Of things lost, of things found
I’m looking at my mother and touching her hand, but she doesn’t look back at me. She stays still, folded on herself, her back bent forward, looking down; then she shuts her eyes as hard as she can. She is trying to keep out the sounds and the images that seem to attack her from the outside. The world around her is frightening. Elvira tells me that my mother no longer wants to leave the house. The familiar and comforting meaning of things seems lost to her. Sometimes the world falls on her as a wall of noise, loud and unpleasant. All she can do is shutting it off.
I’m sitting with my mother in her kitchen in Rome, at the white folding table she bought many years ago (in the world of my parents, I notice, things last much longer; they are so much more permanent than mine). I’ve always liked this tiled room, all white and aqua and filled with light (the Roman light: open, merciless, and with a weightless quality I’ve not found anywhere else.)
She is wearing a white nightgown, a long burgundy robe, and a shawl of the same color. “She is always cold,” tells me Elvira. She also tells me that my mother doesn’t want to take baths. She used to take her clothes off, before they changed her medications.
I know she still recognizes me: she lets me sit close to her and talk to her. Occasionally, she does look in my eyes. Then she says: “Andiamo,” let’s go. I take her hand, which is cold, and we start walking in a circle through the kitchen, the dining room, the living room, the hallway that goes by her bathroom and her bedroom, then the kitchen again. We go around and around at a slow, careful pace that reminds me of walking meditation. It is walking meditation: I try to be present. I try to feel her. What is left of her, I notice myself thinking.
Dreaming things that never were, and asking why not
Politics is very much in my mind these days. Barack Obama is the presidential candidate for the Democratic Party, Hillary Clinton has just given her concession speech, and the 40-year anniversary of Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination has just passed. On a personal note, I’m dealing with the painful awareness of not being a full member of this community, while I’m waiting for my pending citizenship case to be decided.
On June 5, 1968, when Robert F. Kennedy was shot, I was 7 years old and living in Italy. I remember that the news made me very sad. Something about him had touched me deeply, as it had touched millions of Americans who saw in RFK the personification of the hope for a better world for everybody: the blacks, the poor, the immigrants, the minimum-wage workers, and the young people fighting to stop the Vietnam war. Just two months after Martin Luther King’s assassination, the America that desperately needed change was mourning again. It was not just the loss of a man, as extraordinary as RFK was; it was the attempted murder of the belief that progress, peace, equality, and human dignity are possible here and now.
That June of forty years ago, Paul Fusco captured the mourning of the Country: a million people standing by the tracks as RFK’s body made its 8-hour last trip from New York to Washington DC. (video; more about the death of RFK and what he meant for this country in The End of an American Dream: The Assassination of Robert F. Kennedy).
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