As my grandfather was lowered into the ground, it dawned upon me for the first time that I was going to die someday too, and that life is a plank of mortality. As my grandfather headed off of it into the ocean of the unknown, my mother stepped up into position, a soon-to-be grandparent, and I stepped up behind her, a soon-to-be wife and mother. Someday, if I were lucky, I’d be the person at the end of the plank, with all my younger relatives still behind me, including my own child, perhaps by then a mother herself. Watching my grandfather descend into the ground, I literally threw up and passed out. (The great thing about being at an Italian funeral is that when you throw up and pass out, everyone is prepared with smelling salts.)
While my grandfather was dying, his biggest concern was obviously who would take care of his beloved, my grandmother, on a daily basis. In fact, one day he looked me in the eye and said, “Kelly, I need you to promise me you’re going to take care of your grandmother.” Carmela Barnello Petrocci, whom everyone called Millie, was seventy-two when my grandfather died. They’d been married fifty-four years; she’d never even had sex with anyone else. Of course I agreed.
The morning after we lowered him into the ground, I was a little shocked to find her standing in the kitchen, impeccably dressed from head to toe. It was the day the cannolis and pepperoni finally stopped flowing and the relatives left, and there she was, looking like Jackie Kennedy going to a luncheon.
“What are you doing?” I asked her.
“I’m going to see Billy,” she replied.
She hadn’t realized that the viewing was over—she thought maybe she could go see him in the casket again. I knew right then that if my grandmother could get up every day for the rest of her life and go visit her dead husband, she would. She was all dressed up like a sixteen-year-old girl waiting for her new boyfriend to take her to the dance.
Even then, I meant what I said, so I showed up for my grandmother. In fact, I moved into the upstairs apartment in her two-family home in Syracuse. When you are in your truth, good things happen to you. So although I was technically looking after my grandmother, the laws of reciprocity were in full effect. I now had cable TV, a chef downstairs, and a human alarm clock who would wake me up for school by simply banging on her ceiling with a broom! On top of that, I had my grandmother’s love.
I don’t want you to think of my grandmother as a frail, incompetent human being. She was actually very strategic. There were lottery tickets to buy and specials at discount grocery stores to take advantage of. One day when she was attacked by a purse thief while strolling to the bank to deposit her Social Security check, she promptly slugged him with her purse and screamed for help! Luckily, the police apprehended her attacker.
This was a great day for my grandmother, most of whose excitement came from naps, cable TV, and gossip she received while attending her friends’ funerals. (At one point she said to me, “It’s no fun getting old. The only time you see your friends is at funerals.”) She went to court, and when the defense attorney questioned her ability to ID the suspect, she scolded him: “Now you listen to me, young man, when someone tries to steal your bag with your Social Security check in it, you’re going to remember his face!” This performance landed her a feature in the Syracuse Herald-Journal.
Years later, after I’d moved out of my grandmother’s and started my business in New York, there was a period of eighteen hours that no one could reach my grandmother—which, in Italian American life, is a long time to not be in contact with your mother. My mother called my grandmother’s friends and ultimately the police, who busted down her mahogany door and found her sleeping in a white nightgown, her arms crossed. At first, they weren’t sure she was breathing. Of course, she shot straight up in bed and demanded, “What are you doing in my home?” For months afterward, she made it really clear that you’d better not try to take a nap in the middle of the day in this family, because they’d try to bury you!
There eventually came a time when it was no longer a false alarm, and my grandmother was about to pass. My mother and I decided to meet in Syracuse and be with her as her death coaches—just as I’d later hire a birth coach for the arrival of my daughter. So there we were, three generations of women, the younger two encouraging the oldest to push and move, not to welcome a new soul to the planet, but to see one on to its next phase.
I’d hastily stuffed my rental car with file folders as I left New York, and I proceeded to run People’s Revolution North out of my grandmother’s over-the-top dining room for three weeks, surrounded by bright turquoise walls, a cream yellow Louis XIV table, and an imposing, crystal-encrusted wall piece that was somewhere between a sconce and a chandelier. In the meantime, more cannolis and cold cuts arrived, and with them, relatives.
For days, I bathed and fed my grandmother, who had since my grandfather’s death been living mostly in his bathrobe, which she tied with one of his neckties or a hot pink curtain tassel (it was her version of a smoking jacket). At one point while I was bathing her, I saw that her breasts looked like thin, flattened fruit roll-ups.
“Grandma,” I said, “we’re going to have to get
