(no subject)
I ate mango today; and a friend of mine said jokingly that he wishes he could bomb all of the United States. I laughed because these are things people just say sometimes, in a desperate wish to make things stop, but afterward I was a little frightened. I need to talk to him just to be sure he’s not involved in anything, you know, something . . .
I wrote my boyfriend a poem for San Valentino, that he still hasn’t seen. Nor has he opened his present (which, when he’s ready, I’m really excited for him to get), because his mother died choking on rice during dinner that evening. We were at work, because obviously, Valentine’s Day is a big day for couples and restaurants. It was busy, there were thirteen tables, and all of them arrived between 8 and 8:30, which meant the first half hour was crazy. All of a sudden, after all the orders had been taken, Giampaolo disappeared and his nephew (who is always hanging around but rarely actually working) asked me if I wanted him to help out. I was like, Cool, yeah, ask that table if they want dessert, but basically was handling the thirteen tables mostly by myself (which by the way, makes me really proud because it means my Italian is getting really good, and also that my waitressing skills are close to optimum) and at one point I asked the chefs if they knew where he was. (They didn’t know what had happened). They started making jokes about how he left urgently, as if he had something to do in a hurry, and suggesting it meant that he’d forgotten to buy me a present (which, as it turns out, was also true) and how I should whack him over the head with a rolling pin when he came back for me.
But he didn’t come back. And he didn’t come back. And I was thinking of jokes about how he must have had a really long cigarette to last three or four hours. And then I was thinking that I hoped he wasn’t going to too much trouble to put together a present for me because I really only spent just over ten euros. Then, everything was over. The tables were cleared, the dishes were washed (mostly) and his sister in law, Anna Maria, offered to drive me home. She then explained to me what had happened.
The day before Valentine’s Day, one of Giampaolo’s uncles hung himself. On Valentine’s Day, his mother died. And that night it snowed, although the morning had been too warm for a jacket, and they said that it was snowing on the day his father died when he was thirteen. All that night, family members came to the house to sit with Giampaolo and his sister and his brothers. And his mother was laid out on her bed in her church clothes with her rosary beads in her hands. The next day the undertakers brought her casket to the house and they laid her in it so that when people came with flowers, they would see her in a red and white silk packet, but no one took her body away to cut open and fill with formaldehyde, there was no black plastic bag to zip her up in, she stayed in her own room, with her own pictures and her own clothes. No one put any make up on her to make her seem still alive. And for two days, they had a kerchief wrapped around her head to keep her mouth closed, but on the third day, the day of the funeral, she was stiff enough not to need it.
Relatives from all over the area came to bring flowers; and almost the whole town showed up to pay their respects. For three days after she died, the priest came at night to lead a group prayer session, the recitation of the rosary, to help pray her soul out of purgatory. The house was full of people. And on the morning of her funeral, the undertakers came to seal her coffin. The family sat in her bedroom as they put on first the metal lid and welded it to the rest of the coffin with a blowtorch, and then they put on the wooden lid and drilled it shut with screws one by one. I watched my boyfriend and his sister watch them seal their mother up, and I thought how much closer death is here than it is in the US. It isn’t packaged away. Giampaolo had cut himself shaving and was still bleeding while they were shutting her in. He held a tissue paper to his face, and his sister had them in her hands in case she cried, but she didn’t cry. She just seemed crumpled. Later, after the funeral, they watched as they sealed her coffin into the tomb with bricks and mortar. In essence, by the end, there was no escaping the fact that she was gone, completely gone.
I like to think that she chose that moment for herself, by I know that is easily something we say to ourselves to make things more comfortable. But, only a week before, when I was alone watching her, she kept saying, “Morti, morti tutti. Tutti sono morti.” And then, she was talking about one or both of her dead husbands, and for several hours, she was talking about the dead. Also, she’d been having some problems eating, sometimes she ate like a horse, and sometimes she would hardly swallow a bite, and they kept saying, “If you don’t eat, we’ll have to put a tube in. Do you want a tube?” And I know that death by choking is brutal, but there is no gentle simple way to die, no matter what Elizabeth Kubler Ross says. Death is brutal no matter how you look at it, and I like to think she was better off dying without tubes and machines hooked to her, in her own house instead of in a hospital.
I wrote my boyfriend a poem for San Valentino, that he still hasn’t seen. Nor has he opened his present (which, when he’s ready, I’m really excited for him to get), because his mother died choking on rice during dinner that evening. We were at work, because obviously, Valentine’s Day is a big day for couples and restaurants. It was busy, there were thirteen tables, and all of them arrived between 8 and 8:30, which meant the first half hour was crazy. All of a sudden, after all the orders had been taken, Giampaolo disappeared and his nephew (who is always hanging around but rarely actually working) asked me if I wanted him to help out. I was like, Cool, yeah, ask that table if they want dessert, but basically was handling the thirteen tables mostly by myself (which by the way, makes me really proud because it means my Italian is getting really good, and also that my waitressing skills are close to optimum) and at one point I asked the chefs if they knew where he was. (They didn’t know what had happened). They started making jokes about how he left urgently, as if he had something to do in a hurry, and suggesting it meant that he’d forgotten to buy me a present (which, as it turns out, was also true) and how I should whack him over the head with a rolling pin when he came back for me.
But he didn’t come back. And he didn’t come back. And I was thinking of jokes about how he must have had a really long cigarette to last three or four hours. And then I was thinking that I hoped he wasn’t going to too much trouble to put together a present for me because I really only spent just over ten euros. Then, everything was over. The tables were cleared, the dishes were washed (mostly) and his sister in law, Anna Maria, offered to drive me home. She then explained to me what had happened.
The day before Valentine’s Day, one of Giampaolo’s uncles hung himself. On Valentine’s Day, his mother died. And that night it snowed, although the morning had been too warm for a jacket, and they said that it was snowing on the day his father died when he was thirteen. All that night, family members came to the house to sit with Giampaolo and his sister and his brothers. And his mother was laid out on her bed in her church clothes with her rosary beads in her hands. The next day the undertakers brought her casket to the house and they laid her in it so that when people came with flowers, they would see her in a red and white silk packet, but no one took her body away to cut open and fill with formaldehyde, there was no black plastic bag to zip her up in, she stayed in her own room, with her own pictures and her own clothes. No one put any make up on her to make her seem still alive. And for two days, they had a kerchief wrapped around her head to keep her mouth closed, but on the third day, the day of the funeral, she was stiff enough not to need it.
Relatives from all over the area came to bring flowers; and almost the whole town showed up to pay their respects. For three days after she died, the priest came at night to lead a group prayer session, the recitation of the rosary, to help pray her soul out of purgatory. The house was full of people. And on the morning of her funeral, the undertakers came to seal her coffin. The family sat in her bedroom as they put on first the metal lid and welded it to the rest of the coffin with a blowtorch, and then they put on the wooden lid and drilled it shut with screws one by one. I watched my boyfriend and his sister watch them seal their mother up, and I thought how much closer death is here than it is in the US. It isn’t packaged away. Giampaolo had cut himself shaving and was still bleeding while they were shutting her in. He held a tissue paper to his face, and his sister had them in her hands in case she cried, but she didn’t cry. She just seemed crumpled. Later, after the funeral, they watched as they sealed her coffin into the tomb with bricks and mortar. In essence, by the end, there was no escaping the fact that she was gone, completely gone.
I like to think that she chose that moment for herself, by I know that is easily something we say to ourselves to make things more comfortable. But, only a week before, when I was alone watching her, she kept saying, “Morti, morti tutti. Tutti sono morti.” And then, she was talking about one or both of her dead husbands, and for several hours, she was talking about the dead. Also, she’d been having some problems eating, sometimes she ate like a horse, and sometimes she would hardly swallow a bite, and they kept saying, “If you don’t eat, we’ll have to put a tube in. Do you want a tube?” And I know that death by choking is brutal, but there is no gentle simple way to die, no matter what Elizabeth Kubler Ross says. Death is brutal no matter how you look at it, and I like to think she was better off dying without tubes and machines hooked to her, in her own house instead of in a hospital.