Under the Tuscan Dirt

How I Buried Ma in a Foreign Country (*** * ****** ** ** * ******* *******)

Seven years ago today my mom passed away and I lost my feminine pillar. It wasn’t easy being a caretaker for the last part of her life, although social healthcare here in Tuscany made the job as easy as possible for me. The last days were incredibly difficult in any case, but I do feel at ease when I walk just a short ways up our hill knowing she rests in a sweet and peaceful cemetery.

Here’s a little video of Mom’s grave on the hill in Lucardo. I chose a white marble tomb, and a ceramic photo plate as is the tradition in Italy to use favorite portraits. In 2016 there was plenty of room in that little cemetery, with many of the tombs abandoned or unkempt, so it seemed that resting place wasn’t a first choice for those in the area. Mom’s plaque stood out like a queen’s royal bed at first, then I began to notice that others began to follow suit, changing stones, planting flowers and choosing the little cemetery to bury their dead, eventually filling in the remaining spots. Whenever I walk in through the gate there are no living, so I greet Mom and all her neighbors and try to place a wildflower on a forgotten unknown. I feel Mom is content there, and just like in life, her presence always seemed to brighten things up. I often just sit at the foot of her tomb to look out onto the facing hills so I can feel Ma’s positive company knowing she would be happy listening to my thoughts.

Following is a poem describing the day of her burial — or how I tried to write about it anyway (the torment of a writer in the digital age). Birthdays are important, but there’s something about the last day of a loved one’s life that brings profound meaning into life itself.

How I Buried Ma in a Foreign Country
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Ma returned to her motherland –to the Italy she left
 to be with me one last time, knowing she would die
 far from where she birthed me in the America I left. 

I knew it was going to be far different than 
the Midwestern funerals branded in my memory 
so I kept writing just to make sense of the moment.
 
I thought I had written something profound –
like I had discovered an unsolvable truth. I thought 
I had concretized the surreal moment of Ma’s death.
 
Then, as if some devilish hacker thought I may be 
getting close to discovering a god-forbidden truth,
every letter  on my screen turned into an asterisk. 
 
Lines and lines of them. Every word transformed. 
No getting anything back. No saving or unsaving. 
No getting back the enlightenment I wrote that night.
 
The  part on choosing the casket disappeared, too –
quick as the burial, a knock on wood, a handful of dirt
and every stanza shoveled out into a screen’s infinite pit. 
 
Losing all of Ma’s last movements  twisted my guts,
losing how she held my hand and how the last time
she caressed my face made me a kid again.
 
Then the  hollow silence. The owl moaning. The waiting. 
The grief.  The breath.  The silence. Then blink. 
Every detail of the night turned into a zillion stars.