After a few days of bedside vigils, his doctors made it clear that my grandfather would be taking the Exit Door. Hearing this, I sat with my grandmother for an hour before calling my parents in Virginia to tell them to come right away. My mother muttered that it was snowing out and this had better be the real thing. Once she assured me she was on her way, I decided to go meet my friends at a club to blow off steam, since I’d been sitting at my grandfather’s bedside for over thirty-six hours. Though he hadn’t spoken or moved in hours, my grandfather suddenly sat straight up in bed like a zombie and said, “Millie, she’s got pins in her ass, I tell you! Pins in her ass! She can’t sit still even when I’m dying!”
Lesson number one: people who are dying can hear you.
The next morning, I was again at my grandmother’s side when my parents arrived from Virginia. And sure enough, as they walked into the room, my grandfather sat straight up in his bed again—after fourteen hours of total silence—and said, “Beverly, Lee, what the hell are you doing here?” Naturally, my mother accused me of being dramatic, since I clearly had nothing better to do than prank them from the hospital, where my grandfather was on his deathbed. NOT!
The next afternoon, I walked into my grandfather’s room to see that the nurses had left him naked in bed, the sheets pulled back from his body to reveal a skeletal frame with a catheter coming out of his penis. This set me on fire. I didn’t really have a lot of life experience at this point, but I did have a sense of dignity and tribal acknowledgment, and I couldn’t believe anyone would just leave my greatest tribal elder like that. My grandfather, my medicine chief, who had from the time of my birth treated me nicer than anyone else in my life has to this day, who had always assured me I was his favorite granddaughter, even in the presence of his other grandchildren, and even proved it by letting me use his credit card to buy clothes. (Not to mention cash. He’d distract my grandmother somehow—“Hey, Millie, can you get me a glass of water?”—and then slip me $100. Between 1977 and 1987, that added up to a lot of money.) This was the man who had essentially given me the ability to love and respect men.
I demanded to see the head nurse and told her that that was it. We were taking my grandfather home. She threatened me, telling me I had to sign an AMA document (meaning you are removing the patient from the hospital “Against Medical Advice”), which is what doctors use to protect themselves from lawsuits. I didn’t care. Here’s another universal truth: Italians prefer to die at home. Boom-basta-done.
When we got home to my grandparents’ house in Syracuse, I immediately made my grandfather a really cool red terrycloth headband with two leather strips that I iced and tied around his head when he was spiking a temp. With his white hair and flannel pajamas, I told him, he looked like a cross between Willie Nelson and Axl Rose, as styled by Ralph Lauren. He didn’t say much—how could he? He had no idea what the fuck I was talking about! But when he did speak, it was usually about the World Wrestling Federation (WWF), which he was really into. “Rowdy Roddy Piper!” he’d chant. He hadn’t been home long when Italians started arriving with food, mostly cold cuts and cannolis. That’s how you know the end is near—when the cannolis and pepperoni start piling up! It was just two days after his return that my grandfather called my grandmother into his room.
“Hey, Millie,” he said.
“Yes, Billy,” she replied.
He kissed her, allowed a single tear to fall from his eye, and an hour later he was dead.
Now, I don’t mean to sound romantic, but I don’t know what else anybody could fucking want in life than to die like this. Never mind the clothes in our closets and the cars in our driveway—this, to me, is an example of real abundance, truth, and love.
When the dying become the dead, some cultures really get their groove on. The Balinese, for example, know how to throw a funeral. They build a huge Trojan horse out of wood to hold the body and the soul, and then the men serenade it with musical instruments before spinning it in circles and walking for two or three miles to the next village, where they burn the horse (the spinning is so the soul can’t find its way back).
Unfortunately, a Sicilian funeral is sads-ville. In fact, it makes Emily Dickinson and Edgar Allen Poe look positively lighthearted. There are two days of viewing the body, followed by the burial; all these days involve cold cuts, cousins, and resentments that have lasted for decades. Black is the preferred color, and the widow is encouraged to wear it with a veil for a year afterwards. It functions almost like a gang symbol—she is a new member of the Widows’ Club! At the burial, a priest reads a bunch of prayers, both for the soul and the
