Two weeks ago I learned that my aunt in Italy - my dad's sister - had died, at age 89. Days later, I took the time, after many years, to finally visit my dad's last living sibling. She is 87.
My girls had never met this aunt. This aunt, a surprisingly spry woman for all she's been through, has not changed, not in character anyway. She still carries the strong family resemblance we all seem to have, including Boo, my Mini-Me: round eyes slopping down in the corners that are at once sad and full of mischief, straight nose, defiant chin. She still tells wry jokes and laughs when she recounts the stories of my dad's shenanigans (he was full of them). She still laughs the same laugh, puts her hands up in faux supplication to the heavens when she remembers the trouble they all used to get into.
This aunt, barely taller than The Bean, wrapped her arms around my girls before we had fully crossed the threshold into her house. She held them, whispering Italian blessings on them. How beautiful, how sweet, she said into their hair. My girls were enveloped, for an afternoon, by my dad's dialect, accent, and craziness. I heard stories I'd never heard; they learned what kind of person he was - and the trouble he sometimes brought onto himself because of it.
This aunt is my last close connection to my dad, and in a sense, to a part of me. Because my dad died when I was just 13, I never had a chance to become curious about who he was as a person. He was my dad and that was it. It never occurred to me to ask about his own mom and dad, what he remembered about his childhood, what he thought of the immigrant experience. I have never seen photos of my dad as a child, and I am casting about now, to find out if any even exist. What did he look like? What kind of kid was he? Was he as much a handful as a boy as he was as a full-grown man?
We knit our personal stories together based on our memories, our experiences, and our family histories. My mom and I are good at telling our stories to each other, and in the retelling, consolidate those memories in ourselves and transfer them to my children. I didn't have that luxury with my dad. The knitting happens piecemeal, and I feel like so many of the stitches have been dropped. There are holes in our collective story, unfinished business I feel the need to go back and pick up. If only so I can hand my girls a more complete pattern to our existence - the origins of our foibles and our strengths.
Even so, I have come to accept that there is beauty in the unfinished, in the imperfect. Perhaps my girls can pick up some of those stitches for themselves one day, and create their own histories from the complex piece we've put together thus far.
