Cindy Conley

The thought never entered my mind,
What would happen if things went wrong.
I thought we would be fine,
Never hearing the Last note of that song.

But after about two months it came,
The answer to the question we avoided for a year.
I thought seeing you, everything would be the same
But it wasn’t even close, I fear

It snuck up on us like the End of a song,
We didn’t know it was over until it was Done.
And suddenly we weren’t talking anymore,
Years of friendship had come and Gone.

Looking back, I don’t regret a thing,
And telling you this now might be a waste.
I hate how you’ve pulled me along on a string,
So now I'm giving you a taste

Of your own medicine in which you gave to me.
And every word I've said has been true.
So don't keep telling me that people change,
Especially when people was You.

I guess this is Goodbye,
After reading this you'll never give me another chance.
But I was never gonna try again,
So thank you in advance

For showing me what I don't want in a Friend,
And making me a better person.
So please forgive me, it's true you see
You were my best friend - until you weren’t.

Water gently brushed the seashore before descending back into the vast ocean. The horizon endless as the blue matched perfectly, making the horizon seem practically extinct and the world an endless expansion. The only thing separating water and sky were the white fluffy clouds sneaking across the display as if they were never meant to appear. The brightest sun sang its goodbye as it traveled toward the horizon. The sky followed, seemingly melting itself to shades of orange and red. The clouds blushed at the display, joining in with their bright shades of pink. Blue, but a distant memory in the sky, remained in the calm ocean below as the symphony of colors swirled through the sky. As the sun becomes a sliver in the sky, the clouds split apart, darkening with the once vibrant display. Just as the sun vanishes beneath the horizon, a faint flash of green signals the end of light. The water creeps higher, most of the sand covered by the tide. As the sky darkens, small stars begin to splatter the sky with their elegance. Across from the sun, a beautiful crescent shaped moon began glimmering in the sky with its glory. The display remains through time, the sky’s masterpiece among a world of art and song.

I left the family farmhouse with shovel in hand and walked the two miles to the graveyard. I began digging and was stopped only by chance, the parish priest having noticed me while he walked the few steps between the rectory and the church. He asked what I was doing. “My grandfather’s trapped. I have to get him out.” The priest brought me back to my mother, who had not noticed my absence in this tiny hamlet and was horrified by my digging. I was five years old. My grandfather had died in Switzerland within the prior year, while we were “home” in New York City.

I called my maternal grandfather “Bab” which actually means “father” in Romansch, the little-known fourth national language of Switzerland. He and I were often separated by continents but he was always present in my mind and heart. His Stan Laurel face with a handlebar mustache; his smile like the Cheshire Cat’s crescent grin; his baritone calling me down to dinner from the attic, my private kingdom; the sweet smell of pipe tobacco that heralded his homecoming from the fields; the grasp of his hand and his elegant stride as we walked through the village with ice-cream as our destination.

Both he and my grandmother, Tatta, were so kind to their “foreign” grandchild that even at the age of four when I unpenned their small flock of five sheep and guided them to a nearby meadow to graze– it was that kind of village– there was no anger. There was worry, however, because I did it so very early in the morning, told no one, then fell asleep in a sink-hole in the meadow as the sheep formed a circle around me as if to provide protection. Upon being found by a posse of villagers sent out to search for me, Mom was not happy. When she saw the smiles on her parents’ faces that extended to the crinkles around their eyes, she could not help but smile and laugh as well. I was not such a foreigner after all.

Bab was always there. Until he wasn’t. And I never got to say a proper goodbye. Though I spent most of my first five years of life in this alpine village of 600 people, he died while I was in America and I lost what may have been the home of my heart with his passing.

As a child I could not articulate the reasons why his loss impacted me so greatly, but I grew to understand it. The loss of Bab, and the void that followed, led me to free him from the ground because this gentle and accepting man knew how to treat a child, unlike my paternal grandfather, Nonny, and unlike my Dad who was unable be so kind and attentive.

“Something is wrong with Carlo,” my mother Amalia began pleading when I was three as his whole family denied Dad’s increasingly strange behavior. They denied the truth despite his shirking of financial responsibilities toward his wife and child, and in spite of his beating my mother and brutalizing her emotionally. She never told Bab anything but, apparently, he and Tatta sensed the obvious that something was wrong as she was spending so much time in Switzerland rather than her adopted homeland and City, without my Dad who visited Switzerland only once. They told her to stay with them, but she was too independent (and perhaps too proud to burden them) and had long ago become the only person in a generation to escape the village environs for the wider world.

The serenity and beauty of the Alps gave way to the chaos and concrete of mid-1970s New York City, then at its lowest point, and I initially accepted the urban menace of Dad as routine as the garbage in the streets, the homeless on the corners, and the run-down tenements dotting the landscape.

Mom’s situation was made more difficult by the fact that my Italian-American paternal grandparents lived in a tenement building adjacent to ours on the Lower East Side. Their kitchen and rear-room windows were parallel to our kitchen window, and linked by a small clothesline which occasionally delivered a dollar bill for me. But this meant that if my mother had a restless night, they– somehow– saw the kitchen light and questioned her about it the next day. She learned to draw the blinds.

She lived under these conditions with my Dad and with his parents for years. One day he followed her to my school when she dropped me off after lunch. He slammed her against a wall and began to choke her in front of everyone she even remotely knew. I stood by, mouth agape, a powerless second-grader surrounded by my classmates and their moms. It was this public display of private pain that finally forced her to fight for dignity. She called the police and had him arrested. He was promptly placed in Bellevue Psychiatric Center for evaluation where he was diagnosed as a paranoid-schizophrenic with audio-visual hallucinatory tendencies. Naturally they did not hold him long enough, then prescribed some medication that he did not take and for which he was not monitored, and provided no follow-up support to him or to her. NYC was just holding-on to life itself and did little for those most fragile.

Fear and madness surrounded my mother and I for a long time but after the arrest and brief involuntary hold in Bellevue, she finally had the opportunity to change the locks on our apartment door. Dad could no longer hide in the apartment and crouch like a beast waiting to spring on its prey. Nonny had the gall to question her decision once Dad got out, saying “What happened? Carlo could not get into the apartment today.” She marched us away in silence. Nonny was left to stand alone on the sidewalk between the two buildings.

No humanity or sympathy was offered to a woman driven to extremes in order to protect herself and her son. Nonny and Nonna told my mother that they would rather have died than have their son arrested. They directly blamed her for his condition which built a wall of resentment and separation between herself and her in-laws.

With great difficulty I learned how to reconcile the differences between the happy “sitcom families,” the seemingly happy families of my friends, and my own family far too late. With a grandfather who embodied all the negative stereotypes of the “old country” and a Dad whose character was often that of a more maniacal Cuckoo-era Nicholson, I came to feel that happy families existed only on television and in the minds of those deluded by its messages of a society where mom’s apple pie and the white-picketed house still held their mythic power. Mom could not bake, and my fence was that which blocked-off the road-salt depot underneath the Manhattan Bridge that we children routinely broke into in order to climb and slide along its mountains, to return home with raw skin covered in coarse, grey dust.

It was difficult for Mom but I was generally ignorant (or denying) of much of what was going on. Wasn’t it normal for a child of eight to be sleeping with his mother for protection, a bat underneath the bed? I thought every Dad threw filled book-cases out of a third-story tenement window to crash on the pavement as mother and child fled for safety. It seemed almost ordinary for a Dad to believe that society was out to get him, hearing voices of conspiracy broadcast from a wall and seeing silhouettes spring to action. I didn’t know how wrong this was and couldn’t have done anything if I did.

Only once was I confused and truly scared. Mom was hospitalized with injuries I found out as an adult were caused by Dad’s beatings. Bizarrely, he became my caregiver during this period of time. One night, long after my seven-ish self was asleep, I was suddenly shaken awake.

“Huh? Dad.. wuz sleepin’. Why’d you wake me?”

“Get dressed. We have to leave, now.” And I did, barely awake and not knowing what was happening, sliding into my Winter coat.

Dad simply took us next door, to his parents’ apartment, where we sat in the back room with no lights on as he intently watched the windows of my own apartment. Nonna heard us enter and asked, “Carlo, what is wrong?” to which he answered, “Nothing, ma, just go back to sleep.”

We sat. We watched. In the dark. No words, except a heightened “Shushhh!!” when I tried to ask what was going on.

Finally, he spoke. “It’s okay now, we can go back.” We did, I undressed, and spent a sleepless night worrying if there was any real danger to us or to me in specific. I never told Mom.

As I grew a little older and understood the situation a little better, music and reading became the means by which I might briefly escape unacknowledged pain around and inside me. The Chronicles of Narnia by C.S. Lewis was a touchstone: Children living through wartime transported to a magical realm where they could be strong and heroic. Harry Chapin’s “Cat’s in the Cradle” unintentionally haunted me with its refrain that a child could grow to become like his father. And Simon and Garfunkel’s lyrics of immersing oneself into books and poetry for safety equally resonated because I internalized so much of what I experienced and the only outward expression of “trauma” was voracious reading, constant over-eating, and at age ten suddenly proclaiming to my mother that I would no longer respond to her in any language other than English (I then had three others, including the dying Romansch).

What was an essentially single mother to do with a stubborn child like me? “Buggas ti chinchar en Romansch cun mi?!” No, I did not wish to speak Romansch, but I will happily eat a foil-wrapped, frozen Ring Ding or four. The why of this stance took me many decades to understand: I simply felt that Switzerland was– and forever would be– in our past. By then Tatta had died and my mother was unable to honor and mourn her except from afar as we had no money to travel home. The early morning call with the sad news woke us both and she– so very, very strong– cried in the pale morning light as I stood by unable to comfort her. I must have sensed little utility and too many memories in these “foreign tongues” and so I rejected them. I, indeed, became a foreigner to Switzerland with my tongue-tied mouth and in my heart and in real life due to my reaction to our circumstances: An English-only, hyphenated Italian-American just because of my name, with little family beyond my Italian grandparents across the clothesline.

Today, I try to place myself into Nonny and Nonna’s position in order to better understand them. Two uneducated farm-workers coming to America in search of employment, they had little time or desire for anything other than work and saving– never spending!– money. True family was virtually non-existent as their closest blood-relatives remained in Italy with whom they were engaged in mutual vendettas. They allowed few friendships and even the few knew little of my grandparents’ thoughts since they maintained a curtain of secrecy. Confidence and confidantes were not words that applied to their lives.

Their children, my father and my aunt Angela, were never given more than the basic necessities in material goods or emotional love and care. Their childhood seems to have been little better than a boot-camp with a specific daily routine that spanned years. And if Master Sergeant Nonny wasn’t listened to, they were being disrespectful and rebellious and got the belt. There is not one childhood photo of my Dad and his sister with a smile on their faces.

Nonny was a disciplinarian know-it-all who took pride when I called him “Il Duce” after Mussolini when I was a tween, not catching the sarcasm in my comment. He was quick to judge and felt that he was the fount of all wisdom on the planet. He challenged my choice of boyhood friends who were mostly Black, Hispanic, and Asian and decidedly not the diminishing remnant of neighborhood Italian boys whose prejudices and attempted swagger disgusted me. “My friends are my friends because ofhow they are and not what they are.” Nonny did not like this back-talk and made sure to let me know it, but it momentarily silenced him.

Nonna was a less judgmental and a more reserved woman who followed rather than lead except when it came to her household. He took care of the business– banking, bills, and such. She cooked and cleaned and rarely visited the world outside the four walls of their three-room railroad apartment except for church and neighborhood shopping among the few remaining Italian shop-keepers with whom she best communicated. I went to Italian Mass with her on many early mornings. We stood among the Sisters of the Sacred Heart in their small convent chapel. She sang there, only there, not well but robustly and full of joy. Still, she did not balance out Nonny’s imperial and unkind nature, had her own less extreme pettiness and opinions, and so was an accomplice of sorts to his actions.

Since zero financial assistance was given by Nonny and Nonna, and certainly not from Dad, the little money my mother had went to support me as best she could. By the time Dad was forced out of the house, and I later began school, my mother did the only thing possible at the time: She entered the welfare system rather than asking for familial help which should have been freely given.

She had no one to turn to, no family and few friends to whom she could tell the horrible truth she was living. Oh, the entire neighborhood knew, make no mistake, it was still that tribal and insular back then. I had to force a smile at the jokes of schoolmates saying “Your Dad makes license plates for a living” because they heard about him being jailed. For Mom, much worse: The embarrassment of her situation, coupled with Dad threatening and cursing at her female friends on the street, isolated her from any sort of tenderness. She began working off-the-books– cleaning homes and tending to other people’s children– to supplement welfare, food stamps, and to free herself of dependency on the government (which she did within two years).

Mom once served as a British nanny in her teens– her first exposure to the world beyond the village made possible by her efforts as a chambermaid and waitress in luxury Swiss ski hotels. In these roles, she met Gene Kelly whose toupee she once refastened, walked backwards to serve the Aga Khan tea, and was questioned by the CIA regarding what she heard/knew about a particular Hollywood family that may have had Communist inclinations. It was this family that hired her as a nanny. Because of her British experiences, Mom generally embodied their saying to “Keep calm and carry on.” Her pains and suffering in NYC were real, as were her worries for me, but she subsumed most of those feelings by incessantly working both for others and within our home.

She worked, ate scraps from less scrupulous employers, saved and saved, and moved-up to eventually serve as housekeeper/household manager/confidante to Broadway actor- and producer-types who cherished her as a person and properly rewarded her work ethic. She even was entrusted to be the nervous depositor of bags of gold bars into some private, midtown vault that the wealthy have for such things.

Sadness and negativity were rarely part of Mom’s disposition, ever, and she regularly sang as she worked… most often the songs from childhood TV shows like Sesame Street or The Magic Garden that we watched together in less anxiety-filled times. Her attitude was a lesson I learned well but which– for me– also meant burying my own conflicted feelings so deeply that I did not acknowledge or deal with them and also threw myself too much into work later in life.

But my Dad…

A life where one feels boxed-in, surrounded, and constantly watched is difficult to imagine. To feel that you are the world’s center of attention is horrible. To actually believe that the world is inherently biased against you is unlivable. And to think that you are the only person whois going and can go through this is the most awful form of solitary confinement that exists.

Everyone is the enemy.

The cops and The Mob. The Jews. And the government. The mailman and the bartender. The Blacks. The unions. Your parents and your wife. Everyone.

 Everyone except me.

For me, Dad felt only the loss of a son and it was never otherwise. I was never beaten, never accused of any treason. But he knew that he lost me on many levels, though his mind’s denial and amnesiac fury would not tell him why. And, when I was older, if I told him about any incident, he would say I was crazy because none of that had ever happened.

Ironically, Dad also encouraged my escapism by introducing me to comic book super-heroics at a younger age. We had an “in” at The Green Ghost comic shop on First Street and First Avenue which we could visit even when the store was closed. These heroes championed justice and protected the endangered innocents and victims. I yearned to be the hero, not yet knowing what responsibilities come with that role. My love of film likewise came from him as we spent many a weekend at double-features. He brought me to the opening day of Star Wars before anyone knew what a sensation it would be. And he taught me to swim in the choppiest waters along New York City’s shores, Rockaway Beach.

There were other adventures as well. A mob-owned bar down the block, where I often sat drinking ginger-ale as Dad spoke with the last of the local wise guys, became a petting zoo one day. Dad brought me over, we entered the bar but exited through its rear entrance to its small concrete backyard to find… “A tiger! Can I pet it?” “You can do whatever you want, son.” Not only did I pet this cub, I wrestled it for about ten minutes before it began to get too “frisky” and Dad finally pulled me away. I never asked where the cub came from, or why it was there, knowing even then that there are some people to whom you do not pose questions. 

I will say this for Dad during his better days: He encouraged my reading and helped me to expand it as I grew older so I could discern and analyze different socio-political perspectives and make wiser, more informed decisions of my own. As a high-schooler, my grandparents’ table was routinely covered by The New York Times, the New York Post, The Village Voice (an alternative, progressive newspaper), and The Amsterdam News (an African-American focused paper). I read them all, and we discussed stories that were shared among them and how they differed in content and focus, and so he taught me critical thinking. 

I do forever cherish these positive moments as they provide balance to Dad’s darker side, but I wish there were many, many more of them that could outshine the others.

Until at least my late-thirties, I used to blame Dad for not helping himself stay stable and maintain his medication protocols. I grew to realize that he couldn’t, that the world he lived in would not allow it. He was both the sole jailkeeper and sole inmate of his private prison.

Dad spent his days with his parents and nights in his own apartment paid for by disability income that was granted. Nonny and Nonna soon had him arrested and committed when he tried to throw my grandfather out a window. How quickly people own-up to reality when suddenly they become the endangered.

Despite all this, his parents fed him, tried to nurture him, and now– far too late– gingerly treated him like the child that I should have been if life was “normal” when he wasn’t otherwise incarcerated by family, police, or– in those too rare instants of lucidity– his own will.

I suppose that Nonny and Nonna cared for me as best they could, feeding me and paying my grade-school and high-school tuition, (because they insisted I go to Catholic school). This small recompense was only the tip of what was owed to my mother and I after all of the unnecessary emotional, physical, and financial hardships we had endured. Of course, Mom did forgo a big cash bonus when Nonny offered her a few thousand dollars and a one-way ticket home to Switzerland if she left me behind. She turned and walked away from him again: Another sidewalk hustle gone bust.

I therefore had little respite from my Dad or his parents. With Mom working and me in elementary school I was still too young to remain in our apartment alone. My grandparents’ became a place for me to wait and complete homework with Dad to keep me company until I was old enough to gladly become a latch-key kid. I continued to put on a happy, fat face while stuffing junk-food into my mouth and reading my books because of avoidance or a continuing acceptance of “my usual.”

Around the time I was ten, Dad entered the faceless legions of the homeless. Though he had his own apartment and lacked for nothing in the way of bare necessities, he simply chose to leave it behind and Nonny maintained the rent on his unit.

But, still, he couldn’t be avoided. One day, as I walked with my grade-school friends to the City Hall area to sell chocolate for the school’s fundraiser, I saw him sitting on a bench in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge exit ramp. Though I tried to bypass him, he spotted me and called me over. I awkwardly went and asked “What’s going on?” with the traffic zoom and horns from the ramp above us muddling our brief talk. He said, “Nothing much,” and introduced me to two “friends” who had empty beer bottles at their feet. We exchanged other niceties– “How is school, son?” “Fine, Dad.”– until I walked away, head down-turned. My friends did not need to ask who he was, nor would they.

Then we received word that he was in Arizona, living in a Salvation Army house. To this day we have no idea how he got there. The rare postcard was all the reminder of him we had, and this was enough. My grandfather sent money toward his upkeep with the proviso that we be informed immediately if he left the house or returned to New York.

About a year later, he returned. No notice from Arizona, instead we got a call from the NYPD. He had been living in a flophouse somewhere and got into an argument with the manager, threatening to kill him. The police broke into his room and found a .38 revolver hid under his pillow. Rikers Island prison became his new home and I shudder to think what might have happened had he not been captured and instead immediately returned to our lives. He was placed into a residential, non-voluntary treatment program where he spent all of two months before being released with, again, no mandatory follow-up. I was now twelve.

At age thirteen, during a Sunday morning breakfast visit to our apartment that had become semi-routine during his “good” periods, he suddenly rose and lunged at my mother, teeth bared. 

I quickly stood up between them, fists locked and cocked though I had never been in a fight, and uttered a loud “No!” He smirked and said something like, “Oh… you have your own private bodyguard now, Amalia!” before storming out of the apartment. I had to become like a newborn, old-school Batman rising to protect the threatened.

By the time I was fourteen, he suffered a major relapse and became prone to disappearing for hours at a time or even whole days. I came home from high school one afternoon to find him pacing up and down the block across from his parents’ building. He had apparently been doing this most of the day, as per Señor Robles– the barber whose shop was across from our two buildings.

Part of me was glad to see him given his occasional disappearances and my frustrated internal care and love. Another part of me thought, “This is new. What the Hell is happening now?!”

No attempt had been made to retrieve him even though I knew his parents routinely looked out onto the street from their front windows as an ad hoc “neighborhood watch.” He and I exchanged greetings but other than that I did not push my luck. I was old enough to realize that this was a sensitive situation. I kept silent company, pacing alongside.

I finally asked him what was wrong after deciding that he seemed comfortable enough to discuss it. “They’re trying to poison me!” he said with ashen face and scorched eyes. I calmly told him that it just couldn’t be so, that he needed to eat, while trying not to appear judgmental. I eventually persuaded him to cross the street to their stoop. Here he froze. He could not, would not, proceed up into the entry-way.

“Everything will be alright, Dad. I’ll taste your food first.” With that assurance he walked the steps into the building and took the long walk up the three steep flights leading to my grandparents’ apartment.

He stopped many times along the way, eyes tearing with fear, and always I held and led him by the hand like a daycare worker with a naughty child. When we reached their floor, he paused again. With panic in his eyes and voice he tried to turn back, almost begging me to let him go. I stopped him. “I’ll protect you. Let’s go in.” We entered the apartment to their apparent surprise at seeing him because somehow, that day, they had not been on watch duty.

In that three-room railroad flat we sat staring at each other in the kitchen, our hands clasped, with the sick-canary yellow of the walls reflecting that late afternoon’s sunlight but adding little color to his own pale face. The sound of the trains rumbling by on the Manhattan Bridge added to the clamor of the household as his parents scrambled to prepare a meal, with Dad scowling at their every movement.

Once, he got up to use the toilet and I followed him out to the hallway where it was located, (the building so old that there used to be only one toilet per floor), and waited for him to emerge so he wouldn’t make a run. He was a little calmer. He methodically washed his hands in the apartment’s sink.

Then the food was served.

Nonna could not really cook well. “Al Dente” might have been an opera singer for all she knew. “The food’s good. Why don’t you have some?”

I stayed with Dad and ate both for and with him.

Afterwards, we took our long walk down those dingy, steep, marble stairs as I escorted him back to his apartment. “I need you to promise you will stay-in tonight and try to get some rest, okay? Promise?” He nodded. “We’ll see each other tomorrow and will speak more. I’ll cook for you if you need me to.”

With him “safely” in his apartment, I left and rode the elevator down. I slowly walked into nearby Seward Park and planted myself on a bench by its library– formerly a refuge for reading– to recover and try to process what I just had to do, and why. Tears came instead, rare ones through these many difficult times: A beleaguered version of The Spectre, super-heroic spirit of justice and mercy, exhausted from his mission.

During a later period of extended stability for him– during which time I worked to pay for and graduated college, fell in love, and got engaged– he showered my fiancé with adoration and called her “Princess.” She loved him back as he toured her around the Lower East Side showing her all the best food stores places and telling her the history of the community. The now-shuttered Gertel’s kosher bakery allowed him to buy her many a challah for her to “try,” actually to practically inhale… my kind of woman.

He was then the Best Man at our wedding where a great time was had by all, though I did have to remind Mom to spend some time with and dance with Dad rather than just hold court, (to be fair, she had so few chances in life to shine). Mom was not a dancer, though she did so this once for me, and when Dad afterwards took the hand of my mother-in-law for a twirl she thought he was just being polite. She was so quickly stunned by his grace and agility that she still speaks of it to this day. When Dad was good, he was good.

Less than a year after my marriage, now at age twenty-nine as I completed my graduate degree and was about to begin my chosen vocation as a teacher of English, he was gone. By his own hands. In a very brutal and public way. And I saw it coming via a creeping silence that engulfed him, his hunched and awkward body language, and the perpetual shadows on his handsome face.

I went over to his apartment on his birthday to share Chinese food and real talk. I told him I loved and cared for him. “Dad, I’m worried for you. There’s a darkness surrounding you I don’t like and I don’t understand.” He muttered a simple “I’m fine.” I said, “No, you’re not. Tell you what: If you’re willing to go right now, I’ll escort you to Bellevue and wait with you until they have you under observation.” He still denied any problem, but did not respond with anger, and neither did he eat any of the Chinese food he otherwise always relished. I hugged him and trundled out of the apartment.

I left full of despair but determined to keep trying. I went to the only two people who might help: My mother and my aunt. I explained the situation and my worries. Both of them told me that this was “normal,” that he “spiraled up-and-down but would come up again.” I strongly repeated that something felt different this time but, in the end, the two adults who might have been of most help did not offer any.

Mere weeks later, a Saturday morning call to me from a doctor at Beekman Downtown Hospital announced the “Urgent need to come in immediately,” giving the cryptic response to my questions that “There is a problem with his blood.” Yes, most of it had run out of his cross-cut wrists as Dad sat against a column in the lobby of his apartment building while maniacally laughing.

After speaking in-person with the doctors, from a payphone I made the first of the two most difficult phone calls of my life; first, to Mom, who I gently informed of Dad’s passing to her shocked wails as I assured her that I would handle all the legwork before coming over as quickly as possible, then a call to my deeply religious aunt who could not initially accept the reality of her brother’s death in such a manner. She stuttered, through tears, “What are you telling me?!”

My wife and I visited the City Medical Examiner’s Office to identify his body. They don’t slide it out of a bin like on TV, all you get is a Polaroid handed to you by a man in a yellow smock.

When we got to Mom’s, she had the pull-out couch ready. I collapsed onto it and trembled like a baby. Both of them huddled around to console me, but I pushed them away so I could briefly release years of pain and frustration and, now, mourning in solitude: A wannabe hero flinging-off his cape. I gathered myself together within fifteen minutes to begin all the work that was ahead, including handling all the burial details and Surrogate Court legal business on my own as Dad left no will and I would not pay a lawyer to handle his business. More avoidance of pain by distraction.

I did empathize with ninety-two-year-old Nonny, who lost Nonna two years prior and now violently lost his son. A half-hour before the first Wake, he bellowed at the funeral director when he saw “suicide” as the cause of death on the Death Certificate, screaming “I told you I did not want that there!” Nonny did not realize his orders meant nothing to the Medical Examiner.

Weeks after Dad’s burial, my mother told me she went into his apartment to scrub the blood from the floors and the walls… all the while talking to him and asking, “Why, Carlo, why?! We were here for you if you let us!”  I was angry that she did this instead of hiring a specialized cleaning crew, which was on my lengthy To Do List, but she insisted it was something she had to do. She and I were cut from the same tattered cloth except, perhaps, for her it was therapeutic. Keep calm(ish) and carry on.

I was immediately aware that Dad would never see the man and teacher and husband and caregiver to Mom I was to fully become. Neither would he know that we all returned to Switzerland and visited family numerous times in Mom’s elder years and that I eventually became a Swiss citizen with my official registration in that village I loved so much. The City and The Alps, finally reconciled. I learned enough German t communicate well– if not grammatically perfect– and resurrected one of my dead languages. The memories of the love and care of Bab and Tatta, and that of my Mom and wife, were enmeshed with a still-growing comprehension of what Dad went through in his torment despite his love for me and how this all impacted me as a child and adult.

It was not my overall helplessness during our lives together or having to identify his body that dominated my mind in the aftermath years. I realized that the slow walk up and down those long stairs fifteen years earlier marked the final exit from any semblance of childhood and his later suicide scarred the true beginnings of my adulthood. Bookends of life I do not wish on anyone.

I buried most of these feelings for twenty-plus years and focused intently on my work as a teacher and advisor to the detriment of most friendships, my health, and more quality time with my beloved. I sometimes think my students knew me best for all I emotionally invested. There were many welcome laughs with them, and I felt needed and was willing– maybe too willing– to give and give of myself while trying to be Superman for everyone except myself. My over-eating continued until I grew to close to 400 pounds.

I finally sought the counseling I needed all along to even begin to release the guilt, pain, anger, forever lost opportunities with Dad, and to embrace the love and esteem I did indeed hold in my heart for him… realizing that he felt the same for me all along through the fog of his illness.

I had my own long walk up to complete, and I am still climbing it.