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 end, I am supposed to write about the fact that dear bisnonno Pasquale Orzo, your great grandfather and mine, suffered unspeakable, unfathomable grief at the end of his life!
And it was not only bisnonno that suffered.
There was the 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 age! -- on that agonizing day in August of 1929. My dad, Richard, was only three, so young he was blessedly spared any memory!
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 out. Yes, it was muggy on that day in Bristol, Connecticut, at 295 Park Street,
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!
So yes, perhaps that was true to start!
But now, in my heart of hearts, I know now that I am supposed to tell a different story.
Because you see, the story of how the Orzo name came to be, back in Paola, in Italy, in 1870, that is one story,
But the other story is how the Orzo name came to die, at 295 Park Street in 1929!
Now I know for sure. The real 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? Fran? 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, Caterina and Pasquale, the whole family. all crowded around the 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 straw hat to fan yourself in the heat. Where was the rest of the family? Were your daughters sitting with you?
Francis, who was with my Uncle Bob and my dad, wanted to get Bob some chokecherries
He wanted to spare an injury to Bob and my dad.
But in so doing, he wasn't looking where he was going, “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, 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 with him in the back seat? Who drove?
What horrors went through your mind and heart? Did you scream out loud when the doctor pronounced him dead?
I know, I know. I am asking way too many questions. I am playing the reporter that I once was, asking the questions that reporters ask to try to ferret out the emotion, the truth, the story, and all its gory details.
The truth is I don’t really want to know any of it!
Except that I believe that Perdita Finn 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 Perdita Finn says, we can 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 some scary news. At Christmas dinner, 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 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. I had to keep stopping. Then, when I began my morning chanting, suddenly, with absolutely no warming
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 meditation and walked slowly down the hall and collapsed on the sofa.
“What’s wrong?” my husband asked.
I couldn’t answer. I just shook my head. I was with bisnonno. I was with five-year-old Uncle Bob and my dad. I was overhwhelmed and I could barely speak.
“Could you…bring me a glass of water?” I croaked.
I had no warning, 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 was still flooding my bloodstream.
And here now I was face to face with the reality that in the blink of an eye somebody had lost a precious little boy.
I tried to keep myself from thinking about my grandson, injured.
Is it any wonder that I was having trouble breathing? It took all of my to NOT imagine my grandson.
I spent the next hour writing very very slowly in my journal. Using colored pencils. Writing down my feelings. Very very slowly. Putting down only a few words, trying to spell out the emotion I was feeling.
Oh bisnonno, I was with you now, I am here with you now, because when it comes to some kinds of grief, there is no time! There is only eternal sorrow. Sorrow that lasts more than one lifetime. Sorrow that lasts forever!
When it comes to unspeakable sorrow, you keep returning to the episode, over and over and over and over and over and over never stopping forever
to the little boy backing up into the street between two parked cars, that boy, bleeding, lying in the street. I’m trying NOT to imagine this but I can’t stop myself. Because yesterday was Christmas and I spent Christmas with my nine-year-old grandson and his four-year-old sister!
And that's the other thing. With sorrow like this, there is no end to the repetition. When it hit me yesterday morning I realized sometimes we keep repeating things in our mind over and over again. We repeat it because we are trying so desperately to absorb it. To understand it. To accept what we can never accept.
Death of all kinds is hard.
Death of a loved one is heartbreaking.
Death of a beloved child?
No words. No words. Never ending now o wow ow wowow ow sorrow that lasts forever.
Sometimes we go over and over and over them over and over and over them because some broken hearts never mend some memories never end isn’t that a song? And all these long long long years later
Donna, you wrote this: on that August day in 1929, both 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.” Some 84 years later, when you went to the old Park Street house with your dad, who was almost 90 years old, "he 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 be erased.
And here now, 94 years later, we are still staring at the shadow, at the bloodstain. We still feel the desperate pinch of sadness that began on the desperate August day that little Francis perished.
******
Is it possible that I never wanted to tell this story? 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 for all these years and we didn’t even know it!
****
So the nice thing about telling a story, writing it down, is that you can always add more. You can make the story go further. You can even 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 to see the family that you gave birth to!
Sit with all of 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 (mountain in Italian) the little cherub who is one and lives in Colorado.
And there are more! There are my sister Karen's red-haired, blue-eyed grandchildren: Lily, who is four, and Scarlett, who is nine months! And there are so many MANYMORE! There are my cousin Lisa Kiely‘s grandchildren who are triplets and there are so many more I don't know... Before this book is finished, and with the help of Donna and my sister Holly and other relatives, I will write down the names and ages of all of the children that I can possibly identify.
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 (ok, with bisnonna’s help.)
And all this time I thought I was just writing your mother‘s story. All this time I thought I had only to dispel the shame she passed down -- the shame that was nothing compared to the pain of this powerful story!
No comments:
Post a Comment