Carmela

When she came to this county from Southern Italy at the age of 17, her brothers and sisters, who were already here, fixed her up with a dentist.  He would have been a good provider, but she didn’t like his personality; he was a bit dull.  She liked my grandfather, though, when he made his availability known.  He was also from Southern Italy, and he had the energy to match hers.  They were well suited to argue in Italian when, late in their lives, they were living with my family.  It would get loud for a short time, and then they would both settle down.  We didn’t know what they were arguing about, but my guess is it had to do with the allocation of garden space.  My grandfather liked his grapes, and my grandmother favored tomatoes.

After they married, they settled in a small West Virginia mining town called War.  My grandfather and his brother Joe opened a general store—Romeo’s Store—and my grandmother and my great Aunt Nellie raised their ten children—5 from each family—one family on one side of the hall above the store and one family on the other side.  The store kept the two families in food, shelter, and clothes through a fire, the Great Depression, and World War II.  It sent my mother, Tony, her sister Katherine, and Matthew, Frank, and Joe to Catholic colleges.  Romeo’s Store was well known in War for its meat department and because payment for necessities during hard times was sometimes optional. It took years of my grandmother saying, “Dominic, I think we should send the kids to college,” and hearing, “Who needs col? They can work in the store,” before her persistent nudging of my grandfather had its intended effect.  When they decided to send their oldest child Matthew to Notre Dame was made, my grandfather thought it was his idea. 

I took a picture of my grandmother sitting in her chair in the apartment where she’s lived since my grandfather died.  In the photo, she’s wearing a red dress.  There is a small table next to her, and on it is her TV remote control, her holy water bottle, her rosary, and a lamp.  The lamp is on, and the photograph's composition is such that her strength seems to be an equal partner with the light.  Her face is proud and weathered, her jaw is square, and her gaze is tired but even and direct.  Her hair looks like a newborn—fine and wispy—but still mostly dark.  Her skin is brown, and there are creases on each side of her mouth. 
She lost three of her children to cancer: first my Uncle Frank, then my mom, and finally my Uncle Matt.  They died within a span of a few years, all in July—the month in which we celebrate Our Lady of Mount Carmel, her namesake.  In the photograph of my grandmother, her eyes question why she is living while three of her children have died.  She told me that she had dreamed more than once that my grandfather was standing in front of her and saying, “Not yet, Carmela. Not yet.”

A stroke left her without her strong voice and without the ability to kneel, though Fr. Dan, her parish priest, told her many times that she didn’t have to kneel when she prayed the rosary.  She could not eat or drink in the last week of her life because she could not swallow and because her living will stated that she was not to be fed from a tube.  But she smiled when my sister Mary Ellen told her that she had “a fine 100-year-old body.”  She laid in bed in my sister Anne Marie’s sunroom, fingering her rosary beads.  Even though she appeared to be unconscious, she continued to move her rosary and mouth the words of the Our Father, the Hail Mary, and the Glory Be, just as she had mouthed the words of the Eucharistic Prayer during Mass.  She said that Mass is the best thing there is and that the best thing her parish, St. Martin’s, did to show the love of Christ in the world was to feed the poor.

She recited in Latin psalms from her prayer book.  She prayed for her children and grandchildren, for the priests, and the Poor Souls—the dead who have not yet made heaven but who are hopeful that they will.  In Dante’s Purgatorio, the Poor Souls at the base of a Mount Purgatory walk around it with a symbol of their pride—a block of stone —on their backs.  Every time they walk around the mountain, their burden becomes a little lighter, and their turn around and up the mountain becomes a little shorter.  While the stone is large, they can only look down at their feet, but as it gets small, they can begin to stand upright, see the people behind them and in front of them, and know that they are not alone.
Through my grandmother’s prayer and her suffering, she has been helping the Poor Souls up the mountain while they couldn’t see the way and had to walk by faith.  Now she has moved through the dark into another life, probably dragging a number of the Poor Souls with her.  She has been greeted by her husband Dominic and welcomed by her children Matthew, Tony, and Frank, and all of her questions are answered as she meets God face-to-face.