GEORGE AND ANGELA, TILL DEATH DO THEY PART
My mother did not wake up when her husband, my father, died in bed next to her. Moments before, my brother Robert was shooting morphine drops into his open mouth whenever his breathing sounded like barking, harsh and thick. Then, the death rattle stopped, and he was gone. I held his wrist and felt no pulse. Mom slept through it all, not waking even when the men from the funeral home arrived and silently and efficiently put Dad into a bag, zipped it up, and took him away.
My brother and I hugged in the living room after the men left. “I can’t believe he’s gone,” he said. Sandra, our parents’ Jamaican home care aide, embraced us both. The day before, she called me to say, ”You better come soon. He’s traveling.” Not “he’s dying,” or more gently, “he doesn’t have much time.” For Sandra, a devout Pentecostalist, my father was simply en route from this life to his eternal one in Paradise.
When my mother woke in the morning, she asked, “Where’s my husband?” Sandra said, “Dear, would you like your breakfast now?” Mom assented and forgot about her absent husband. “Dementia can be a blessing,” I said to my brother. In the two months remaining to her before her death at ninety-six, she never again mentioned the man she’d been married to for seventy-five years.
My brother called to tell me our father was unlikely to survive the night, so I caught an Uber ride from Long Island City, my Queens neighborhood, to Bridgeport, arriving just minutes before he died. During the ride, I thought about the times I’d made this trip in reverse with my parents and brother to visit relatives in Queens. We would drive from Connecticut to spend Sundays with Zia Lina and her family, her American-born children Anthony, divorced, and Raymond and Lucy, never married. In Lina’s dining room, with Italian music playing softly on the radio, we spent afternoons a tavola in hours-long meals of cucina casalinga prepared by Lina and Lucy. The sort of Italian American familial gatherings many recall wistfully, through the lens of nostalgia. As a child, I enjoyed these dinners, the delicious food and being doted on for being a “smart” and “well-behaved” kid. But the warmth and conviviality could be easily shattered by Anthony’s son, also an Anthony, an unruly, angry kid whose Irish mother had abandoned him and her husband to “run off with a mulignan,” as Lucy put it. If Lina or anyone else spoke Italian, he’d brattishly interrupt, “Speak American!” He’d mock the names or nicknames of older relatives, especially one Zia Mariuccia, known as Mariucc’, whom he called “Ooch.” There was one Italian expression he liked to use. At a Sunday dinner, between the antipast’ and the macaroni, he screamed at Lucy, “Ba fongool!” earning himself a slap from his father.
In my early teens, I started to get political ideas. My maternal grandfather, a Sicilian immigrant, had been a communist. With the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War underway, he sounded off about both issues. He told me that one of the first things he learned about America after immigrating was “how bad they treat the colored people.” A semi-professional classical guitarist in his youth, he fell in love with jazz and had Black musician friends. When I was a child in the early Sixties, I watched the Civil Rights movement on the TV news, the marches with Black and white participants, the scenes of Southern cops beating demonstrators and turning fire hoses on them, and the massive 1963 gathering in Washington DC with hundreds of thousands thrilling to Martin Luther King’s transcendent oratory.
My parents, Angela Di Pietro De Stefano and George De Stefano, Sr., though not especially pious, were observant Catholics who didn’t voice racist sentiments and believed that “prejudice” was wrong. My father could have what my brother called his “Archie Bunker moments,” when he, a WWII veteran, would grumble about the cultural and political changes sweeping America in the Sixties and Seventies. But these reactions didn’t curdle into hatred. Dad didn’t use the “n” word, at least not around his wife and sons. When the Italian and Irish priests at their parish died off and were replaced by Africans and South Asians, he and my mother adapted to the change without complaint. Our Queens relatives, though also Catholic, and more ostentatiously so— more figurines, crucifixes, and images in their home than ours, and a Blessed Virgin Mary on the half shell in the front yard—didn’t share Mom and Dad’s attitudes. Anthony, a former cop, liked to joke about how he and his brothers in blue “messed with” Black men when he worked in the Bronx. Raymond would laugh appreciatively at his brother’s stories.
Their sister Lucy’s anti-Black racism was exceeded only by her anti-Semitism. When it came to bigotry, she was capable of holding two contradictory notions in her mind at the same time: Jews encouraged Blacks to protest and riot while also exploiting them as domestic servants. I noticed that my parents either would remain silent or fidget during Anthony’s remembrances and Lucy’s tirades. At a certain point, I think when I was 14 or 15, I refused to accompany them on the Sunday trips to Queens. They too, eventually stopped the visits; they became rarer after Lina’s death and many years later, my mother told me that she broke off all contact with Lucy after she referred to Barack Obama as “that n_ _ _ _r in the White House.”
****
When Mom and Dad became too infirm to care for themselves, a friend of theirs who was a geriatric social worker said the only way they could stay in their home would be to have live-in aides. “How are your parents with people of color?” JoAnne, the social worker, asked. No problem, we assured her. In the sixty years since they moved into the two-bedroom ranch house in Bridgeport’s North End, the neighborhood had changed from “white ethnic” —Jewish, Irish, and Italian—to Portuguese, Brazilian, Dominican, and Jamaican. All the families we had known when my brother and I were growing up, the Perrinis, the Codys, the Marcys, the Silvermans, were long gone. My parents not only stayed put, they befriended their new neighbors, becoming especially close with the young Dominican family that moved into what had been the Perrinis’ house and with a Jamaican couple, he a lay preacher and ex-Marine who ran a home repair contracting business, she a grammar school teacher. For my brother and me, our parents’ late-life friendships were a godsend; with me in New York and my brother in California, we relied on these neighbors to check on Mom and Dad and keep us posted. When Dad suddenly had to be admitted to the hospital (St. Vincent’s, where my brother and I were born), it was Tony, their Dominican neighbor, who drove him there and handled the admission. “I love your parents like my own,” Tony told us when we expressed our gratitude.
For the last three years of their lives, Mom and Dad were cared for by several aides, all of them Black women, who moved into the bedroom my brother and I had shared. My mother sometimes would confuse one with another or forget their names, but she never was hostile or abusive toward them. She reserved that for my father. As her dementia progressed (what a strange way to describe a mind’s deterioration), she would yell at my father, “Hey, you!” If he didn’t respond quickly enough, she’d go over to him and kick his chair. “Hey, you! I’m talking to you!” At other times, she’d panic if he was out of her sight for more than a few minutes.
Our mother generally had been good-natured and affectionate. She was beloved by the other elderly couples in the “Friendship Club” at their parish and by the waitresses at the Duchess Diner, where they had brunch every Sunday after Mass until my father’s macular degeneration reached the point where he no longer could drive. Mom developed a taste, no, a craving, for grilled cheese sandwiches; according to her, Duchess made the best. I teased her —“Mom, you’ve become so americana,”—and she said, “Yeah, so what.”
“She forgot she’s Italian,” Dad said, trying to make a joke of it, but his tone and expression were mirthless.
Mom was still in pretty good shape physically and mentally on her ninetieth birthday. In photos taken that day, she’s smiling and waving at the camera, stylishly and meticulously dressed as ever, her hair well-coiffed and dyed black. (She refused to go “old lady gray.”) But a year or so later, her dementia, which manifested first as increasing forgetfulness, worsened, as did her depression, which she’d suffered from on and off since my brother and I were children. Actually, since we were born. As we learned years later, when my brother and I were middle-aged, she was hospitalized for post-partum depression after both our births. When she’d have her occasional dark moods and angry outbursts, we chalked them up to her being “crabby” that day. No one talked about depression or going to “therapy” when my brother and I were kids. So, Mom’s depression went untreated. She avoided anything that might alter her mood; she rarely even took a sip of wine with meals because it made her feel “woozy.” Getting her to take meds was a struggle— “I don’t like to doctor myself”—but she finally acquiesced to trazodone because it helped her sleep. It worked so well that she slept through my father’s death.
Telephone conversations with her became painful in her last years. My father usually would answer the phone when my brother or I called, and although he was becoming more forgetful and confused, we still managed to communicate. Mostly, he complained about Mom. “Rodney across the street is selling his house,” he informed me during one of our talks. “I’m thinking of buying it to get away from your mother.”
After we chatted, he said, “Say hi to Mom.” I heard him call her to the phone.
“What?” she snapped.
“It’s your son, George.”
“Ahh, what does he want?”
“To talk to you!”
“Ah, alright.”
“Hi, Mom.”
“Hi.”
“How are you?”
“I’m OK. Bye!”
“Bye? That’s all you have to say to me?”
“Yeah, bye!”
My brother got the same treatment, and sometimes worse. When he heard her ask my father, “What the fuck does he want?” he told Mom, “You know, you have a real mean streak.” Her tone immediately changed. She became contrite, verging on tears. “Oh, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean it, forget I said anything…”
***
Mom continued to cook until her late eighties, but Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners became increasingly difficult for her to manage. Some years, my brother and his girlfriend would fly in from California, joining me and my husband, Rob, at my parents’ house to help with the preparations. On one of our last Thanksgivings together, Mom’s dementia revealed itself in the most mundane of ways, as we were in the kitchen putting together the meal. My brother’s girlfriend Carla was preparing the turkey gravy. My mother worried about this. She opened a cabinet and took out a can of “ready-to-use” gravy, which she held out to Carla. Mom had never used store-bought gravy, always making hers from scratch. My brother said, “Mom, are you kidding? Put that away. Carla’s making the gravy.” “Yeah, Mom,” I chimed in. “Put that away, we’re having homemade.” Mom looked at us with the kind of dazed, out-of-it expression Italian Americans call “stunod.” She stood there holding on to the can of gravy until my brother gently took it from her and put it back in the cabinet. Mom said nothing and wandered off to join my father in the den.
She was ninety-four then, and when Rob congratulated her for reaching that age and still looking good, she shook her head and replied, “No. It’s too much. I’m tired of it. I don’t want any more.” She was ready to die; she just didn’t want to leave her husband behind.
The worst was Christmas 2019. I’d prepared antipasti, pasta in ragu, and side dishes. Rob, my Jewish spouse, baked the pinoli cookies and biscotti my parents loved. Mom and Dad seemed very far away, off in some private worlds of their own. “Don’t give me too much!” Dad said as I placed caponata, salumi, and a few pieces of cheese on his plate. I did the same for Mom. She poked at the food with her fork, took a few bites, and continued staring into space. When I tried to get a conversation going, she became irritable. Close to despair, I lost my patience. “Jesus Christ, Mom, I made this dinner, and you’re acting like I put shit on your plate. Thanks a lot. Merry fucking Christmas!” “Hey!” Mom objected. I’d never spoken to her like that. My father looked up from his antipasti, turned to her, and dryly remarked, “See? You really pissed him off.”
****
That Christmas was the last one I spent with my parents. With the outbreak of Covid-19 in March 2020, I communicated with them only by phone for a year. Rob and I couldn’t risk infecting Mom and Dad with this strange new virus they were only vaguely aware of from watching TV news. Sandra, their aide, kept my brother and me updated on their condition, and Tony checked in with them nearly every day. Sandra’s call to tell me that Dad was “traveling” came right before the Fourth of July 2021. Dad died on the night of the Fourth, and Mom followed him just two months later. She died not in her bed but in a hospice facility in New Haven after a week in a coma. A few days before Mom passed, I sat at her bedside, held her hand, and spoke softly to her, hoping for some kind of response, which never came. I noticed that although she was ninety-six, her skin was soft and smooth, with hardly any wrinkles. The only clue to her age was her white hair, which she would have hated had she been aware of it. I guess never having smoked or drunk more than a rare sip of wine did her good. She kept her Sicilian beauty even as she approached one hundred. I called my brother in California and told him that she was unresponsive and close to the end.
A young and unmistakably gay Filipino nurse told me that after Mom was admitted to hospice, she refused any sustenance, even water. Before she became comatose, when he tried to give food or liquids, she violently resisted, slapping away his hand. She “dropped a lot of f-bombs,” he said. “She’s a tough lady.” I thought, are you a fucking idiot—you can’t tell dementia from personality? But all I said was, “She wasn’t like that before.”
***
My father told me and my brother that he had put away money for his and our mother’s funerals. When he died, we found out that he hadn’t. So we paid for their cremation, the memorial services, and the internment of their ashes. They had spent down their modest assets to qualify for Connecticut Medicaid home care services. Their reverse mortgage had allowed them to stay in the house after my father’s retirement, but since they lived so long, there was no remaining equity. Because they had so few resources other than their Social Security, they were unable to maintain the house. The emerald green carpeting in the dining and living rooms was pocked with holes. The roof leaked. The boiler broke down. The window frames and sills were rotting.
My brother and I received notice of foreclosure papers from the State of Connecticut about a year after our parents passed away. We would be held responsible for any court costs involved in the foreclosure. We had no stake in the house, nor did we want to buy it. Given its disrepair, whoever did would be leaping into a money pit. I consulted an attorney, who, after reviewing the legal papers we’d been served, told me “You don’t have to do anything” other than pay a small filing fee to make the whole matter go away.
Two years after our parents died, my brother decided to move back to Connecticut after nearly forty years in California. When he drove to our former neighborhood, he was shocked by what he saw. The house at 15 Melbourne Street and the property that my parents had proudly and diligently maintained had become the neighborhood eyesore. The shrubbery and trees my father tended and trimmed were unpruned and turning brown. The side, front, and back lawns my brother and I were assigned to mow were overgrown and full of weeds. The cement wall between the edge of the front lawn and the sidewalk had collapsed.
When Rob and I joined my brother and Carla for Thanksgiving dinner at his new home, he informed us that squatters had moved into the house. They ripped up and replaced the old tattered carpet, brought in furniture, and made themselves at home, much to the dismay of neighbor Tony. They even had free electricity and heat since neither utility had been shut off. “The bank”—actually, the reverse mortgage holder—owned the house but since the mortgage had been sold and re-sold, we still don’t know its status. My brother and I were children when our parents bought the house, so we mainly grew up there. Decades of family life had passed under its roof; now it was a shambles occupied by strangers who had no right to it.
****
After our mother’s death, my brother told me something that disturbed, even angered me. My parents came to accept my relationship with Rob and even to love him. My father referred to him as “my son-in-law.” My mother told him, “I’m so glad George is with you.” But what I didn’t know was that my mother’s initial reaction to my being gay was anything but accepting. I hadn’t come out to my parents; they found out when I was thirty, from an article in the “alternative” newspaper I had worked for before moving to New York to live with Rob. The article referred to me as “a gay activist,” which came as a shock to Mom and Dad. When my father called to ask if this was true, I said yes, and the conversation went downhill from there, ending with me angrily hanging up on him. After several months of estrangement, my mother called to say she hoped I would join them for Christmas and with Rob. “We love you and want to see you both.”
Over the next forty years, I assumed that everything had been resolved with that call from my mother. But my brother informed me otherwise. When my parents found out I was gay, my brother’s marriage was on the rocks. Listening to my mother complain about me, he told her, “He’s happy in a gay relationship. Would you prefer him to be in an unhappy straight marriage like me?” “Yes!” she replied. My father was also upset with me, mostly because I hadn’t trusted him enough to confide in him.
Despite my mother’s acceptance of my relationship with Rob and her affection for him, she never entirely got over her negative feelings about my sexuality. She and my father went to see “Philadelphia,” the 1992 movie starring Tom Hanks as a gay man with AIDS, and afterward, my mother worried, to the point of obsession, that his character’s fate would be mine. I assured her that I did not have the virus and that Rob and I were sexually monogamous. (A lie.) She never raised the issue again. But I noticed that when I spoke about our gay lives or showed Mom and Dad photos of us with gay friends in Italy, Mom looked uncomfortable and kept quiet. So, I’d change the subject, to her evident relief. I realize that I put distance between us for years, even after her “we love you” phone call, because I sensed that she hadn’t overcome her ingrained discomfort with homosexuality.
I remembered that when I was growing up, she’d refer to gay men as “fruits.” When, on a pop music TV show, Ray Davies of the Kinks embraced the show’s male host, Mom said, “Figures they’re queers.” Life magazine published a photo essay about urban nightlife that included shots of male hustlers in drag preening and posing on a Brooklyn street corner. “The Rolling Stones,” my father remarked, well aware that the Stones were my favorite band. Mom thought that was pretty funny. Little things like that stick with you when you’re a closeted adolescent terrified by your sexual nature and that your secret might be exposed. So I wasn’t entirely surprised to learn that Mom would have preferred me to have been an unhappy hetero than a happy homo. Still, she made the best of a less-than-optimal situation for an Italian-American Catholic of her generation. But perhaps that’s ungenerous of me since she and my father did go beyond simply accepting reality. And they certainly could have behaved far worse, as did parents of other gay men and lesbians I’ve known.
A more pleasant surprise arrived via my niece, Adria. She had videotaped my father, interviewing him as he sat in a folding chair on the front porch. “Say something in Italian, Grandpa,” she urged. He replied with several sentences in perfect Neapolitan, not Italian, and then sang a few bars of “Te Voglio Bene Assaje” while looking affectionately at his granddaughter. I was astonished. In his later years, Dad would sometimes reminisce about growing up in a Neapolitan immigrant family with his eight siblings. But I’d rarely heard him speak more than a few words of “dialect” since my childhood, when his mother and other Italian-born relatives and family friends were still alive. After he turned ninety, he would say, “la vecchiaia è brutta”–old age is nasty—but speak in napoletano and sing a famous canzone napoletana? Madonn’, Dad. Where did that come from? I learned about the Neapolitan language and the city’s rich musical traditions as an adult, when I began to seriously study the histories and cultures of southern Italy. After watching my niece’s video of Dad, I regretted that I’d never sat down with him and recorded his recollections. I was a writer who’d published articles and an entire book about Italians and Italian Americans. The idea of doing an oral history with my father had occurred to me, but I just never got around to it.
****
I was struck by how many people of color showed up for my father’s memorial service. Besides the African priest who spoke at the beginning of the service, there were other Black and Indian parish priests, Rose, the West Indian woman who operated the home care company that provided my parents’ aides, two former aides (Sandra was home with Mom), neighbor Tony and his wife, son, and daughter. And Wayne, the Jamaican lay preacher and his wife, Marcia. Wayne, tall, handsome, and athletically built, looked sharp in a dress shirt, suit jacket without tie, and black dress pants. It was his shoes, though, that caught my, and everyone’s attention, two-toned, purple and black leather slip-ons with a patina, long and tapering to a point. Wayne’s sartorial flash was matched by his oratory. In his mellifluous Kingstonian accent, he first greeted my brother, his daughters, then Rob and me, acknowledging us as a married couple. Then he spoke about my parents, their being married for three-quarters of a century, their devotion to each other. He recalled a recent visit to their home and watching them as they slept. “Look at them! I thought. This is what it means: till death do they part. Till death do they part! You cannot separate them!”
Wayne’s Caribbean cadences took me back to the late Seventies, when I was at the height of my reggaemania, going to see performances by Bob Marley and Toots and the Maytals and other Jamaican artists, playing their music on my show on Bridgeport’s WPKN-FM radio station and writing about the music for newspapers and magazines. I flashed back to the night when a Rasta musician called me to schedule an interview while I was having dinner with my parents. My father answered and handed me the phone. “I think he wants you, but I couldn’t understand what the hell he was saying.” Evidently, Dad’s ears had adjusted over the years because he had no trouble communicating with Wayne when they became neighbors.
When it was my time to speak, I provided some biography. Dad was the youngest of eight children (a ninth had died in infancy) born to Vincenzo De Stefano and Maria Amodeo, Neapolitan immigrants. The family weathered the Depression better than others because of my grandmother’s frugality and industriousness. Dad’s parents grew vegetables and kept chickens and goats in their backyard, where they recreated southern Italy. At night, before they went to sleep, Dad and his brothers checked with each other to be sure one of them had locked the goats in their pen—if they’d forgotten to, there’d be hell to pay with their father. After Dad graduated high school, his sisters insisted he go to college. But when war broke out, he enlisted in the Army. As an airplane mechanical gunner, he flew dangerous missions over Germany. He killed Nazis! Dad was awarded several medals and a “distinguished unit badge” during his two years of military service.
After the war, back in civilian life, he worked long hours six days a week as an auto mechanic, first in Bridgeport, then Westport. In both places, he worked with older brothers who held the franchises (Esso, then Exxon) of their garages. In Westport, Dad ran the business, although it was his older brother Anthony’s name that appeared on the plaque above the entrance. What I will always remember is that Dad never could completely clean off the black grease that collected under his fingernails, no matter how hard he scrubbed his hands with industrial-grade soap. Once, when I was in the Bridgeport garage, a local guy who hung around the place asked me if I wanted to be a “grease monkey” like my father when I grew up. “He won’t,” Dad replied, scowling at the guy. After he retired and I was living in New York, he asked if I liked my work. When I said yes, he said, “That’s good because I never did.” Only then did I appreciate the sacrifices he had made to give me, my brother, and my mother a solid and stable family life.
Of course, like in any father-son relationship, there was friction. Dad was a WWII guy; I was a baby boomer. We disagreed over politics, music, religion, and haircuts. When I came home during vacations from college, the increasing length of my hair and beard would really get him going. I looked like a hippy freak, like the Sheik of Araby, like a bum—his descriptions seemed to vary with the degree of my hirsuteness. But after I graduated and got my first journalism job as a reporter with a local weekly paper, he and my mother read my articles and were proud of me for having written them. When my first book came out, and from a major publisher, Dad bought the New York Times to read the review. He showed it to the man he bought his paper from, pointing to my—our—name in the review. “You wrote a book?” the newsdealer exclaimed. “I didn’t know you were a writer! That’s fantastic! Congratulations!” Dad didn’t contradict him. He let the man go on for a bit, enjoying the moment, before he said,
“No. That’s not me. That’s my son.”
George De Stefano is a New York-based writer and editor specializing in culture (music, books, and film), politics, and social issues (ethnicity, race, and immigration). He is the author of An Offer We Can’t Refuse: The Mafia in the Mind of America (Farrar, Straus, Giroux) and a contributor to numerous other books, including the Routledge History of Italian Americans, Our Naked Lives: Essays from Gay Italian American Men (Bordighera Press), Mafia Movies (University of Toronto), The Essential Sopranos Reader (University of Kentucky Presses), and Reggae, Rasta, and Revolution (Schirmer).
OVUNQUE SIAMO 