open it. It was low to the ground, and it strained her back to reach there. Outside the window, I heard the fruit vendor bringing his car up the narrow street, shouting for us to buy the sweetest melons, the tenderest plums. We ignored him. I peered into the contents of the sixth drawer.
There, alone, was a single clear plastic garment bag. Inside it, there was one pressed and folded white floral-printed nightgown. “Take that out, I will show you,” she said.
As I reached in, I focused on a detail inside the clear plastic. There was a photograph set on top of the pristinely folded nightgown. It was of her and Giuseppe, my father-in-law, taken some fifteen to twenty years earlier. In the photo, she is standing behind him and they are both smiling. I could see presents on a table in the background. The two of them were dressed up. It had probably been taken at someone’s wedding. I handed her the bag, and she set it on top of the dresser. Slowly she removed the photo, set it aside, and held up the clothes: a nightgown, undergarments, stockings.
“These are for when I die.”
Then she patted the clothes, straightened the stockings, and carefully put them and the photo back into the bag. I was directed to put the bag back into the sixth drawer. “I have to have all this. You don’t want anyone saying at the end of your life, ‘She didn’t have enough to have fresh gowns in the hospital and a decent gown to take to the cemetery.’ ”
I told her I understood. She shrugged her shoulders, as if maybe I did, maybe I didn’t, but at least now I knew. Then the fruit vendor’s baritone interrupted the moment as he made his way up the street. Nonna took that as a cue to return to ironing Emanuela’s nightgowns. “I do this because her daughter-in-law doesn’t like to iron. But people come to visit each day. It is needed.”
She left me standing in the bedroom alone as she went back to work. I was caught off guard, moved by what had just happened. She had shown me her most vulnerable self, invited me to see and contemplate her own mortality. I felt soft inside, as though I needed to sit down. We had never had openness between us like this before. In one day, she had shown us off to the priest and shown me her death clothes. I wasn’t sure how to respond to such an invitation of closeness, to being included in parts of her previously unknown life. In all our years together, this was perhaps the most intimate moment we had ever had. She had literally opened up hidden places, shared with me her wishes for what would happen when she no longer had the ability to make decisions. This was end-of-life planning, Sicilian style. But I also felt trusted, as if she had invited me into a new chamber of her heart and was encouraging me to stay. I felt like her daughter-in-law in a new way.
When I left the bedroom and passed her at the ironing board, pressing the creases out of Emanuela’s smock and bras, I was struck by something else. I realized I was witnessing another example of the way community functions so tightly here. For better or for worse. Each of the women on this street will be called upon and expected to participate in the illness or death of the others. They held one another up. It was a custom as ancient and alive as the ruins of Sicily’s Hera Temple—where Zoela and I were headed next.
HERA AND THE SAPPHIRE SEA
The ride to Agrigento devolved into a nearly four-hour, mapless road trip full of road closures and detours. Cosimo had offered to drive us, I think because there was a collective concern on the part of my in-laws that Zoela and my bisecting Sicily’s desolate interior without a local was a potential shit show in the making. Franca came along, too. Frankly, having endured many road trip mishaps in Italy and Sicily, I was relieved to have them with me. Most memorable had been five years earlier with Saro, when a gas station attendant had pumped leaded gasoline into the diesel engine of a car we had rented in Rome. Twenty minutes later, the transmission had gone out on the autostrada. It was the middle of the day in August. No AC, limited cell service, cars zooming by at ninety miles per hour; we couldn’t even let the windows down once the engine died. There was no AAA to come to our rescue. The Numero Verde, Italy’s national emergency response number, was a Kafkaesque nightmare of a single prerecorded voice telling me to “press one” for assistance over and over again for hours. Saro cursed the nation and declared Italian inefficiency a plague on mankind. I prayed for a miracle and peeled the oranges we had just bought to keep Zoela hydrated. We waited for help for four hours. Spending four hours stranded roadside on the loop around Rome in summer is like idling a diesel engine inside a sweat lodge. At the end of that trip, I declared Italy insufferable and threatened never to come back.
That memory was fresh in my mind as I planned our trip to Agrigento and considered the two major things that were happening in Sicily that summer: raging wildfires (likely due to arson) and the closure of a portion of highway A19, which leads from the northern coast toward the southeast to Catania. Still, Cosimo wanted to begin our journey on A19 because he was familiar with it and he wanted to avoid Palermo traffic before connecting to the main highway that leads to Agrigento. This meant that in order to get from Aliminusa to our destination, we’d have to go through the island’s interior on secondary roads. It was a trip that would take an hour and a half on a California highway, but in Sicily, traveling that same distance would take four hours. Still I was undeterred.
I had chosen Agrigento because Zoela loved tales of the gods and goddesses, their virtues, struggles, laments, humor. Saro had taught her about all of them, and she had readily entered into his deep thinking about the big struggles of human behavior. I wanted to travel with her there to the Valley of the Temples, the greatest archaeological site in Sicily. Saro had taken me there years before. We had kissed among the pillars of the Temple of Hera, the goddess of marriage. It was a place where my past and my present could perhaps meet. Closer to North Africa, the Valley of the Temples was sacred, ancient, evocative, a place where visitors must wrestle with the construct of time. Standing in the presence of the temples, you can’t help but contemplate what has been lost while also seeing the continuity of life. It was just the kind of place I needed.
When our carful finally arrived in Agrigento, I was a little carsick yet nonetheless optimistic. It was hotter than I could have imagined. When we filed out of the car at midday, the air felt like the inside of a pizza oven. To make matters worse, Zoela and I were both on the verge of crippling hunger. I wasted no time pulling crackers from my purse, along with a pear I had swiped from Nonna’s house for this exact moment.
My in-laws and I differ in many ways but none so much as the fact that I am more than willing to stop at a trattoria for a hearty lunch or a snack. I’ll even stop for a bit of respite before venturing out into a sweltering afternoon of monuments and tourist attractions. I am of the easy-does-it school of tourism. They, on the other hand, prefer to power through, inhale a home-packed sandwich, see the sights, and then hit the road home in the hope of arriving before dark. They will always choose to eat dinner at home. They rarely dine at a pl
ace they don’t know. Practically never. That day I was on their schedule.
As they surveyed the parking lot of Agrigento’s archaeological ruins, clearly hungry, hot, and thirsty, I suddenly felt bad. I could see from their general lack of interest that I was putting them out, taking them from their routines, albeit bringing them to one of the most beautiful historical sites in Sicily, but one that I think neither of them cared much about seeing. We had all just spent nearly four hours in a cramped car. I had the subtle feeling that they couldn’t wait for me and my demanding American predilection for journeying here and there to wrap up. A lifetime could pass for them, as it had for Nonna, never seeing Agrigento. I, on the other hand, was pulled by desire, loss, hope, mystery. I wanted to know more and more about the island that I was now claiming as part of me, my past, my present, perhaps even my future.
“Zoela, come with me.” I pulled her close to me as she took a bite of the pear. I felt as though everyone else was on a short fuse and, except for me, had little interest in seeing ruins. Heat was the enemy. I was the only one who was willing to challenge it head-on. So Zoela and I began walking. I quickly decided that I’d start with the biggest and largest temple, the Temple of Hera. Everything else, if I saw it, would be a bonus. We’d leave my in-laws to wander at their own pace.
“Mommy, it’s hot.” Zoela hated heat, always had.
“I know, sweetheart.” I was conscious of the fact that she would be able to handle the heat, the sightseeing, for only so long. I’d need to spin this. “It’s hot because this is the place where Icarus fell after flying too close to the sun.” She loved the story of Icarus. Saro had read it to her countless times. She loved fingering the pages of the story in her book on Greek myths.
I delivered my version of the tale with the same enthusiasm that I used to perpetuate the fantasy of the tooth fairy and Santa Claus. “I think we can actually see where Icarus’s body fell.” If I couldn’t fool an eight-year-old, then someone should revoke my Screen Actors Guild card. I’d find a hole in the ground and point to it, if I had to. I needed to hold her attention just long enough for us to approach the Temple of Hera and touch the pillars. That’s all I wanted. And maybe to take a few pictures. And if I were lucky, I’d get to say a silent prayer into the waters facing North Africa.
Prayer at the seaside was the one thing I had taken from the twenty years that my mother had been married to her third husband, Abe, the Senegalese eldest son of a Muslim family who had grown up in Dakar and been educated at the Sorbonne. He had introduced me to the tradition of saying a prayer at every shore you visited. It was something he did without fail. When he came to Los Angeles for visits, he would travel to Santa Monica to honor his ancestors and the dead by offering a prayer into the water. Whether that tradition was a by-product of his faith or his culture or a personal affinity, I could never tease out. Frankly, it didn’t matter. I loved the idea and spirit of it. During Saro’s illness, it gave me peace to leave the oncologist’s office in Santa Monica during his treatments and drive two miles west to pour my worried prayers into the ocean. In the two years since his death, prayer at the seaside had become one of my rituals. That day in Agrigento I hoped to say a prayer that might reach the shores of northern Africa, which Saro and I had once visited. It was an illogical but heartfelt notion that if my grief touched all the places where my love had traveled, it might somehow help heal me.
“Franca, Cosimo,” I called back as Zoela and I were ascending toward the ruins. “Take your time. Zoela and I will go ahead. We can meet back here in an hour.” They were trying to figure out if the car needed a ticket to park in the attendantless, dusty gravel lot just below the archaeological site.
I took off without waiting for an answer.
For the next half hour, Zoela and I wandered among the pillars of the Temple of Hera. We touched a five-hundred-year-old olive tree. We circled an art installation of the fallen Icarus. An artist had rendered his bronze torso as large as a pickup truck, lopsided and fallen, sprawling on the ground. And there somewhere between the fallen Icarus and Hera, I started to feel a duality that was becoming familiar in my grief. Part of me was exalted by getting to experience this place again many years later; another part of me suddenly wanted to plunge myself into the sea. Grief did that still and often: it left me to wrestle with two contradictory feelings at once. In that moment, I felt a little like another character from mythology, Sisyphus, forever pushing his boulder uphill. My boulder was loss. And life after loss could be a repetitive loop of heavy lifting, pushing, and struggling to move to higher ground even while enjoying a view of the sea.
As Zoela and I wandered the archaeological site, the internal questioning grew deeper, darker. Had Saro and I been too ambitious in our love? Had we flown too close to the sun? Was cancer some cosmic challenge assigned to us by the gods? The randomness of life made no sense, giving and taking in equal measure. Though I knew we’d had a great marriage, a brilliant and dynamic love, I still wanted more and I felt cheated. Cheated of companionship, lifelong love, the joy of someone who had known me well enough to know that standing at the temple of the goddess of marriage would make me feel a little insane.
Then it was as if someone had turned on a blender and all my darkness began to churn at rapid speed. I felt jealous of all the couples around me on vacation in their shorts and sunscreen, celebrating new and old love. I was jealous of Cosimo and Franca, who still had each other. I was jealous of all the women who still had spouses, maybe even the ones in unhappy marriages, because at least they had help, their children still had dads. I had come to the southern side of Sicily only to be mad at Saro for dying. I had driven four hours to find a feeling as ancient as time: anger. There in Agrigento I quietly raged at Saro for being dead and leaving me to move through a morass of memory, questioning, a middle-aged woman who was desperate to stand in the presence of ruins in the hope of finding myself again. I was at the gates of an ancient temple trying to retrieve parts of my soul.
Suddenly I realized that I had had three marriages to Saro: the one we had experienced as newly-in-love married people; the one we had spent in the trenches of surviving cancer; and the one I had with him now, as his widow. In the decade that I had cared for Saro, I had lost parts of myself, my natural effervescence, my sense of my own sexuality, my sense of optimism. The ups and downs of years of cancer caregiving seemed to have leached those things from my life. And although caregiving had taught me how to draw from the well of my strength, how to love deeply and unconditionally, how to see the big love that exists all around us at all times, it had also dimmed my everyday light a little, grief perhaps even more. I was tired of being tired. The thing that terrified me was that I felt I might never be able to laugh effortlessly again, so hard that it hurt my sides. I worried privately that it might be years before I made love again. Things I had once done regularly that now felt outside of my reach. Nobody had told me that widowhood would be so full of fear for what might never be. I was terrified that this aspect of my grief might have the solidness of a temple’s stone pillars.
I was beginning to understand that the last marriage with Saro would ultimately be our longest. He was no more gone from my life than the moon is gone from the sky in daylight. He was everywhere, yet unseen. Learning to exist in that kind of love would take time. Time is maybe the most critical aspect of loss.
On the drive back home through Sicily’s rugged interior, I looked out the window, feeling as though I’d lost track of how many days we had been there. Time had a way of eluding capture. Much like the Sicilian landscape, it played tricks on my mind, giving me valleys of verdant groves one moment, then taking it all away, leaving barren, jagged mountains. Since I had arrived that summer, more than ever I couldn’t attempt to measure time in nice neat half and quarter hours. There were days with long stretches of endless sun and nothing to do but observe that morning and afternoon were petulant twins, each demanding their time. Then there were the twilights that came on quickly and lingere
d as if they were loath to submit to night. I realized then that I’d have to take the remaining days slowly, just as I did Sicily herself.
* * *
I craved the taste of sea salt at the edge of my mouth and sand between my toes. I wanted the gentleness of the Mediterranean to take me as I floated on my back, belly to the sun. I needed to feel my body become light, effortless, drifting wherever the water would take me.
So two days later, Cosimo let me borrow his Fiat, and I drove Zoela from the foothills to Cefalù by the sea. As we moved along the two-lane coastal road going into town, we passed the turnoff for Hotel Baia del Capitano. For a fleeting moment, I almost turned to Saro to reminisce about when we had sipped espresso in the garden and waited for his family. Memory is tricky that way. But I kept driving, imagining the feel of his palm on my knee and focusing on the moment at hand, a day in Cefalù with our daughter. His life was being lived through us now.
When we arrived in Cefalù, two things usually happened. Zoela and I would stumble up to Lido Poseidon because the place had three wide, deep freezers of eye-popping gelato, and I would order pinot grigio or an espresso seaside, depending on how my day was going. That day it was wine.
From our many trips here before, Zoela knew the drill. She swaggered right up to the hostess and requested two lounge chairs and one umbrella. She paid the twelve-euro rental fee and then told the twenty-something cigarette-smoking lifeguard in a red Speedo exactly where she wanted our chairs to be in relation to the sea. “Mia mamma vuole leggere—My mother wants to read.” What she meant was that I wanted a chair close to the shore so that I could watch her as I rested.
