When my mother entered, not long before midnight, she’d taken one look at her sister and asked me to call for the doctor. I did. We’d helped Zia Piera onto a chair beside the bed when he arrived. He spoke softly, as if he was interrupting, like someone shuffling along a full row of seats in the middle of a play. “I’m going to ask you a few questions, Piera,” he’d said.
She nodded.
We looked at him.
“Can you tell me where it hurts?” he’d asked.
Mum and I turned back to Zia Piera.
In the second it took for us to do so, she had taken her last breath.
The doctor offered condolences. We all began talking in whispers. He started filling out forms. My mother had tapped into her nurse background and performed all the necessary procedures with clinical calm. My sister’s baby finally fell asleep, as if he had intuited the release in the room next to his. My father brought up a bottle of mirto, an aromatic elixir, which my aunt had made some months ago by soaking wild myrtle berries in aqua vitae. We toasted her carcass. That is what it seemed to me. She was somewhere else now. Not there, in that skinny frame.
My Piera had fat fingers stacked with sparkling, semipreciousgem rings that she’d bought after fierce haggling with the Senegalese beach sellers hawking the crowded Sardinian coast. My Piera wore rhinestone-encrusted sneakers and visited her sister, who now lives in my late grandmother’s house, inland of those beaches, with cases full of curry powder, dry-roasted peanuts, and pyramidal British tea bags as exotic gifts. My Piera could cook for twenty-five people with the ease another would fry an egg. She had a tongue to cut through any bullshit and a razor-sharp memory that filed every wrong, every triumph, and every little beige moment in between—from the pope’s visit to her hometown of Simius when she was three to what socks the local north London bus driver wore two weeks ago.
Now Zia Piera smiles at me, like she always does, from the photo on the bedside table of this tidy room reserved for guests or itinerant offspring. We took the shot at our favorite Sardinian cove on the last day of our stay at the summerhouse, when we knew she’d only ever return to her island as ashes. Cancer was rippling through her lungs even though, at seventy-three, she miraculously had come out on top after surgery and chemotherapy for pancreatic tumors. All the pictures of her during her final summer are resplendent. She’d gone on a last-minute retreat near Bologna with a friend and, in her words, “met the angels.” She reconnected with her long-lost cousins in southern France.
In short, she did what I’d urged her to do one wet afternoon in Edinburgh, when she visited me while I covered the city’s theatre festival for a broadsheet. I asked her then if she was scared. She responded with a quintessential Sardinian shrug. Could mean yes. Could mean no. Could mean I don’t know; the universal body language for I can’t give you words for that, or the Sardinian for I won’t give you an answer to that. Why commit to a thought, a stance, when we could hover in the vagaries of a purgatorial no-man’sland?
“You are in a way really lucky,” I’d said at the time, once again clawing out of the earthy pits of realism toward delusional optimism. “You’ve been given a warning. It’s a chance to do everything you’ve always wanted. Don’t waste it.”
Her tears finally came—the first I’d seen since the ordeal started the previous year. In that condensation-thick Scottish café, Zia Piera and I sobbed into laughter, leaving little pools on the dirty floor for the impish shadow of Death to frolic in.
The only other time I’d seen her cry was when she talked about her beloved sister Carmela.
I stick my head out of the spare room window and inhale. I was with Zia Piera when the doctors diagnosed her pancreatic cancer. When they asked her if she exercised she answered them with a gruff “No!” Then they laughed—I explained she walked three miles daily because in the next neighborhood she could buy bananas two pence cheaper per kilo. When they asked her if she was on medication, she replied, “Yes, I take ibuprofen if I have a toothache.” They didn’t understand her at first, her thick Italian accent always elicited either condescension or bafflement from the listener. Once I had repeated it, they laughed at that too—at that sweet, old Italian lady with the funny voice and the dancing hands, whose number was almost up. Grimness and comedy twirled a dance—the perpetual symbiotic pair, like fish and chips, tea and cake, pasta and parmigiano.
I breathe out my smoke and watch it waft over my mother’s prizewinning back garden. My boyfriend—I use the term with some hesitation—drifts into my mind. I stayed over at his place last night so I could cry loudly. Then we made love all night. He likes having sex to music. Last night it was the opening track of Astral Weeks. It played the first time we did it. That was the night I fed him nearly comatose with my family’s guarded recipes: homemade gnocchetti with sage butter and a liberal, fresh grating of Sardinian pecorino, followed by braised lamb with fennel and green olives. Then I revived him with a truck driver’s portion of very alcoholic tiramisu and a large pot of espresso to accompany my aunt’s homemade mirto. Only then did he finally loosen his guard and perform a fine demonstration of unbridled British passion; much like the crackling of a suckling pig roast, if you have the time, it is worth the wait. Only I prefer to have sex without the music. I like to hear nothing but the charged breathing of a lover, his sweat on my throat, the squelch of his hand hot in mine as we lift off into the ether. I hate an underscore. It feels contrived.
That’s why I know it can’t last. He’s a romantic, and his instinctive approach to seduction is like that of any true Brit: crablike. Couple this with the fact that my family can leave even the strongest soul bulldozed and it leaves little hope of a future together.
My father is my Jewish mother. He’s armed with a colorful spectrum of passive aggression, an unstoppable zest for life, and bombastic meltdowns that are devastating and fortifying; after growing up with him, the newspaper editors I work for feel like puppies on Valium. He was born to Russian-Polish Jews, grew up in a leafy suburb of north London, and fell for a demure Catholic girl from a then-little-known rustic island in the Mediterranean. I went to a Catholic school with all the other local Italian, Ghanaian, and Irish families. I learned the Bible stories by heart. I chose favorite saints, dependent on which names I liked best rather than good deeds.
At home, however, I’d pore over my dad’s collection of books about Atlantis and listen to his after-dinner lectures about space, or spirits being frequencies that we might tune into like a radio antenna—radical thinking for a nice Jewish boy from Golders Green. When my elementary school teacher asked me to draw God, I did my best scribble of a mesh of yellow and blue light in the center of my page, because that’s how my dad would describe Him/Her/The Universal Source. I remember my teacher’s arched eyebrow, but nothing more came of it because I went to mass every week and my grades were good.
My family speak over one another. We overfeed. We argue for fun. Loudly. I watched my boyfriend at the crematorium, even though I had insisted his attendance was a punishment he didn’t merit. I saw him look desperate to feel comfortable—and fall short despite his best efforts. No doubt he’s in love with the idea of charging at this fairly successful, London-born, Sardinian-Jew (ish) travel writer with boy hips and a Medusa mop. But the reality must be exhausting, I’m sure.
I look down at the yellowing tip of my forefinger. It reminds me how deeply my smoking disappoints my mother. I start to sob again. My mother is halfway through her own course of chemotherapy for breast cancer. The two women I love most in the world have been out to battle for months. One has fallen.
Now I wade through the first stages of grief while watching my mother battle on. I feel helpless, except for the odd misplaced joke I can offer here and there to lift spirits. I’ve sat next to Mum as the chemicals drip into her vein. I’ve given a mouthful to the mincing male matron reigning over the night staff in the hospital, who had mistakenly taken her blood pressure on her arm when her notes explicitly said not to, due to the removal of several lymph nodes. I’ve watched her sleep through the thick panes of a solitary room when her white cell count was