In November 2009, my Italian grandmother died after suffering a bad fall in her apartment from which she never recovered. Because she lived in Italy and I lived in the United States, I didn’t get to see her often, but we were extremely close due to my many visits to Italy and her intermittent visits to the U.S. when I was young. At her request, we called her “Nonna Vecchia,” which means “old grandmother” in Italian. When I was little, I asked her why she wasn’t offended by being called an “old grandmother.” She responded “Well, I’m old and I’m your grandmother, so why should I be offended?”
Whenever we were together, we’d stay up late into the night talking about anything and everything. How she survived World War II and Mussolini’s reign. How she raised five children in a tiny apartment with barely any food to eat after the war. How she lost her husband, my Nonno, to lung cancer when she was in her fifties. Why she never remarried or even dated afterwards. What my mother was like when she was young. Her blessings and her regrets in life. What she might do differently if she had to do it over again. Nonna never went to college and may not even have graduated high school if memory serves, but she watched a lot of news and was well-versed on the issues of the day. We talked about that too. A classic centrist with a pragmatic streak, Nonna wasn’t interested in political arguments or debates. She just told you what she thought. You could take it or leave it.
One time, back in the late 90s, she came to the United States for my sister’s wedding and stayed with me in New York City for a few days. I picked her up at JFK, and we cabbed to my tiny shoebox apartment on the Upper West Side. She was in her 70s then and had such bad scoliosis that she practically walked sideways, so she took her time making her way up my ridiculously steep stairs to the second floor where I lived. I took her to dinner at Ernie’s, an Italian restaurant located nearby. She ordered the spaghetti alle vongole, and when they brought out a loaded plate the size of her head, she said “Mamma mia, queste porzioni sono cosi grandi, non posso mangiarle tutto!” The next day, I got us tickets on a Big Apple Tours sightseeing bus, which took us all over the city. We sat in the open-air seats at the top so she could see everything. When we stopped in front of the Twin Towers at the World Trade Center, she looked up and said “Guarda quanto sono grandi quei grattacieli!” Even though she wasn’t very mobile, my Nonna handled my clueless effort to cram as much New York sightseeing as possible into three days with grace and no complaints. I remember being so proud to show her my city and to have that special alone time with her where I lived.
When she died, it came as a shock. Even though she had been ill for some time, her death was caused by a fall, not anything relating to her illness. My mother flew to Italy immediately upon hearing of her passing, and I flew out a day later. My family graciously waited until I got there to hold her funeral. The stress of her sudden death and my rush to get there as soon as possible caused me to lose my voice. I could barely speak to anyone the day of her funeral and for several days thereafter. Apart from her death, what made this experience surreal for me was staying in Nonna’s small two-bedroom apartment during the week I was there with my mother. This was the same apartment my mother grew up in, the same apartment that my sisters and I stayed in when we visited Italy as kids, and the same apartment I stayed in during my visits as a teenager and an adult. All my memories of these visits came flooding back, and now she was gone. It was head-spinning. An existential whirlwind.
My mother and I spent a week together in Nonna’s house reminiscing, laughing, and mourning the loss of my grandmother. My mother also spent a great deal of time–too much time–mediating between family members who were clamoring for this or that keepsake, from Nonno’s old pipes, to Nonna’s television set, to her armoires, to her jewelry, to this or that trinket that she had on her shelves. Before she died, Nonna asked my mother, who was the oldest child, to make sure there was no fighting between siblings over her possessions after she died. Thus, apart from mourning her mother’s passing, my mother was charged with trying to keep the peace between her siblings, which was not an easy task given certain genetic predispositions. All of this took a toll on my mother, who was physically and emotionally exhausted the entire time I was there. I can’t imagine how stressful this must have been for her.
Looking back, I have never felt closer to my mother than that week when we were alone together as adults, dealing with our loss in our own way in the home where she grew up and where I had so many memories, thanks to her desire to have me know my Italian family and experience life in Italy from my earliest days. This is one of the greatest gifts she has given me in my life. She told me that I could take what I wanted from my Nonna’s possessions, as long as no one had requested (demanded) it already. I took a few small items that could fit in my suitcase: a small, folding picture frame of my Nonno and my mother’s grandfather that Nonna kept in her bedroom, three small paintings, and a pencil drawing that Nonna had hanging on the walls of her apartment. Two of them were made by my mother’s uncle, who died of Parkinson’s and dementia several years earlier, and two others were made by his sons, my cousins. I also took a small painting she had hanging in her living room. All of these now hang in my apartment.
But what I wanted most, what mattered the most to me, was having a permanent record of all the memories I had from my visits to Nonna’s house throughout my life. Obviously, this was impossible. I couldn’t take those memories with me, or record them. They were buried in the past, somewhere deep in my mind’s eye. The best I could do was to try and capture Nonna’s house the way I remembered it, the way it was before she died, the way it was before it was picked clean by everyone and sold to a stranger after more than a half century of her living there. This was the very last time that I would ever be in Nonna’s house. It was the last time I would ever set eyes on the small items that marked her daily life, her blue shirt with white flowers, her clothespins, her red espresso coffee pot, her kitchen sponges, her bed, her family photos arranged on a dresser, her top floor balcony, where she used to toss down cento lire for me to go buy an ice cream or a bag of potato chips, the white chair she used to sit in and smoke even though she was using an oxygen tank by the end of her life. This was the last time I would see Nonna’s house exactly the way it was when she was alive.
So I did the only thing I could. I took out my camera and photographed everything. Everything that called out to me. Everything that struck a chord and triggered a memory, good or bad. Even the small things. I took dozens of photos, not wanting to leave anything out or miss anything. These are many of the photos I took, the ones that compelled me the most. Looking back at them, it’s clear that I was still learning how to use my camera because I used a far too shallow depth of field for most of them (a 1.4 or 2.8 f-stop, instead of f-5.6 or f-8). These low f-stops give most of my photos a blurred background except for the very center of the image, making most parts of the image appear out of focus. But this is perfect in a way, because that entire week *was* a blur to me, a dizzying mix of profound sadness, churning memories, and the reminder that one day, we will all be gone and someone we love will be performing my mother’s task. One day I will be performing it for my own mother. The blurred and out-of-focus quality of many of these images render them a dream-like, surreal quality that perfectly captures my spiraling thoughts and emotions that week.
A week after I opened the door to Nonna’s house for the very last time, I left there with tears in my eyes, knowing that I’d never see it again, knowing that a piece of me, a piece of my life and my history, was gone forever, except for these photos and my memories.
