Hi Donna,
So cousin, is this how it ends? With the story that follows here? Or is this perhaps how it begins? Or maybe the story wraps around on itself, and comes full circle!
After all the pages I’ve written, I realize today exactly where this story has been carrying me! In the beginning I was writing our great great grandmother's story, telling how Filomena Scrivano gave birth to Pasquale, our great grandfather, out of wedlock, in 1870, in southern Italy. But now, in the end, I know that I am supposed to write about the fact that "Bisnonno" Pasquale Orzo, our great grandfather, suffered unspeakable, unfathomable grief at the end of his life!
And it was not only Bisnonno who suffered.
There was the severe trauma suffered by his grandson, Robert Ricci, your dad and my uncle. Uncle Bob was just a little four-year old boy – my granddaughter Dani’s
It was the afternoon of August 16, 1929, to be exact.
Perhaps the sun was shining -- an orange ball hanging in a deep blue sky. Perhaps it was very hot outdoors. Yes, it was muggy on that day in Bristol, Connecticut, at 295 Park Street, on the front porch where Bisnonno was sitting.
Sit sit sit sit sit down here now Bisnonno, please sit here with me, with us. We are going to sit together for as long as it takes to tell the story. No one should have to suffer this alone! But you did suffer alone for so many years.
“I no longer want to live.”
Is that what you said to me, or am I just making that up? I swear I heard you say it to me yesterday morning!
I know that if what happened to you in 1929 happened to me today, I would say it, “I no longer want to live. I no longer want to live.” Over and over and over again…
Non voglio piu vivere!
And so Bisnonno, is it any wonder that you had a stroke a year later? A stroke that kept you bedridden. A stroke that kept you from speaking for the last ten years of your life!
So, let me ask you this: after the stroke, was the pain lessened?
All this time I’ve been writing this year, I thought I was telling a story about your mother, Filomena. I thought it was my job to tell a story that would repair her reputation. Relieve your mother of the shame she had, giving birth to you out of wedlock back in Italy in 1870.
And also, I would try to relieve the sadness when she had to give you up shortly after you were born!
So yes, perhaps that was true to start!
But now, in my heart of hearts, I know now that I am supposed to tell another story too.
Because you see, the story of how the Orzo name came to be, back in Paola, in Italy, in 1870, that is one sad story.
But the other story is how the Orzo name came to die, at 295 Park Street in 1929!
And that story is so much sadder!
Now I know for sure. Part of the reason for my story is to explore your agony at the end of your life! And if that psychic Perdita Finn in Woodstock, New York, is right, telling this story will cure all of us descendents who inherited your pain and trauma through our DNA!
****
Francis. That was your son's name. But did you call him Francesco? Or Franco for short?
“There must have been dancing in the streets!” You wrote that, Donna. And I agree. I can just see the family, the older sisters, and Caterina and Pasquale, the whole family, all crowded around the new baby boy in the cradle! You must have felt such a bounty of joy!
And then the disaster. When he was seven.
He was only seven years old and he was your only son and you saw him get hit by a car.
You were sitting on the porch perhaps with Bisnonna, perhaps you were using your elegant Fedora hat to fan yourself in the heat. Where was the rest of the family? Were your daughters sitting with you too?
Francis, who was with my Uncle Bob and my dad, decided that he wanted to get Bob some chokecherries to eat
He wanted to spare an injury to Bob and also, to my Dad.
But in so doing, he wasn't looking where he was going, so Donna wrote, “he backed out into the street, where a car hit and killed him in view of my father and likely the family, watching on the porch!”
“Francis was rushed to a doctor’s office close by on Main Street, but died within a few minutes of arrival as a result of a fractured skull.”
Looking back now, Bisnonno, how long did you hold Francis there, in your arms, kneeling in the street? Did you carry your son to the car? Did you sit there weeping, holding him so tightly in the back seat? Who drove the two of you to the doctor's office?
What horrors went through your mind and heart? Did you scream out loud when the doctor told you what you already knew, that Francis was dead.
I know, I know. I am asking way too many questions. I am playing the role of the nosy reporter -- I once did that for a living, you see, asking the questions that reporters ask to try to ferret out the emotion, the truth, the story, and all its gory details.
Except that I believe that Perdita Finn, the psychic, may be right, we as a family need to know, so that we can deeply immerse ourselves in that day, in that unfathomable tragedy, in order to clean out the wound that has festered for the past 94 years! As Ms. Finn claims, we can talk to our ancestors and render miracles with their help.
But can we actually help to heal our ancestors?
****
It is quite odd how all this hit me this morning, the day after Christmas, 2023.
On Christmas Day, my daughter Lindsay who lives in Colorado called me to share a very scary story. At Christmas dinner at her home, her husband’s 92-year old great aunt, a beloved relative, almost died while choking on green beans and steak. Lindsay’s sister-in-law Carly saved her aunt’s life by performing the Heimlich maneuver. Lindsay said, "Mom, it felt like it went on forever!" That same sister-in-law rode in the ambulance with her aunt. Thankfully, Aunt Rosi survived.
But everyone was extraordinarily traumatized. Me included – no matter that I was 2,000 miles away. Yesterday morning when I sat down to meditate, visions of that elderly woman choking kept flashing in my mind. And each time they did, tears sprung to my eyes. Then, when I began my morning chanting --
I was chanting OMMMMMMMMMM, the sound that soothes the heart --
when suddenly, with absolutely no warning
I was there with you Bisnonno in the street on August 16, 1929!
I stopped chanting. I was having trouble breathing. Ever so slowly I got up from my meditation bench and walked at a snail's pace down the hall. I collapsed on the sofa.
I couldn’t answer. I just shook my head. I was with Bisnonno, and with Francis. With four-year-old Uncle Bob and my three-year old Dad. I was so overhwhelmed with sadness that I just sat there on the sofa, speechless.
“Could you…bring me a glass of water?” I croaked finally. I was there in the street kneeling, collapsing in grief over the body of that seven-year-old boy.
Why was my reaction so intense? Perhaps because on Christmas Day, I had celebrated with my beloved grandchildren, one of whom is an amazing boy of nine. The joy I felt on Christmas Day with him and his little sister of four was still flooding my bloodstream.
And here now I was face to face with the reality that in the blink of an eye, an ancestor of mine had lost a precious little boy. Bob and Francis “were both one month shy of their September birthdays. Francis would have been eight years old and my dad, five years old.”
I tried to keep myself from thinking how I would feel were it my grandson, injured. Is it any wonder that I was having trouble breathing? It took all of my energy NOT to imagine my grandson!
I spent the next hour writing very very slowly in my journal. Using different colored pens and pencils to put down on paper what I was feeling.
Oh Bisnonno, I was with you when, as Donna wrote, you kept going into the street where Francis died, you kept staring at the bloodstain. As if somehow that could change what happened to your son.
Sometimes with grief this deep, we keep revisiting the event, we keep repeating what happened in our mind, over and over and over again. We do this because we are trying so desperately to make sense of it. To understand it. To accept what we can never accept.
Death of a loved one is heartbreaking.
Death of a beloved child?
No words. No words. There were no words for the never ending sorrow that lasts forever.
Some 84 years later, Donna accompanied her 89-year old father, my Uncle Bob, to the place where Francis died. "My father said that he and his grandfather stared at the bloodstain in the road for what seemed like months.”
“…my dad shook his head at the memory of that awful day as if to make it not so. Although he never verbalized it to me, I believe it is possible that dad spent years with that tragedy as a shadow that followed him.”
Of course he carried that shadow because shadows like this are not easily erased.
And here now, in 2024 we are still staring at the shadow, at the bloodstain. We still feel the desperate pinch of sadness that began on that desperate August day that little Francis perished.
******
Is it possible that the reason I have never heard you speak to me before, Bisnonno Pasquale, is because all this time, down deep, I knew I had to keep this bottomless well of sadness a secret? Because it was too painful to bring it to light?
This isn’t the story I bargained for, is it? But I think this is the story that I was supposed to tell all along.
So is that what this book is going to do? Somehow erase the shadow, or at least make a space to contain it, because in a real sense, that shadow has followed all of us through the years and we didn’t even know it!
****
One very nice thing about telling a story, about writing it down, is that you can always add more! You can make the story go forward by adding a new ending. You can, by extending the narrative, find joy and redemption in the end, despite the pain.
So please now, per favore ora, sit down here with us dear Bisnonno Pasquale, sit here with us as we see the family that you gave birth to!
Sit with all of your grandchildren -- I know two of them, my Aunt Bette and her sister, my Aunt Cathy! Sit with your great grandchildren and all of your great great grandchildren and all of your great great great grandchildren
way too numerous for me to count at this moment!!
See how you filled the world with children? Does it help to see this? All these adults and children and babies?
There is Evie, Donna's granddaughter, who is five. In my family, we’ve got Ronen who is nine. We’ve got that little spitfire Dani who is four. We’ve got Monte (which means mountain in Italian) -- the little cherub who is one and lives in Colorado.
All of these children, dear Bisnonno, are descended from you! It gives me goosebumps to think that you have populated a small town at least, all on your own (okay, you had Bisnonna’s help.)
And all this time I thought I was just writing your mother‘s story. All this time I thought my task was to dispel the shame she passed down -- the shame that was nothing compared to the pain of this powerful story!
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