FINDING TONIE
I was determined to find her. The grim weather would not stop me, nothing would. My shoes, more and more wet, left their impressions in the soft grass and the mud. Grateful the spring storm carried neither the rumble of thunder nor flashes of lightning I proceeded, though with caution. As a child I had been terribly fearful of lightning and would run past the bathroom during a summer storm. Though the window over the bathtub was small, I feared a bolt would rush in and strike me down. Although always my protector and loving big sister Tonie found this anxiety amusing, having not inherited the genetic predisposition that haunted me from our mother’s side of the family.
This particular day was long overdue. Was it trepidation or simply the reality of everyday life and responsibilities that had been in my way?
It had been a fairly long process but I was determined, the only one in the family to embark on this search. What I discovered was certainly disquieting but at least we had answers. Now I was on a mission, a wet, soggy undertaking as the rain bounced off my umbrella and the wind tossed it about, barely keeping me dry.
The first step of my journey was meeting with a Franciscan friar in a church office down the road, a lovely gentleman with a sweet, cherubic face. Wooden rosary beads punctuated by a large cross hung from his rope belt. His gentle demeanor eased my mounting anxiety and, for a brief moment, I sighed with a modicum of relief. This was not to last.
We began in a comfortable room, but once he learned the year had been 1988, more than twenty-five years prior, we moved to the records office, one that contained archived files. In this more austere environment even the air seemed cooler and a bit damp. Once again my heart pounded, my mouth and throat were a choking desert, and my hands shook in anticipation. I carefully spelled her first name for him, not an easy name– Antonina– but, like mine, a strong Sicilian name carried for generations. His hands deftly inspected the files, one after the other. Did I know the exact date? Yes, of course, July 18. Finally, with this last piece of information he said, almost in a whisper, “Here it is,” opened the file, and handed me a piece of paper with hand-drawn images.
The drive from the church to my destination was short and the rain, the driving rain, persisted. My spatial sense has always been somewhat lacking so I was particularly nervous to negotiate my way through this novel space, having only the hand-drawn map of sorts and instructions to drive past the larger stones to where the stones became smaller. As the view changed to what the friar had described I pulled my car over and parked on what was once lush grass until the rain turned it into a muck of brown and green. I opened the car door, unlatched my umbrella, and continued to the next step of my journey.
The wind had accelerated a bit, though the rain had eased its torment but still required an open umbrella in one hand and the make-do map in the other. I walked up a slope and began searching not for something there, rather for something missing, a piece of earth unadorned and abandoned.
I scouted around for almost an hour, examining the names on the stones and comparing them to the names on my now-weathered piece of crumpled paper. At one point I gently, perhaps foolishly, called out to her for help. As the rain lessened and the wind became a mild breeze, I continued. All I had for assistance were the names on the grave markers. But I was not looking for a marker, I was looking for a space between two markers.
Finally, I saw two flat markers with names that matched two names on my paper, with a small grassy rectangle between them. Three small toys and a tiny stuffed elephant lay in front of the marker on my right, a grave with the name, Daniel, and the years 1980-1982 carved into the stone. The stone to my left bore the name, Nicole, with the even more sorrowful, “Our Angel,” 1985-1985, carved into it. And between them, in that small spot, somewhere underneath the oozing grass, lay my sister’s ashes.
I cried, talked to her as if she were there. So many years without her, my beautiful big sister with sparkling blue eyes. My hero, of whom I was in awe, taken from us twice– the second time with no hope of return.
The final step of my journey was perhaps more emotionally painful. I refused her final resting place be barren, a cold ending to her abusive marriage. No different than those little ones, she deserved to be honored and remembered. My visit to the monument mason was a somber experience. I engaged in a tortured debate with myself. Should the marker have just our birth name or her married name? While I kept my birth name when I married, my sister had taken the surname of her husband. Given her lamentable marriage, I did not want her husband’s name on the marker. But her son carried his father’s name and he had been her reason for living. After engaging in mental gymnastics on this conundrum I decided her first, birth, and married names all would be engraved thereon. I chose a simple granite slab with a beautiful flower sculpted in the corner and, somehow, the mason managed to fit all three parts of her very Sicilian name on that piece of gleaming granite, along with the years 1949-1988. The dash, that tiny hyphen connecting her birth and death years, is her story.
Tonie loved babies and would have loved her son to be a big brother but the chronic metabolic disease that eventually took her life disallowed her from risking pregnancy and childbearing a second time. One of our granddaughters, however, does bear her name.
Several years after I purchased her grave marker, I went to see a trusted psychic/medium, the minister who officiated at our son’s wedding. She knew nothing about my sister other than she had transitioned at a young age. Thus, I was surprised and somewhat speechless when she told me my sister had a “job” in the hereafter. Regardless of my belief system I was more than a bit curious. That job, she said, is to welcome little ones who cross into the spirit world. Only then did I tell her my sister’s ashes lay buried in the baby section of St. Anthony Cemetery.
Rosaria Caporrimo has been haunted by the muse since childhood and writes poetry, short stories, and personal essays. She is currently expanding her work to a speculative memoir and a novel. A professor of psychology at CUNY for many years, she continues to teach courses online. The proud nonna adores her five grandchildren and enjoys precious moments spent with family in the U.S. and Sicilia.
OVUNQUE SIAMO 