by Tembi Locke
The night before, she had told me we would rise early to head to Mass by 7:00 a.m. We would be at the cemetery by 8:00 a.m., in time to have a private ceremony before the cemetery was open to the townspeople. That last detail, “before it was open,” was important, because interring ashes was uncommon here. She didn’t want to draw attention. Franca had sought help at the town’s city hall to handle all the Italian Consulate’s paperwork. It had to be completed to Italy’s exacting specifications in order for me to transport and inter his ashes. On my end, I had had numerous conversations and emails with her telling her that I needed an address and tomb number for the final resting place, neither of which she could provide because the cemetery in Aliminusa was situated on a street with no official name at the far edge of town. As is common in much of the rural interior of Sicily, cemeteries dating back to the Greeks and Arabs were placed just outside of a town, often on secondary roads downhill of winds, leading to a dead end. The people who lived there knew where it was, and that was all that mattered. Outsiders weren’t buried there. Only an outsider would need a street name.
To make bureaucratic matters more complicated, at the time of Saro’s death there had not been a tomb available in which to place his ashes. Construction had halted in the cemetery as a result of economic austerity or perhaps some indirect Mafia influence. The plots that were available were already taken, prebought by well-off families long ago for the generations of dead to come. Saro’s family didn’t have an empty tomb. They were not the only family in town to find themselves in this predicament. As a result, a de facto practice had arisen: people had begun “lending” a tomb to those families who needed it, the agreement being that, in the future, when a new space became available, the remains would be moved to a new crypt within the cemetery. At least that was how it had been explained to me back in L.A. as I had struggled to make sense of it and get all the travel documentation into order. It felt surreal, exactly the kind of Italian bureaucratic shenanigans that made Italy the punch line of many jokes.
I wanted to have no trouble transporting Saro’s ashes into Italy. I was excessively meticulous about that. Perhaps my hypervigilance came from a childhood spent with parents who had taught me how to avoid confrontation with authorities. As an adult, I had faced the reality of being a woman of a certain color and age traveling into Rome. I had often been profiled. I had been pointed out by the carabineri and immigration police on more than one occasion. I fit the ever-changing face of European immigration. I could be a woman from Morocco or Cuba or Ethiopia or Brazil, depending on which stubble-faced official was looking at me and what the authorities had been told was a current threat. Over the years, I had learned to stay close to Saro through the corridors of the baggage claim and at immigration. I had learned to keep my American passport out and visible so that there would be no holdups or delays jeopardizing our connecting flights.
Carrying Saro’s ashes with Zoela at my side was not the time to risk even a tiny margin of error. Before the trip, I had had nightmares about a search and seizure, of Saro’s ashes being detained or, worse yet, taken from me in front of Zoela all because I had failed the bureaucratic task of crossing all my T’s. I would not, under any circumstances, travel with an undocumented box of dust. Besides, Italian law strictly forbade the clandestine transport of human remains. Ashes required their own travel documents.
The whole process had been an epic exercise in Italian clerical madness. Not to mention its costs, the equivalent of three months of private school tuition. I had to have two death certificates (English and Italian), a funeral home certification, travel documents, and birth certificates all translated into Italian and then certified with an apostille (a legal certification that makes a document issued in one country valid in another) and then stamped again by the Italian government. Every piece of paper and signature carried a fee and a tax. On more than one occasion, I told myself that if Saro had known how much it would cost me in money and stress to take his ashes to Italy, he would have told me to dump them into the Pacific and be done with it. But that was not what he had said. Take part of me to Sicily.
Had he never asked me to inter his ashes in Sicily, I don’t know that I would have done it. I might have scattered them on our favorite stretch of beach in Santa Barbara, the exact spot where we had gone so often to lift his spirits during the years of treatment.
Zoela roused gently, stretching her lean frame against me.
“Sweetheart, Mommy’s going to church soon and then to the cemetery this morning with Babbo’s ashes.” It struck me that I was speaking of myself in the third person.
In my heart, I was hoping she wouldn’t want to go. I was exhausted from the hours of air travel and the winding car ride to Saro’s family home. I didn’t think I could handle being an attentive mother while sitting through a Mass. It was well within reason to imagine that I’d have to carry her along the cobblestoned streets through town to the cemetery. She would be tired and overwhelmed. Motherhood has its own demands. That morning bereaved wife and foreign daughter-in-law were the only roles I had in me.
“Can I see them?” she asked wiping sleep from her eyes.
“See what?”
“See the ashes.”
That was not a question I had anticipated. I sat up in bed and let my feet touch the marble floor.
“Sweetheart, they are downstairs in the blue box on the table. You’ve seen them.” I began to smell the scent of stove-top espresso emanating from the kitchen below. “Let’s get you something to eat.” I was punting, my classic parental redirect.
“But I want to see them. I want to see what’s inside.” She sat up in bed, clear-eyed and determined. The expression on her face told me that tears were waiting at the ready. “I want to see Babbo.”
She had been asking to see her father for months. His death, his complete goneness, was inconceivable to her young mind. When I spoke of his death, it reminded her of when she had said good-bye to him, of his memorial service; when I tried to tell her about his body being gone but his spirit being with us forever, she balked. She hated this new world in which he was inaccessible to her physically but somehow still with her invisibly. At seven, she was fiercely literal. Invisible was equal to nonexistent. My child, who had not yet entered the second grade, was cutting her teeth on the great mystery humans have pondered since the dawn of time: Where the hell do we go when we die?
Ever intuitive and exacting in her wants, she was also the kid who, three days after her father died, had told me she was done with a house full of grieving adults.
“Everyone comes over here for you. He was my dad. Why don’t they come for me?”
They had. In their adult way, family and friends had checked in on her, brought her toys and gifts, then marched out of her room and came and sat with me. Three days of that had been enough for her to see a pattern and call my attention to it. I want to see my own friends. Three days in, and she was teaching me what she would need.
The next day I invited five of her friends over. They played. They wrote messages to Saro at her urging. They created art in the room where he had died. They put flowers near the candle I kept burning. They sang, they danced. In short, my daughter had orchestrated her own elementary school–style wake.
“You can’t see his ashes. They are sealed in the box. It can’t be opened.” I knew that wasn’t true, but I needed to give a concrete reason for which her brain couldn’t conjure up a workaround. The real reason, that I would rather eat nails than open the box on your grandmother’s dining table, was too aggressive for a child of her temperament.
And as her tears were making their Sicilian debut, I added, “But I have some here in this locket. You can see those.”
For the next few minutes, we sat on the bed and stared into the locket. On one side was a tiny picture of Saro I had cut from a photo, on the other side was a small sealed plastic bag that I had taped to the heart-shaped form. We stared at the locket until Nonna shouted from below, “Tembi, sei sv
eglia? Caffè è pronto.—Tembi, are you up? Coffee is ready.”
An hour and a half later, I crossed the threshold from Nonna’s kitchen into the street on our way to the church. Zoela had chosen to stay home with her teenage cousin Laura after all. She had in fact fallen back to sleep, and I hoped she’d stay asleep until I got back.
* * *
That morning the heat rose with determination. My mother-in-law and I walked arm in arm, striding in slow unison down her street and toward the main road that is the only entrance and exit to town. She held Saro’s ashes and pulled me close as we passed the baker and cheese maker. We’d have bread and cheese made inside those shops when noon came. I wasn’t sure what she had prepared, but we’d eat the food of mourners. Of that I was sure. It would be soothing, easy to digest. It would be the kind of food to give you the strength to go on.
We passed fresh laundry hung on lines and sheep dung–coated cobblestones. The postman zipped by on his Vespa, headed to the next town before he’d circle back to Aliminusa on his way back down the foothills to the coast. As we rounded the piazza, the only square in town, I could hear a fruit vendor in the distance hawking his wares in a raspy dialect over a loudspeaker atop the cab of his small truck: “Pomodori e pesche, freschi, freschi, buoni, buoni!” The tomatoes and peaches he promised were fresh and not to be missed. I could see the pharmacy door being unlocked. The butcher was receiving his first customer, an old man wearing a coppola and snuffing out his cigarette before entering.
Nonna and I walked up the wide, smooth marble steps of the church and into the dark sacristy. We had been holding each other up during the whole ten-minute walk. Others were waiting inside. Now she broke away from me to give the priest the ashes and take her place in the pew nearest to the altar. I took the seat next to her. Looming above us all was a statue of Sant’Anna, the mother of Mary and patron saint of the town.
The priest said a brief Mass over the box of ashes. He sprinkled holy water over them, then he spoke of Nonna and her strength through his illness. He prayed for me and Zoela. I struggled through intense jet lag and fatigue to focus on his words. If I could only fix my attention on one thing, I could get through this moment. Instead, all I felt was an intense longing to have Saro next to me in that very pew. So I lowered my head and fixed my gaze on the table where the priest had put Saro’s ashes. It was humble, small with an ornate cloth. I didn’t take my eyes off of it until my mother-in-law grabbed my hand because it was time to go.
We walked back out the church, down the striated white steps to Cosimo’s waiting car. Driving would help us avoid the steep descent on foot and ensure that we didn’t risk encountering townspeople now that more people were surely out. The town’s groundskeeper was waiting with a key to open the cemetery.
At the archway that led into the main corridor of mausoleums, there was a gentle breeze. We were a small cluster of mourners: Nonna, Franca, Cosimo, two cousins, two childhood friends, a painter friend from a town nearby who had known Saro in early adulthood, the priest, and the groundskeeper.
Throughout the ceremony, I leaned against a cypress. I needed to be held up by something with deep roots. Birds gathered in the tree above as if to oversee this human drama or merely to seek shelter in the alleys of the mausoleums. Either way, they were what I could focus on. I felt as though I were floating above my body, in the sky with them. To be present in my body would mean that I’d feel the weakness in my legs, the aches in my hips. I’d have to suffer the light-headedness that threatened to cast me down onto the cobblestones. My body was an awful, fearful, unstable place to be. So I floated above it. And I listened.
I listened to what was being said first by the priest: more words, more prayers. Then I listen to the words of Vincenzo, the painter friend who had also been a close friend to Saro’s mentor Giuseppe “Pino” Battaglia, a well-known Sicilian poet. Vincenzo, the painter, began reading Pino’s words as a call to prayer. It was a poem for the dead but as I listened, I imagined that the poem was really for me.
Il mio nome è aria,
il vento che soffia.
Ora io vivo ancora in campagna
My name is the air / the wind that blows . . . / Now I live again in the countryside
Poetry would save me. It was more real and stable to me than my own body. In that moment I realized why I had returned here to this island of stone: I needed a kind of salvation. I desperately wanted, even for a moment, to shake off the ever-present sadness and fill my spirit. The poem was the love, the poetry a thread connecting me to Saro, Sicily, and my home back in L.A. where Pino’s books lined our shelves.
The groundskeeper gestured toward the ashes. That snapped me back into my body, as if a branch from the tree above had fallen and struck me on the head. I was almost crushed under the weight of a sudden crashing awareness. I understood for the first time that I was burying half my life in a tomb in Sicily. Every smile, every joy, every shared secret, a lifetime of aspirations. I was committing all of that and all of the me I had known with it to a marble tomb. The sounds of a distant mule, the scent of fresh-cut hay, salt from the sea in the air were my witnesses—the elements that would now watch over it all.
The groundskeeper climbed the handcrafted wooden ladder, fashioned from the wood of an olive tree and tied together with rope and what looked to be dried bamboo. The ladder, I imagined, had been made by the groundskeeper’s father or grandfather as a way for them to reach the upper levels of the mausoleum wall. He ascended nimbly, holding a sledgehammer. Through my tears I noticed that he was wearing old but starched pants. His hammer hit the cement facade, the layer between the crypt and the marble front stone, and it shattered the cement, sending small pieces falling to the ground below. The sound caused the birds above to squawk and fly away in unison. Their departure forced an opening into the otherwise quiet, still air.
I closed my eyes. Someone leaned into me. It could have been Nonna or her cousin or simply the town mourner, who was a fixture in such moments. “Tutto bene, forte stai—It’s okay, be strong.” Someone asked my mother-in-law for the ashes. She handed them to the groundskeeper, who descended a few rungs to get them. When I opened my eyes, he was back up on the ladder, and I saw him place Saro into the dark space behind the cement. I noticed that the cement facade had not completely shattered. He had deftly managed to create a small opening, just large enough to slip in the box. We all stood in silence as he reached for a pail of fresh cement and a trowel. In a matter of minutes, he had closed up the opening. Someone pulled at my arm to tell me it was over. It was time to go. I had done part of what I came to do. Saro was buried in Sicily. But I had yet to release him to Sicily.
As we drove home, exhausted and spent, I thought of Zoela there waiting for us. Everything that would pass between Nonna and me in the coming weeks would determine whether Sicily remained part of Zoela’s past or could also be part of her future. Anyone could see that the three of us—mother, daughter-in-law, and granddaughter—formed a grief triad, that we were swimming on dry land. It was a dangerous place to start from. I hoped that spending a month together would forge a closeness, that the loss would not drive us apart from one another. Our future felt tenuous. But on the drive from the cemetery it was too soon to tell. Right then, all I wanted to do was put a kilometer of cobblestoned street between me and the cemetery and get back to my child. She was the person who gave me a reason to keep putting one foot in front of the other. Because even in grief, motherhood made me show up. It was my salvation then and had been from day one.
SOMETHING GREAT
I had always wanted to be a mother. Always. In elementary school, Attica and I had played together, dreaming up elaborate story lines wherein each of us had six kids—three boys and three girls. Their names all began with the same initials or had to rhyme. Our play was high in drama and full of sitcom plots we borrowed liberally from Good Times and The Brady Bunch.
I saw my role as “mother” as a series of clear-cut tasks: running the house; making e
laborate meals; orchestrating frenzied trips to the pretend shopping market where Attica and I took turns playing cashier in my grandmother’s living room using an upturned dining room chair as the checkout stand. We’d pull all the canned goods from the pantry and place them around the living room. I insisted that they be grouped according to food type: bread, crackers, and cookies together; canned peaches, canned meat, and canned string beans on the windowsill near the TV.
Saro and I had been married two years when I went off birth control and let fate roll the dice. One year later, I wasn’t worried so much as I was curious. And I thought it was divine timing since trying to get my career off the ground would have been harder with pregnancy and a child.
By the fourth year, we were concerned enough that we decided to each get a fertility test. The results were neither definitive nor remarkable: my tilted pelvis and his low sperm motility, likely due to his work standing near searing heat eight-plus hours a day, made for challenges. We weren’t excessively disappointed. We had plenty of time. I wasn’t even thirty. We could also go the route of the turkey baster, if needed. But privately, I started learning more about adoption as well, an idea that had always been close to my heart.
With a little research, I found an adoption agency started by two moms in northern California that specialized in the placement of children of color, specifically transracial adoption. Every time I got one of their newsletters in the mail, my heart leapt at the family photos inside. I saw children of all backgrounds being parented by families of all backgrounds and configurations. I saw children being raised in a “forever home” with people who seemed brave enough to risk loving big and embracing the unknown. People like I imagined myself to be. They saw something more salient than blood when they saw family. The people on those pages also looked like the family I came from, a variety of shades and hues. They looked like the world I knew and the family I hoped to create.