Written by Haley DiRenzo
Near the end of his life, my grandfather lost his language, then gained his mother tongue. A few
months after dementia had taken all but his childhood memories, he was performing paragraphs in
perfect Italian. His father had spoken the language to him before abandoning the family when my
grandfather was a baby, but he had never learned it as a child, and never had time to as an adult. Yet
when I held my Google translate app up to his quivering, crinkled lips, after realizing that he was not
just babbling but weaving words I almost recognized, my phone spoke back to me in English, “Would
you like to share my toast?”
I glanced up at him, perplexed, but his face softened as I took the knife from the table, a glob of
crumbed butter still stuck to the side, and cut his bread down the middle, placing one half on his plate
and one on mine. He didn’t say another word until we finished eating. Then quietly, almost fluttering
beneath his breath, he nodded at me and said, “Grazie.”
We hadn’t had a real conversation for months before this. The disease had rattled through him until
the only way he could communicate was through wails and tantrums. A baby stuck in a grown man’s
body, he’d cry or throw his shoes to get my attention, even when he didn’t understand who I was. But
now, with the signature politeness of his former stoic self, he’d ask me to share breakfast every
morning, pass the milk, cut his banana. He began to talk about Italy as if he’d seen it before. But the
closest he’d ever gotten to the country was when an old girlfriend invited him to spend part of the
summer there at her family’s apartment. But he declined, needing to put in more hours at the factory
so he could save enough to move out of his parent’s home.
“I always regretted that, Jaime,” he’d told me years ago. “Never let a fear of not having enough stop
you. You need money, we can find a way.” And we did. When I hadn’t cobbled together quite enough
to pay for grad school in New York, he took the money from his retirement account and placed the
handwritten check inside a congratulatory card that read, “I’ll see you in the city.” He’d take the train
in from New Jersey and meet me with the Broadway tickets in hand that I was too broke to buy for
myself.
This was why it was so easy, almost two decades later, to quit my job and move in with him when
things began to turn. At first it was fun–finishing the crossword and playing cards together in the
kitchen. Until one day, he looked up in the middle of Gin Rummy and asked me to explain the rules of
the game, which he’d taught me when I was eight, and we’d been playing for decades. But even when it
got hard–when we got into arguments I knew he didn’t mean, when I had to install special locks on
the doors so he couldn’t sneak outside the house alone–I reminded myself of the thin, perfect paper
of that check. It was not so much the money, but how it had allowed me to accomplish a dream, born
from the regret of him missing out on one.
And now, after months of me narrating our days to him sitting in silence, I was the one with nothing
to say in response to his Italian soliloquies. Had he learned Italian at some point and never told me? Or
was this some kind of magic, the gift of a new language, at the end of his life? I chose to believe I was
witnessing a miracle. Sometimes you need that to keep going, to keep caring for someone you’re
already grieving, even while they’re still alive.
One morning, I asked him to join me on the balcony off the master bedroom that we hadn’t used in a
year as his moods became more unpredictable. I’d gotten up early to clear the debris of dead leaves and
spiderwebs and placed a white tablecloth over the tiny, off-kilter table, then lit a candle in the center. I
poured our apple juice into wine glasses and replaced our fiber cereal with fluffy pastries, jam, and
fresh fruit. Then I spoke to my grandfather of the sites we’d see that day–the Vatican, the
Colosseum, and Trevi Fountain. The pizza we would devour, complemented by glasses of Barolo. He
nodded as I walked through the itinerary of the missed trip of a lifetime.
When I finished, he asked, “E possiamo visitare la tomba di mio padre?” By then I had finally picked
up enough that I knew he was asking to visit his father’s grave. I didn’t know if his father was buried in
Italy, didn’t think he did either, but when I nodded, the look on his face was one of peace I hadn’t seen
in a long time. Like after wandering through a dense forest, he’d reached a clearing and was finally
heading toward home.
.
Haley DiRenzo is a writer, poet, and practicing attorney specializing in eviction defense. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Flash Fiction Magazine, The Winged Moon, and Ink in Thirds, among others. She is on BlueSky at @haleydirenzo.bsky.social and lives in Colorado with her husband and dog.