Death in the Almost-Family

My mother has had the same two best friends since grade school -- my Aunt Lou, who lived down the block from her growing up, and my Aunt Pat, who came along at the advanced age of 8. They may not be family, but they're as close as.

While I was at my parents over the weekend, my Aunt Lou's mother passed away, something I thought would never happen. Up until about six months ago she was a spry and as hale and hearty as a woman half her age, despite the fact that she's been battling lymphoma on and off for the best ten years. She and her husband of 63 years danced the Continental at the wedding of my Aunt Pat's son just this past summer, but over the past month or so she's been slowly fading.

She couldn't have had a better death, though. She got out of bed Friday night -- an increasing rarity -- since all her grandchildren were home for a visit, had an enormous family dinner and then went to bed next to her husband. She just never woke up Saturday morning.

In a way, it was a relief, but I'm surprised at how sad I really was to hear the news. My mom's mother died when I was in middle school, and my Aunt Lou's family sort of adopted us. They're a huge, boisterous Italian family, and they just sort of fit us in. When my mom was a kid, she and my aunt used to trade houses so that she could eat pasta and my Aunt Lou could have potatoes -- so we claim that we're honorary Italians.

She was an amazing woman -- not sweet, not in the slightest, but kind and funny and compassionate. She was the life of the party into her questionable age (we still don't know how old she really was -- her obituary omitted the information and she lied to everyone about it -- but a good guess was 90 or so (her husband is 94), and from all anecdotes was hell on wheels as a young woman. She always told me that she would dance at my wedding, and when I last saw her -- at yet another wedding a few months ago -- she patted my hand and told me, in the distinctive croak of a 60-year pack-a-day smoker, that it took the men "a little longer to come around on the smart ones."

We may be honorary Italians, but I have to say that the ways of Italian mourning are new to me. In an Irish family, the grief is tempered by a lot of whiskey and a lot of laughter. In an Italian family, there's still booze -- in this case brandy and red wine -- but no laughing, and serious amounts of food.

I spent much of the rest of the weekend ferrying around to various and sundry teeny, tiny Italian delis, groceries and bakeries in "the old neighborhood" with my brother, tracking down all kinds of exotic foods and smelly cheeses. In a way, it was strangely reassuring to have something concrete to do, to contribute, and it's funny how the ins and outs of grief have been codified over the years.

At one point, I'm standing in the best bakery in the city for homemade cannolis, on a Sunday morning after the last Mass, in a neighborhood where Sunday dinner still starts at two o'clock in the afternoon, trying to explain why I didn't call ahead for the massive amounts of pastry I've been sent to acquire.

The old women behind the counter who, in their pastel smocks and dyed-black bouffant "sets" look amazingly, heartbreakingly, like my Aunt Chick, are fixing me -- whom they're obviously pegged as one of the hated yuppie outsiders currently gentrifying their longtime neighborhood -- with steely brown eyes. "Honey," the oldest one says, not unkindly, "It's after 11 o'clock Mass. There's nothing left but some ladyfingers."

But, I'm trying to explain, I was sent for cannolis. The grieving, apparently, require cannolis. I pronounce them the way I've been taught by my Aunt Lou's family -- as canools -- and something in her face softens.

"Aw, hon, did someone pass?" she asked, and suddenly, there are pastries appearing from everywhere -- things I can't identify, things whose names I can't spell and can barely pronounce.

"We always keep a few in the back," she tells me, patting my hand as it rests on the counter, "Just in case."

Twenty minutes later -- "Was it a good death? Old woman? Old man? They'll eat more -- with the young people, it's too sad" -- I leave laden with boxes tied tightly with twine as the old women press their floured hands to my cheeks, touched and faintly baffled by what just transpired.

I meet my equally-puzzled brother back at the car, juggling his own packages filled with meats and cheeses, to hit the bread bakery before we return to my Aunt Lou's house and her million and one hungry relatives.

"Did they ask you how old she was?" he asks me, and apparently, that's a universal measure for the amount of funeral baked-meats any household needs.

On the way home we do our mourning Irish-style, telling funny stories about Aunt Chick and her husband, Uncle Moon, in which the food currently perfuming the air-conditioned car features prominently. We both realize that we've learned all Italian food terms orally -- it took me years to realize that ham cappacola and gabbagool where the same thing -- and I think it's particularly appropriate that we only found out that Aunt Chick's real name was Michaelina, and her husband's Dominic, when we had to fill out the Mass card for the wake.

And I'd like to think that someday, though, if I ever do get married, Aunt Chick will be dancing the Continental in heaven in celebration.