The Wake, and After

Note: Sensitive content: contains depiction of death.

When she was very small, Tabatha Presenza saw death for the first time. She saw it as a wisp hovering just above Nonno Grumble’s nobbly chin as he lay on the rollaway cot in the living room, his eyes still opening from time to time, unseeing, pupils still glimmering as the final fever burned his life away hour by hour. All night, her grandfather’s chest rose and fell unevenly, yet the wisp never moved. Even when Mamma and Tia Rosa carefully dripped precious morphine onto Nonno’s tongue, every hour, it did not move.

Tabatha lay across from Nonno Grumble on the lumpy sofa all night, barely sleeping. She could not, for as the clock slid past midnight, more old women came into the house. Some were wrapped in black shawls, so only their beak-like noses peeked out. Each one came over to Nonno’s cot and bent over him, weeping loudly. Then they would bend over Tabatha and stroke her cheek, her hair. “Beautiful child, you love your grandfather so,” they all said. None of them had tears on their cheeks, and after they petted her they went into the kitchen and nattered loudly over tiny cups of espresso that La Nonna kept getting up to make for them. Tabatha heard, over and over, her grandmother rise from her kitchen chair, the legs screeching slightly, and totter to the gas stove to put the Moka pot on.

“He was a hell of a husband,” one of them, Auntie Carmela, said.

“He was the devil,” Zia Marcella said. There was a burst of laughter and chatter.

La Nonna said nothing. Tabatha frowned where she lay on the sofa. How many times had her grandmother scolded Nonno Grumble and then said how much she loved him? And Nonno, who Tabatha had never once in her life heard speak, because he had the stroke before she was born, how many times would he gaze at her and weep?

Tabatha stared at death and closed her eyes.

The door banged open. Outside of it, the night was fading and being replaced by a dim, blue-gray glow, speckled with stars. The men were coming in: Papa, and Tio Mario, and Cousin Vittorio, and Old Pepe, holding a bottle of wine. They wore dark coats and Sunday clothes.

“How is he? How is my father?” Papa said loudly, without looking at the cot.

“Come, come have coffee,” La Nonna called.

The men strode past Tabatha and sat at the dining table with much scraping of chairs across the linoleum floor.

“It’s not long now,” Auntie Carmela said to them. “He’s barely breathing. Where is your wife, Cousin Giovanni?”

“She will come later, after,” Papa replied. “Judy, she doesn’t like how we do these things. She thinks my father should die in a hospital. She’ll bring Johnny with her when, you know, when it’s all over.”

“Pah! In a hospital?” Auntie Carmela cried. “No, he’ll die here, in his home. With his family beside him. That way he doesn’t get lost on the way to heaven.”

“Or hell,” said Zia Marcella.

“Old lady, why do you think my father is going to hell?”

“You didn’t know him like I did,” said Zia Marcella. “I was a little girl in Italy, but I knew him then. He fought for Mussolini. He did so many bad things; I can’t even say what he did. When the Americans came he took off his uniform, but they knew. They knew! He’s the reason we couldn’t go to America after the war; we went to Argentina instead.”

“But now you’re in America,” Papa said. “You’re here thanks to me and Mario.”

“Yes, now I’m in America. And too old to have any fun.”

Old Pepe roared with laughter, but Papa did not. “Fun, eh? Fun, while the rest of us work. No wonder you never married.”

Tabatha was getting cold. She tucked her knees into her chest as she lay on her side, but she never took her eyes off of Nonno Grumble. The little wisp, death, hovered patiently over his mouth.

The front door opened, closed, opened again. The younger aunts and uncles and cousins were streaming in now, as the pale light began to strengthen. The kitchen was full to bursting, and Tabatha’s cousins had to line up along the opposite wall of the living room, gazing sadly at Il Nonno.

Tia Angela burst in then, with her teenage daughter Veronica following behind, looking embarrassed. Tia Angela only ever wore flower-decked Spandex tights and a billowy vee-neck tunic, even in the winter, and she stored everything down her bra. Tabatha once overheard Zia Nuna calling Tia Angela a bafana, but she must have been wrong because Angela never gave anyone candy or flowers.

“Oh! My god, look at him, he’s sleeping so peacefully,” Tia Angela said. She wept over Nonno like the old women had done, pressing her great bosom into his chest and smooshing a wet kiss on his forehead. She came to Tabitha and pinched her cheek and told her what a brave girl she was, and then she shoved her way into the kitchen. “How is he? He looks pretty far gone,” she shouted to the crowd. “Did you give him his medicine yet, Tia Rosa? Did you forget? Give it to me; I’ll give it to him.”

Veronica sat on the sofa next to Tabatha.

“Are you sleepy?” she asked; Tabatha nodded. “Are you cold?” Veronica stood up and got a blanket from the hall closet, tucked it around Tabatha’s shoulders, and sat next to her.

Tia Angela strode into the living room, carrying the precious bottle of morphine. She bent over Nonno Grumble, obscuring his face from the eyes of the others gathering around the edges of the room. However, from her place on the sofa Tabatha could see that Tia Angela never opened the bottle. She whispered fiercely in the old man’s ear, tucked the bottle into her bra and stood up.

Tabatha thought about telling La Nonna – but she saw death begin to move.

The wisp that was death slowly curled into itself and out, just like a puff of smoke on a rainy day, and as Tabatha sat up and watched, it began to gather something: a pale, cream-yellow strand, gently spiraling upward from Nonno Grumble’s mouth and nose. Slowly and carefully, death gathered the essence, reeling it inward, and the motion reminded Tabatha of her grandmother gathering a bedsheet off the clothesline on a windy day, the clouds billowing and the sun shining.

Cream-yellow seems right, she thought. It was the same color as the walls of the kitchen, where she always sat with her grandfather, who let her sip his espresso with a drop of anisette in it, who always gave her an extra cantucci over La Nonna’s loud remonstrations.

“Nonno Grumble,” she whispered. The delicate strand was gone, and now, so was death, fading in a slow instant.

Tia Angela held her plump hand above Nonno’s mouth. “Everyone, come quickly. Come here! I think he’s almost gone.”

There was a great rush of feet from the kitchen. Papa knelt beside the cot, his hand smoothing Il Nonno’s curly gray hair. A chair was brought for La Nonna, to sit by his feet.

Tabatha’s father began to weep. He gathered Il Nonno into his arms. “Papa!” he cried out. “Papa!”

The aunts and uncles began to shout their grief. “Cousin! Oh, Vittorio!” The younger cousins stood awkwardly around the edges of the room, silent. Some wiped their eyes.

Tabatha leaned against Veronica, who cradled her tightly in her arms. Outside the window, the sky was bright blue.

Later, her mother came, holding her brother Johnny by the hand. Tabatha’s father picked him up and told him to kiss his grandfather on the forehead. Johnny squirmed and cried. Papa beckoned Tabatha to the bedside. She let the blanket drop onto the sofa and stood next to the body that was once her grandfather’s.

“Give your grandfather a kiss and tell him goodbye,” Papa said, placing a hand on her shoulder.

Tabatha looked up at him. “I already said goodbye.”

“Do as I say,” her father said quietly.

Tabatha stared at her grandfather. His face was relaxed now, no longer twisted as it had been in life, after the stroke, and to her, it seemed a different person. She clenched both fists, bent forward, and pecked his forehead. It was cooling now, no longer burning hot as it had been in the final hours. “Goodbye,” she said, loudly enough for her father to hear.

“Come sit on the sofa,” her mother said. Tabatha sat next to her on one side, and little Johnny sat on the other side. They watched as the hospice lady came in, and the director of the Spadafora funeral home, and two tall young men in dark suits who gently folded the patched quilt around Il Nonno’s body and lifted him onto a wheeled stretcher.

It was then that La Nonna began to keen, high and loud, rocking back and forth. It frightened Tabatha, and she leaned closer to her mother. The other women in the black shawls began to keen as well, wailing. Old Pepe burst into loud, messy tears.

They keened and wailed and wept and raged as Il Nonno’s body was wheeled around the living room furniture and squeezed past the uncles and aunts and cousins, and out the front door, down the concrete path, past the small knot of neighbors who were beginning to gather outside, and up to the open doors of the pale yellow hearse parked in the street. The stretcher’s wheels folded up as the men carefully slid it into the vehicle. The rear doors were shut and locked, and the hearse drove away slowly.

The keening stopped. Tabatha watched as Tia Angela and her father helped La Nonna stand up and walk to her bedroom to rest. The mourners went back into the kitchen to make breakfast for everyone. Mario went outside to greet the neighbors.

Tabatha pushed the chair that La Nonna had sat in close to the cot. She climbed onto the chair and up onto the bare mattress and sat cross-legged, resting her chin on her hands, watching the family as they went to and from the kitchen. She was very sleepy and she wanted to stay awake a little longer.

From her perch she could see them all now. High above each head, whether curly or gray or dark or blonde, she saw a tiny wisp hovering. Some were so high that they bounced happily along the ceiling; others hovered a few inches from the top of a person’s head. Each had their own pale color: some gold, some gray, some bright blue.

Tabatha looked up. Her own death hovered on the ceiling, an opaque cream-yellow wisp. Just like Nonno Grumble. She smiled, remembering the taste of anisette and bitter espresso, the crumble of sweet cookies, her grandfather’s tears that she always kissed away.

Veronica hopped up onto the cot next to her. Tabatha laid her head in Veronica’s lap and let Veronica stroke her long hair.

“Can you see them?” Tabatha asked softly.

“Of course,” Veronica murmured. “We are Presenzas, you know. Except for my mom. She’s afraid to look.”

Tia Angela walked past the archway that led into the kitchen. Tabatha could see, now, the wisp that swirled near the top of her head, a dark and angry storm cloud.

“I’m sorry for your mom,” she whispered, and fell asleep.

When she woke, Tabatha was tucked into the bed in her father’s childhood room. The light outside the window was old and shadows crept across the floor. She could hear grownups talking in the kitchen, so she got out of bed, slowly and stiffly. Her buckle-up Sunday shoes were gone, but a pair of big slippers sat next to the bed, and she slid her bare feet into them. She shuffled down the long dark hall and into the bright yellow kitchen.

“You should still be resting,” Veronica said from the other side of the small table next to the stove. “Sitting up all night with him, until they took him away; you’re exhausted.”

“I’m not tired anymore,” Tabatha said. She eased herself into the sturdy wooden chair across from Veronica and gazed at her with eyes half-closed. There it was, Veronica’s death, hovering just a couple of inches above her head, shimmering bright gold. Always bright gold.

“Then I’ll make espresso,” said Veronica, and pushed herself up and over to the stove to put the Moka pot on.

“Why did Zia Marcella say that?” Tabatha murmured as she watched the gas flame underneath the steel coffee pot. “My nonno wasn’t a bad man.”

“What is Mamma talking about?” a young man called from where he sat at the dining room table behind her. His death was a faint green and danced high above him. Across from him at the table, two children played.

Veronica waved a hand. “Just something from long ago, Mark.”

She leaned against the kitchen counter and smiled down at Tabatha. “You know how families are. Zia Marcella was all about drama. Do you remember what you said to her later, at the funeral?”

Tabatha, still drowsy, shook her head. “I was so little then. I don’t remember.”

“You yelled at her across his grave. You told her no bad man would have such a beautiful death to take him away.”

“Did I, really?”

Veronica paused to lift the lid of the Moka pot and watch the first drops of espresso bubble upward. “And do you know what she did then, Zia Marcella? She walked over to you and picked you up into her arms, and said, ‘Finally.’ She said to the family around the grave, ‘My piccola, my little one, speaks the truth.’ After that, they only said good things about him.”

She brought the steaming Moka pot to the table, sat down, and poured three cups of espresso. Into each one she dropped a sugar cube. “Because they knew then, of course. They knew you could see.”

Mark walked over with the bottle of anisette. “What does that mean?” he asked.

Tabatha smiled at him. “Come, sit down, my son. Give us a drop of anise, and we’ll tell you about your family.”