Case of the Weepies

I've been holing myself up in my cubicle all day. Today is just a bad day. The grief that I should have felt years ago when my grandparents' passed has just come to fruition. All of a sudden, it's hit me quite hard.

My Nana passed in 2002. I was a mess. She had been diagnosed with intestinal cancer 8 months before she finally died, so while it pierced my heart, I was comforted by the thought that she was no longer in pain.

My grandfather passed in 2004. In the days before he died, he refused to eat and continually called my grandmother's name. It broke my heart. For a year before that, he didn't recognize us. It was torture visiting him, because while he quite vividly remember Alicia, he did not, in fact, realize that *I* was me. Alicia was an 8-year-old little girl to him. So while I again fell apart when he died, I had lost him even before that.

And now suddenly, so so suddenly, the grief I now feel is all-consuming. It has a little to do with my new fascination and fixation with Italy, reading and consuming everything I can about that beautiful country. It has a little to do with our new gung ho empahasis on growing, planting, and building our land, which will always remind me of them.

But I think it has a lot to do with Miss Ellie. In the last few weeks, Ellie has grown into the little girl I was. Like whoa. All of a sudden, she's playing pretend, making up stories, playing with her dolls, dancing to songs she sings and makes up as she goes, and all around resembles little 4-year-old me. Only 4-year-old me had Nana and Pop as both her obedient playmates and captive audience. Ellie does not have that.

I miss them so much. Every day it just seems to get worse. The pain intensifies. I remember things like the way my grandmother couldn't fully open or close her hand because of a work accident at the Sprague Meter in Bridgeport. I remember how all my relatives used to rag on Pop because of his obsession with sitting in the caffes and walking the piazza, visiting this friend and that, when he lived in Italy. A man of leisure, they'd quip. And now reading that that was actually normal male behavior. That's what men did and still do in Italy. It's part of their life, their personality, their La Dolce Vita mentality. Dolce Far Niente.

I saw a picture of two old Nonnas walking down a lane holding hands, and the tears sprang to my eyes. Those two little Nonnas could have been Nana and Zia Zia Carmella, my grandmother and her sister, polar opposites that loved each other to the core. I remember how my grandmother only wore dresses and Zia Zia only wore pants. I remember them both working their gardens, their gold earrings shining in the summer sun.

I read about Italian men with creased faces and dark, tanned leather skin, working the farms, weaving, picking, pruning, jacks of all trades, and I want Pop back. I want him in his backyard under the grape vines, whittling wood or twiddling his thumbs, both of which he did daily.

I found out yesterday that my grandmother's name is the word for Sunday. Domenica. How did I not know that? My dad wanted to name me after her, but my mother wouldn't let him. I remember thanking her for that growing up, but now? Now I wouldn't mind.