by Carmine Sarracino

 

Waiting for Nonna

 

 

Eight or nine, I’d run up Sutton Street, zip a right on Atwells Avenue, to “Leo’s Variety” with the quarter in my hand. Mama smoked Pall Mall, which I knew from television advertisements to pronounce “Pell Mell.” 22 cents. With the three cents back, my three cents, I sidestepped down to the glass case with four long, deep shelves. Peach Stones, three for a penny. Squirrel Nuts, two for a penny. Mary Jane’s, two for a penny. Jawbreakers, penny each. “C’mon, kid” Leo would say when I spaced out, “Next!”

I ran home with the bright red pack in one hand, and the small paper bag in the other.

After I bought my own cigarettes at Leo’s for a decade, Marl­boro, and then quit, I hounded Mama. So she switched to Merit. “Look,” she would say, blowing the smoke into the air as if this were a scientific demonstration, “nothing. There’s no nicotine in these! Here, read. It’s like air, nothing.” “Then why don’t you smoke nothing, Ma.” “Ayyy, this kid. He makes me laugh.” “Well, Anna,” Edith from next door chimes in, “he’s just trying to look out for you. He says that cause he loves you. Am I right, Car­mine?” “I know,” Mama says, and smiles. “I know,” inhaling the tasteless Merit. She looks at me shyly. Then she blows the smoke out in another demonstration. “If I close my eyes you don’t even know you’re smoking. It’s like air!”

“Ma. . . .”

When the tumor in her hip grew so big it cut off circulation to her right leg, and then grew until the skin over it thinned and fi­nally split, then she smoked three to four packs a day of generic cigarettes. They came in a white pack and said only, “Filter 100’s” in black print. Mama sat at the kitchen table under the ceiling fan, leaning left and smoking. When you asked her how she was feel­ing, she said, “Good, good.” She talked on the phone with every­one in the family, gossiped with visitors, sometimes reminisced. Most importantly, she sat and worried. With Mama, worrying was a public service.

She confided to me one day her superstition that if she worried about something bad that might happen to someone, then it would not happen. She believed that her worrying protected eve­ryone she loved. It was a kind of secular praying. She loved a lot of people, and she kept a mental file cabinet filled with every acci­dent, malady and disaster she’d ever read about, heard of, or seen on TV. The permutations and combinations of so many loved ones times so many possible misfortunes was astronomical. “Ma,” I said, “that’s silly.” “Yeah, I know.” And she lit another cigarette.

In her hospice bed much later, just weeks away from death, she told me a doctor had found what he thought was a spot of cancer inside her lip, no doubt from smoking. She smiled weakly. “At least,” she said, “I don’t have to worry about that.”

 

II

 

We are probably all thinking the same thing, but only my wife brings it up to me: “Can’t we help her go?” “But she’s never said anything like that herself,” I object, “How could we say anything? What might she think?” Mama has sleeping pills which no doubt could end her suffering. She also has a bottle of morphine. At times I consider asking my cousin, who is an MD and who tends to her with great devotion, specific questions about methods and dosage. But I never do ask.

Mama has a rare cancer called a cordoma, a very slow growing tumor near the base of her spine. It is inoperable. Radiation ther­apy has failed. For years she has had discomfort and pain, but now it is all much worse. Tam, my wife, is an occupational thera­pist and has found various high-tech cushions, but nothing really works. The tumor on her right hip is so large the skin over it has split and ulcerated. Pressure on her bladder has made her inconti­nent.

One afternoon Mama and I are sitting at the kitchen table pre­paring the diaper-type undergarments she must wear now, sprin­kling powder into them and folding them into a water proof liner, and she smiles at me and says, “I have no dignity left.”

At that moment I’m tempted to say something. Looking back, I can think of only one reason why I never raised the possibility of assisted suicide, as it is called, or euthanasia — Mama never seemed at a loss, overwhelmed, broken-spirited. Terrible as her ordeal was, it never seemed, as her priest friend put it, a cross she couldn’t bear. My sister Beverly tried to articulate once the un­usual relation Mama had to her illness: “When you talk with her about her pain, her illness, it’s almost like she’s talking about someone else. It’s hard to explain, but she seems kind of separate from what’s happening to her body. . . .”

Months later in the hospice, Mama says to me one afternoon, “I feel like I’m waiting for Nonna. Is that stupid?”

“No, ma. I’ve heard that when it’s your time someone you love comes for you.”

“You think so? I hope so. But it’s been so long. . . . You think she could know I’m here?”

“Yeah, of course, Ma. She was your Mama. She’ll be sure to find you. She’ll come for you.”

“I hope so.”

“Don’t worry about that. Look, you wouldn’t miss, would you? Some day when it’s my time — you’ll come for me when it’s my time, right?”

“Ayy, come on now!” she says.

“Ayy, come on now!” is one of Mama’s stock expressions. De­pending on intonation, it has an extraordinary range of possible meanings. It could mean, “Shape up!” as in:

 

“I don’t think I’m ever going to find a good job, I might as well give up.”

“Ayy, come on now!”

 

Or, it could mean, “You are exaggerating wildly,” as in:

 

“The meatballs were so tender there was gravy all the way through them.”

“Ayy, come on now!”

 

If someone said something off-color in the presence of kids, “Ayy, come on now!” meant, simply, “Shut up, fool!” Here, as Mama looks up at me, her son, “Ayy, come on now!” means: “Don’t tell me something I can’t bear to hear.”

The last time I see Mama alive, she again mentions waiting for Nonna. “I don’t know why she doesn’t come. I don’t know. But I keep feeling like I have to wait.”

 

III

 

When Mama has to leave my sister Joan’s house, where she’s been living for more than twenty years, a hospice ambulance comes for her. Most of the great-grandchildren are there. She has cooked for them all their lives, played games with them, given them gifts, read to them, held them when they skinned knees, rocked them to sleep in her arms. They are sitting side by side in a line on the sofa — Jason, Rebecca, Brittany, Eric, Ashley, Briana — as Mama is wheeled past on a gurney. Their mouths are wide open in perfect “O’s,” like a choir singing joy — but their eyes are scrunched, they are bawling their little hearts out. “Mama, don’t go! Mama! We love you don’t go!” At moments their undulating wails crisscross, a children’s chord of grief. They do not get up, do not try to grab on to the hand Mama slowly waves. They seem to sense that something inevitable is happening. Mama, her eyes streaming, calls to them “It’s okay. Don’t cry. I love you! It’s okay,” waves and blows them kisses all the way out the door.

After she is arranged in the ambulance, the driver comes around to take the wheel. “Jeez!” he says, “Ten years I been doing this,” he pinches tears off the bridge of his nose with thumb and forefinger, “I never seen anything like that!”

 

IV

 

Mama could cook. She was proud that she did everything just as her mother, my nonna, had taught her. If anyone ever sug­gested a change for convenience, or for more flavor, or just for something different, Mama’s response was automatic and abso­lute, “Nonna didn’t do it like that.”

From Nonna she learned how to make a tomato sauce, which we called “gravy,” by cooking a chunk of beef in olive oil with garlic and onions, browning it and turning it all morning, then adding plum tomatoes and slowly cooking them down with just a bit of tomato paste. All Sunday morning it bubbled and steamed, rich, fragrant with parsley and a few leaves of fresh basil, and we kids lifted the lid again and again and sniffed deeply with appre­ciative “ummmmm’s.” Watching her shuffle back and forth from the pantry to the kitchen stove, adding a bit of water, a pinch of salt, tasting, stirring, we sensed that more than a meal was in the offing here. A ritual was being performed yet again, as it was done every day, in which she enacted her love for us.

Nonna, however, could not make meatballs. And so Mama’s meatballs too could have, with adjustment for caliber, served as cannonballs. Bear in mind, Mama’s braciolla, when we could af­ford it, was exquisite: flank steak wrapped around black olives, chopped hardboiled eggs, grated Parmesan cheese, parsley, garlic, bread crumbs — perfection! Her stuffed peppers were without equal. On a winter’s evening the appearance of her roasted sau­sage and potatoes could bring a noisy table to utter silence. But her meatballs — deadly.

Sometimes one of us kids, having eaten meatballs at some friends house and made appreciative inquiries, would suggest changes to Mama. “Ma,” we’d pipe up as we pushed the side of a fork against the hide of a meatball, “Freddie’s mother doesn’t use egg in her meatballs.” “No egg? Naaaaw, you gotta put the egg.” “Yeah but she doesn’t and they’re good — soft.” Her inevitable clincher: “Nonna always used egg.” And that was the end of that.

Two weeks before she died, Mama, whose life had been cook­ing, whose love was in the delicious meals she served and served to her family and friends — Mama stopped eating. She also stopped smoking. She drank only water and ate nothing but Ital­ian ices for her parched mouth.

A few days before she died, however, her eyes popped open and she said: “French fries.”

“What, Ma?”

“I have a wolee for french fries.”

Someone ran out and bought a large order of fries, but by the time they returned her resolve was back too, and she would not eat. So, in those last two weeks as she lay in bed in the hospice, I fed her half-teaspoonfuls of Italian ices, lemon flavored, and she batted her eyes to say “thanks” and sometimes she spoke and said “good.”

 

V

 

A week into her stay at the hospice a nurse carts in a small ma­chine which she plugs into the wall behind Mama’s bed. The ma­chine is loud and wakens Mama. “Anna, this is just some oxygen. It will help you breathe.” She stretches an elasticized cloth band around Mama’s head and tries to secure a plastic tube under Mama’s nostrils. Mama, who has been too weak to move at all, raises her right arm and pulls the tube away. The nurse says, “No, Anna — it’s okay. This will just help you to breathe more com­fortably, but it won’t prolong anything. It won’t have any effect — ” Mama has now swept the band from her forehead and is shak­ing her head slowly but decisively. “Oh, okay, okay, Anna, I won’t put this on you.” She gathers her equipment, unplugs the machine and wheels it out with a glance over at me. “Boy, stubborn!” she says, rolling her eyes, a little put off. The room is quiet again.

Mama settles back into her pillows, breathing heavily, her chest gurgling, exhausted from her struggle, and returns to her dying.

 

VI

 

Tam and I stand by Mama’s bedside as she rests, breathing hard through her mouth with long pauses between breaths. Some pauses are so long that I think, and part of me hopes, that it is over. Then another breath comes. The nurses call this breathing “chain stoking.” “It won’t be long now,” they say, yet she has been in the hospice almost two weeks.

Mama’s eyes open. She looks at Tam and me and says: “I’m dy­ing to get out of here!” She laughs, and, astonished, Tam and I laugh with her.

 

VII

 

Ann Marie comes into the room and leans over near Mama’s ear. Ann Marie is a nurse, but has also had extensive training as a counselor for the dying. Experience has not coarsened or dulled her. She is sensitive and compassionate, but no sentimentalist. Mama appreciates Ann Marie’s clarity and strength. They talk quietly and I sidle closer, a little jealous of the intimacy.

“How are you feeling, Anna?”

“Not too bad now, Ann Marie. They increased the pump.” She means the morphine released through an epidural. Mama’s breathing is strained, gurgly in her chest.

“I have . . .” she reaches a hand to her belly, “There’s like a pressure. . . .”

Ann Marie’s hands go to Mama’s belly too.

“You feel like a big ball here? It’s kind of hard?”

“Yeah, like a ball.”

“That happens, Anna. That means it won’t be too long now. Everything gathers here. This happens just before going.”

“Oh, good, good,” Mama says and smiles. Ann Marie smiles too, gently rubbing Mama’s round belly. “Soon now, Anna, soon. . . .” The moment is almost joyous, in some inside-out way like a birth: blessed event, the arrival at last of Death.

 

VIII

 

Mama looks up at the light on the ceiling and points with a puzzled, entranced look. “Ohh, what are they? See? Are they what kind of bugs?” Ann Marie is in the room and she says, “No, Anna. It’s okay. That’s just the morphine. It makes you see things. There’s nothing there, really.” “Oh,” Mama nods, like a child, “okay.”

Then, later, she awakens and forgets the explanation, pointing again. After several times the explanation shortens to “Those are just the morphine bugs, Ma.” “Oh, yeah. Yeah,” and she rests qui­etly.

There is a worse side-effect of the morphine, extremely hyper­sensitive touch. Mama was never sentimental, and therefore in my visits to her bedside I was not so either. About a year before her death she began to end phone conversations with “I love you” instead of “goodbye,” which was about as sentimental as she ever became.

But one evening, alone in the room with her, I lean close as she drifts in and out of consciousness and begin telling her how brave she is, how much we all love her. Her eyes open and focus. “Please,” she says to me “don’t breathe on me.” A moment later she adds apologetically, “You can’t imagine what that feels like.”

 

IX

 

The last time I saw Mama alive she waved goodbye to me as I stepped into the hallway, raised her head a tiny bit and waved weakly. I saw her lips move but I couldn’t hear her saying, I guess, “bye,” and “I love you.” On the train back to Pennsylvania (I’d been shuttling back and forth from Harrisburg to Providence — up on Thursday evening or Friday afternoon, down on Sunday afternoon) I remembered her wave and all the times she’d waved to me, all the greetings and goodbyes.

One August day in 1967, I left for graduate study at The Uni­versity of Michigan. It was the first time I’d left home. Mama and I lived in a third floor tenement on Federal Hill, known as a bad neighborhood because of Mafia activities. I was the youngest of three, the last to leave her. Mama, approaching sixty, would be alone now.

I could have lived at home and attended Brown, but it would have meant completing the Ph.D. with a huge debt. Michigan had offered a complete fellowship. Still, as I clattered out to the land­ing with the American Express luggage Mama had bought me at a good price from an Aunt who knew somebody who worked where they were made, part of me wished she would break down and tell me she did not want me to leave.

Maybe she feared she would break down, so she stopped talk­ing. After I kissed her, she said, “Be careful.” She tried to add “Call me,” but her mouth began to quiver with the first syllable, her held-together face broke apart, and tears sprang from her eyes. I took one step back up the stairs and she raised her hand — and waved. “Go ahead,” she said, “Bye!”

Down on the street I looked up at the kitchen window, and there she was, waving goodbye, trying to smile. I have in my mind an album of clear images of her waving to me from that window, or standing and waving from the doorway of Joan’s house, where she went to live a few years after I left. All the Thanksgivings, all the Christmases, all the summer vacations I came up to visit from Pennsylvania where I’d found a teaching job, married, and settled — every time I arrived and every time I left, Mama stood and waved. What I don’t know now is whether, when I see her in my mind’s eye in that blue house dress, her hair in bobbypins, Chey­enne in front of the glass storm door barking — Is she waving hello? Or waving goodbye?

 

X

 

Four or five months after Mama died I am surprised by a heaviness I can’t shake off. At odd moments, while I’m brushing my teeth or driving down the highway, my eyes will well up. I know that at this point there’s something wrong with this grief, something self-indulgent. I’m being sorry for myself now. Her suffering is over, suffering she handled so bravely. Here I am, snivelling.

But it’s a story she often told that helps me most. “When An­tonetta died, her daughter Caroline was all broken up. She wore all black. She cried every day. This went on for months and months. She was always in church lighting candles. Then one day I saw her coming and I thought, ‘Oh-oh, Mo comeenge — Here we go now.’

But she wasn’t wearing black. And she looked nice. We started to talk and she didn’t start to cry and go on about her mother. I said, ‘Caroline, what happened that you’re so much better about your mother’s death?’

She said, ‘Anna, I had a dream. I dreamed of my mother. She came to me and she looked a little bit put out and she said, “Eh, Caroline — Mo vo fa fini o no?” “Caroline, do you want to make an end to this or not?”

When I find myself entertaining grief even now, I think: “Mo vo fa fini o no?”

 

XI

 

Now, three years after Mama’s death, I’m glad I never talked with her about suicide. Her death had its own unfolding. It was slow and painful, but a trial she bore with courage, waiting with stoic patience for its culmination — the reunion, as she envisioned it, with her mother.

I also see clearly, with the perspective of time, that Mama’s death was one with her life. How we die is of a piece with how we have lived — in a certain sense even reveals in microcosm our whole life.

Those of us who knew Mama well and those who had only re­cently met her — doctors, nurses, home health and hospice work­ers — were awed by her warmth and unaffected good nature in the midst of pain and indignity. But Mama’s whole life had been, as she sometimes put it, “no picnic.” Widowed at 38, she had to raise three kids alone. We were poor, but always well-fed and clothed, even if with the outgrown clothes of older cousins.

In the last few years of her life Mama seemed concerned about our hardships growing up, wanting to know how we felt about the childhood that she had provided us. “Those places on Sutton Street were terrible, weren’t they?” she would ask.

We lived first in a tiny cottage and later in a third floor tene­ment. Neither had running hot water or central heat. “Ma,” I would tell her, “we had wonderful homes. When I think of them, I think of how they were filled with the delicious smells of your cooking. There was always a lot of love at home when I came back after school. And all the time I was growing up. We always had family stopping by on Sunday mornings after mass — Uncle Cadillac and Aunt Josie with Frankie and Antonio, and Uncle Frank, Aunt Mary, Aunt Ada. And their kids and grandkids. Nonna was just next door. They’d bring pastry and you’d make coffee and Frankie and I would go up into the attic and play “miner” and knock chunks of plaster out of the walls with ham­mers. And we knew all our neighbors. Those are the kinds of things that make a good home. A lot of people live in mansions that are a worse kind of ghetto. . . .”

“Yeah? I guess you’re right” she’d say, returning a white lie for my strained truth. No one who has been really poor can honestly be cavalier about it.

For to grow up poor is to live in a world that repeatedly says “No!” to you. “I want a set of American Flyer electric trains” I once told a department store Santa who later made no magical visit. “I want to be a doctor when I grow up” I once told an uncle who replied that I should think about plumbing.

There are, however, things the world of money, of class, cannot deny, cannot even speak to at all. “I want to be loved,” I felt as a child, like every child, rich and poor. “Oh, yes!” Mama’s smile told me every day of my childhood, “You are well loved.”

 

XII

 

I wanted to be with Mama when she died. The Sunday before Thanksgiving I left her hospice room planning to meet my classes and return within a few days. But early Wednesday I received a call from Ann Marie at the hospice. “Mama died a few minutes ago,” she said. My sister Beverly’s daughter Missy had stayed the night with her and was holding her hand. Later Missy told me that Mama’s face when she passed over was radiant.

Mama’s pain was over. Her worry, embarrassment, ended. More than that — who can really say? Maybe Nonna, in a rendez­vous which will always be unfathomable to me, had come for her at last.