Kill 'em with kindness

Having a restaurant is more than just serving food. It's more than just four walls that house hungry people for a few minutes of their busy day. At least it should be. It should be an opportunity to bring people together, to feed their bellies and their souls, to become a part of their lives, a memory that they look back fondly upon.

This morning I was at the diner and a dad walked in with his son and checked his wallet and promptly realized he didn't have cash on him. I heard him as he turned to his kid and said "we'll come back next time buddy" and they walked out. I was sitting in the front window sipping a coffee while Maggie read a book and after hesitating for a second I dashed out after them. 

"Hey!" I shouted at him, "Come back in. Come eat, pay tomorrow. You're here and he's hungry, don't leave." He looked a little shocked but said yes and thank you and led his boy back inside to a table and they proceeded to order and eat the breakfast they'd both biked here for. When Maggie and I left he stopped me and introduced himself and thanked me. It was really my pleasure, I told him, and it really was. 

On the walk home Maggie asked me what the guy was saying to me. I explained that he didn't have money on him and that I told him to come eat and pay tomorrow. Maggie said wow mom, that's really nice. I told her that you never win when you play dirty and you can never go wrong with kindness, a lesson I hope she holds onto for a long time. 

There have been moments in my life when I hesitated to do a kind thing, and then it was too late, and I never got to. Holding the door for someone, listening when someone needs an ear, buying a kid at the playground an ice cream who's parents don't have cash on them, all opportunities I don't want to miss. I want my kids to learn this lesson over and over again til it's their mantra: you can never go wrong with kindness. 

Side note about this blog: I considered shutting it down after my grandmother died, but have decided not to. This place I've come to for the past few years to write has been special to me and I don't want it to end. Life is still happening and I want to acknowledge that. So here I am, still typing away. Thank you for being here with me. 

Obituary

Below you will find the obituary that I wrote for my grandmother with input from my family. It will soon appear in the local paper with information about services.

Josephine Antona Mancino, the second youngest of eight children, was born January 14th, 1929 in
Washingtonville, New York. Her parents Josephine Tacchella and Marziano Antona both entered America through Ellis Island in the early 1900s. Josephine graduated from Washingtonville High School in 1946 and settled in nearby Monroe where she married Ralph Mancino (deceased 1991), also a first generation child of Italian immigrants. They were married for over forty years and had four children: Ralph Mancino (Carla Henry), Theresa Brodzik (Bill) , Josephine Papagni (Shabazz Jackson) and Catherine Hutchins (William, deceased), that they raised on the same block that many of Ralph's siblings lived on. She was a devoted grandmother to her five grandchildren, Demian, Matthew, Blair, Devon and Tyler. She also had five great-grandchildren she took great pride in: Dylan, Maggie, Crosby, Samantha and Jack, and many nieces and nephews.  She is survived by her sister Marguerite Re and brother Joseph Antona. She was predeceased by her brother Piero (Peter) Antona; sisters: Bianca Floriano, Louise Lee, Mary Myszelow, Laura Barley, and Theresa Barbieri.

She worked for many years at Highland Telephone Company just steps from her home on Elm Street, retiring in 1987 to care for her husband and play Gin Rummy with her neighbors, Eugene and Antoinette Moran. On summer evenings they enjoyed back yard "cake and coffee" with the very large Elm Street Mancino family and friends. They often spent weekends on Cherry Pie Lane at Bakers Acres on the Jersey Shore, sharing meals and many laughs with the Scherne family. She remarried in 1994 to George Rowe and divided her time between New York and Florida for over a decade.

She was a talented seamstress, a self taught cook and a master at crossword puzzles. She was always
available to talk, except from 12:30-1:30 every week day, when she would draw the curtains and watch "The Young and The Restless".

The family asks in lieu of flowers that donations be made to the Alzheimer's Association.

How to say goodbye?

I have sat down at my computer to try and write a eulogy for my grandmother and I don't know where to begin. How do I sum up a lifetime of loving someone in a few paragraphs?  How do I make people understand that, beneath her cranky, opinionated exterior, she was kind and funny and so special to me?

Sometimes when people die, it seems they are immediately sainted by those they left behind.  I will not be doing that. It would be a disservice to her to suddenly describe her as a sweet old lady that always had a kind word for everyone.  That was not the case.  She was not everyone's friend, but she was mine. She had opinions about things, even if they were based on nothing more than her unexamined beliefs. She was a Catholic who liked to go to church on Saturday night to get it out of the way.  Much of what she did was based on a feeling of duty and on being a disciplined person.

As a kid, she was the best person to take care of me when I was sick.  She would make up the couch into a cozy bed, hang a little plastic bag off the edge of the cushion (she would not tolerate my tissues making a mess of her floor) and make sure I had lots of fluids to drink in a tall glass, sensibly rested atop a coaster as to not leave a water mark on the wooden end table. When I woke up she'd fix me soup or grilled cheese or anything else I asked for. This was how she showed her love best: through food.

I'm not sure what I will say about her when I stand up in a few days, but I'm sure of what I want people to know. I want them to know she loved people and was loved in return, however imperfectly it came across. She did the best she could with the time she was here and that's really all we can hope for.

Revoir ma reine

Below is what I wrote this morning but did not get a chance to post. Since writing this my dear grandmother has left us. I want to believe the speed of her departure means her physical suffering was brief. I will miss her terribly.

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A missed call from my mother this morning followed by a text that read: call me when you get a chance. I dialed immediately and heard the news I was dreading. My grandmother is not doing well, "taken a turn for the worse" is how the nurse that called my mother described it.

I am in Long Island this weekend and my first instinct is to drive upstate. My mom kindly reminded me that this knee jerk reaction would not be supported by grandmother. She would want me to do all the things I had planned already to do with the kids today. A fair in a nearby town, a salamander hunt tonight with a local museum, a late night movie. She has always, since I had children, emphasized her desire for me to always put them first.

I will get an update from my mom later today when she visits my grandmother after work. Based on this report, I will take the train up tomorrow or Monday. My fear is not that she will die, that is inevitable. My fear is that she will spend the remainder of her life before she dies in pain and that her Alzheimer's will take over completely and she will die surrounded by family, but still alone.

Wishing for her peace and a painless journey to the other side, when ever that might be.

9/11/2015

The train was just a little quieter this morning, the way it was in the days and weeks that followed the towers falling, all of late September of 2001 was quiet. Even when Letterman came back on the air, and held our collective hand, and let us know we would indeed laugh again, that our broken hearts would one day heal, it was still quiet.

The man across from me on the train had a tie on with the towers on it and an eagle and a boat the looked like Columbus was sailing it. It made me want to laugh. And cry.

Reading Flannery O'Connor this morning, standing, swaying with motions of the train, I found a few lines that felt so appropriate for today.

"The way things happened, one thing after another, it seemed like time went by so fast you couldn't tell if you were young or old."

Karla

How do you say goodbye to your mother? The person whose love was unconditional, whose advice was unsolicited, whose knowledge of life was underestimated by you for so long, til you grew up and had your own children and saw how wise and fearless and kind she truly was.

Two years ago my friends had to do just that. Their mother, the mother to so many, her own children and dozens of foster children over several decades, took her last breath. Cancer is a nasty, unfair, unrelenting disease that she fought against as good as anyone ever had.  She was brave and strong and able to hang on so much longer than any doctor thought possible. She was a miracle.

Karla Scherne was many things to many people, but to me she was always the lady who lived up the street who was there, in my house, with my mother and my grandmother, the night I was born in the middle of a blizzard. She let me come into her house, eat her food, borrow her movies, swim in her pool, be in her life. She was one of the good ones, one of the very special. We lost an amazing woman two years ago today. If I close my eyes, I think I can hear her sewing machine humming away in heaven.

Not over yet

I wrote the section below a few weeks ago after a particularly difficult time for my grandmother and decided not to post it. Two days after writing it I visited her and it was so bad I didn't even want to write about it, which was a first for me. And then this week I went to see her, and much to my surprise, she was doing better. It is difficult to put into context how much better she is doing unless you understand how she was not too long ago. Yes, she still has Alzheimer's and is, quicker than I'd like, losing most of her memory, but she is also still fighting to hang on, and that is worth remembering.

Written on August 7, 8pm:

I think it is all going to be over soon.

The last chapter is being written in the very long, sometimes sad, often funny, story of my grandmother's life. She is currently retaining water at an alarming rate. She is on antibiotics for an infection and is having congestive heart failure. She is the least healthy she's been since being diagnosed with Alzheimers.

I feel sad as always I suppose, for her and for my mother and for what I'm soon to lose, what I've already lost, all of the intangible love that I feel for her that she can no longer comprehend. And on some level, relief I guess, that she might soon be at peace. And then, when I imagine a world in which she no longer exists, I feel panic, at her death and what that means, the deeper meaning that one day my mother will die and I will die and suddenly I'm in a morbid death spiral and the world is ending.

I haven’t seen her in a month, by far the longest I’ve gone without seeing her in the past few years.  The possibility of her not recognizing me when I see her this Sunday is very real, and yet, I am not afraid. I am anxious to see her, hoping for the best but preparing myself for a very different woman to be waiting for me.