Please Talk about Me When I'm Gone

Machinery (2)

(1979)

Until he passed away shortly before I became a teenager, I would see my mother's paternal grandfather, Nonno, every few years at his house. His wife died young (a heart attack), so he'd lived the last thirty years of his life alone. In truth, I remember little except impressions and the stories others have told about him. My recollection is that he was fairly short, had pleasantly disheveled white hair, and still spoke with a strong Italian accent. He kept chickens in his backyard and I enjoyed watching them clucking in their wooden house, or as they roamed freely in the grass. Most of all, I recall that his house smelled like piss.

He was diagnosed with colon cancer in his early sixties and, almost miraculously for that time, the surgery was successful. As a result, he was obliged to wear a colostomy bag and his diet, for the last two decades, existed almost entirely of cereal and crackers. Looking back I can better appreciate what a tough, self-sufficient man he was. He was in poor enough health that he could occasionally have trouble making it to the bathroom. As a result, he simply filled up half-gallon milk cartons and would leave them around the house, mostly in his bedroom.

I was too young to process this on any sort of rational level, but old enough to find it unsettling, and even a little frightening. What I couldn't possibly appreciate, then, was how independent and resourceful he managed to be. I like to think of him living out his years, comparatively content to exist on his own terms, at least as much as he was capable of doing.

All I knew, circa 1979, was that I was going to live forever. I was nine years old, knew nothing of cancer, or old age, infirmity, or isolation. I knew that piss smelled unpleasant, especially when it sat in a semi-open container, neglected inside a warm room within a house without air conditioning toward the end of summer.

I didn't know much in 1979, but most of all I didn't know all that I didn't know, which is the one irretrievable condition of youth. I knew some things, like the fact that my backyard was Fenway and Yaz never struck out; I knew about block parties, blue gills, burned marshmallows, mosquitoes, and putrid bug repellant that didn't kill anything but made me stronger. I knew I was going to live forever and no one close to me was close to dying either. And then, in 1980, Nonno's daughter-in-law, my grandmother, was diagnosed with cancer.