One Italian Summer

by Rebecca Serle

For my mother, the queen of my heart. Long may she reign.

I cannot yet conceive of a world without her, what that will look like, who I am in her absence. I am incapable of understanding that she will not pick me up for lunch on Tuesdays, parking without a permit on the curb by my house and running inside with a bag full of something—groceries, skin-care products, a new sweater she bought at Off 5th. I cannot comprehend that if I call her phone, it will just ring and ring—that there is no longer anyone on the other end who will say, “Katy, honey. Just a second. My hands are wet.” I do not imagine ever coming to terms with the loss of her body—her warm, welcoming body. The place I always felt at home. My mother, you see, is the great love of my life. She is the great love of my life, and I have lost her.

I am wearing dark jeans and a wool sweater, even though it is warm outside, because inside the house it is freezing. My mother liked to keep a house cold. My father only knows the way it’s been.

My decision to leave Eric had less to do with my mother’s death and more to do with the remembrance of death in general.

She loved my father, certainly. I believe there wasn’t a man on earth she would have traded him for, but there was no relationship above ours. I was her one, just like she was mine.

But he was asking me an impossible question. He was asking about a future I could no longer fathom.

The problem, of course, is that we hadn’t really been through everything together, because we hadn’t been through anything before. Not until now. Our life had unfolded with the ease of an open road. There were no forks, no bumps, just a long stretch into the sunset. We were, in many ways, the same people who had met at twenty-two years old. What was different was where we lived but not how. What had we even learned in the past eight years? What skills had we acquired to get us through this?

I do not know how to feel about his grief. I know it is real, grounded in his own connection to her, and yet it feels indulgent. It feels like he’s letting something out to dance that should be locked away. I wish he’d stop. His bottom lip quivers, trying to hold it in, but he can’t. It’s bigger than him, this emotion, and it breaks over him now. I put my hand on his shoulder, but I do not feel the thing inside me I should. I do not feel protective of him, sorry for him. I do not feel compassion, and it does not stir my own grief. I am too afraid. If I let myself see his pain, what will that say about mine? Since she died, I have not cried. I can’t meet it, not with a plane to catch.

I am somewhere new, where I have to be nimble, alert, present. It forces me into the moment in a way I haven’t been in a year, maybe even ever. When my mom was sick, it was all about the future—the worry of what was coming, what might happen. Here there is not space for thought, just action.

I’m met with the stirrings of small-town summer life.

I am here, I think. It is really Italy below me. I am not watching a movie in my parents’ den or on the couch at Culver. This is not a soundtrack or a photograph. It is real life. Most places in the world I have never touched, never met. But I am here now. It is something. It is a start. I inhale the fresh air, this place that seems to be dripping in summer. There is so much beauty here; she was right. I go back inside. I shower. I unpack everything right away, my mother’s daughter, and then I wander out onto the terrace again. I sit down on a lounger and tuck my feet underneath me. All around me Italy swells. I feel the air thick with heat and food and memory. “I made it,” I say, but only I can hear.

All around the light is golden and liquid and heavy, like it’s just beginning on its second glass of wine.

I pick up my fork, spear a tomato, and taste the most heavenly, sweetest, ripest, saltiest thing I’ve ever encountered. I swallow them, glorious and geranium red, along with my grief.

I’ve often wondered why he can’t just keep to himself. Why he’s always insisting on interjecting into everyone’s day, making himself known, taking up space with inane conversation.

and I felt a fierce pull of love for her, for all the women she had been before me, all the women I never got to know.

Everything was a reminder of what I was losing, of what was slipping away.

I didn’t know what was wrong with me. I was worried, maybe, that she had taken my heart with her.

“Positano is a good place to let life return to you.”

I miss her warmth and her guidance and the sound of her voice. I miss her telling me it was really all going to be okay and believing it, because she was at the wheel. I miss her hugs and her laughter and her lipstick, Clinique Black Honey. I miss the way she could plan a party in under an hour. I miss having the answers, because I had her.

Was it love at first sight? Or was it the quiet recognition of the possibility of a good life?

I think that maybe there were parts of her I never made an effort to see.

Is familiarity a taste? Or just an accustomed tolerance?

What if I got it all wrong? What if the point of marriage wasn’t to belong but instead to feel transported? What if we never got to where we were trying to go because we were so comfortable where we were?

She was my mother and my friend and my sibling, all at once.

But it would be a shame if you kept doing something only because you’ve done it before.”

Sometimes I think it didn’t work because it wasn’t right, and sometimes I think it didn’t work because I refused to let it.”

For the next four hours, all we do is nap and swim. It’s heaven. I go from the ocean to the beach lounger to the rocks and back. That’s it, that’s all. Just the simplicity of water and rocks and stunning views. There is wine and water and icy lemonade. I reapply sunscreen, and Adam switches chairs with me once the umbrella can no longer cover us both. He reads. I close my eyes, and for the first time in months, there is a pleasant blankness there. I am not met with images of hospitals, or questions about my future, the uncertainty of what’s to come. All I feel is this—this complete embrace of the present.

We’re fully encapsulated now. The moment hovers around us like an air bubble, threatening to pop.

I don’t cook; I don’t decorate. I don’t know the right place to order flowers from in the Valley, because I always just called her. And now she’s gone and I can’t help but think, in this moment, that she left me unprepared.

“There is more to life than just continuing to do what we know.”

She knew me completely, but it didn’t work both ways; it couldn’t. Look how much life was lived before I ever even arrived. Look at who she was before she met me.

All I can feel is this rapidly contracting moment. Everything that once was, evaporating.

The disease made her hostile, and I felt that hostility, I felt it down into my bones.

“Katy,” she whispered. I bent down close to her, but that was all, that was the whole ask and answer: Katy. Those were her last words to me. The reminder of my own singularity, the impossibility of my name without hers. How could she do this to me?

and I don’t see my mother. I see a woman. A woman fresh into a new decade who wants a life of her own. Who has interests and desires and passions beyond my father and me. Who is very real, exactly as she is right here and now.

Learning how to find your way back can be harder than starting over. But, damn, if you can, it’s worth it.”

The blessing of this life, this one, brilliant, beautiful life. All the loss and anguish. All the joy that makes it possible. The tender connections, the fragility, the impossible odds of being here, now, together. The choice of continuing to make it so.

I hope you’ll understand someday that just because you become a mother doesn’t mean you stop being a woman.