
In January 2021 both of my parents died within two weeks of each other in the suburbs of Toronto, Ontario. My mother, aged 86, and my father, aged 82, lived together for over 53 years. In her final years, my mother was disabled. She had severe dementia, she was unable to walk, she couldn’t see, she was practically deaf. My father insisted on caring for her himself, fearing that she would have died in a nursing home. He was probably right.
In the early hours of December 29, 2020, my father fell while helping my mother to the bathroom. He didn’t call anyone for help. The next morning, when one of my mother’s personal support workers came to help my mother with her morning routine, she found my father struggling to make my mother’s breakfast. His knee was purple and twice its usual size. She called my sister, who lived nearby.
My sister and brother-in-law went to my parents’ apartment. In the meantime, they let me know what was happening, and I stayed on the phone with my dad while he waited for help.
My father was taken to a hospital in Toronto, where he was told that his kneecap was broken and that he needed surgery. He was then moved to nearby Brampton because of a COVID outbreak in the surgical wing of the hospital. My sister was left scrambling to take care of my mom and her own family. I was unable to travel from New York to Toronto because of COVID.
My father languished in pain, waiting for surgery, for two days. The number of procedures was greatly reduced because of COVID. He finally had surgery just before midnight on December 31. He spent January 1 recovering nicely. Then on January 2, we were told that the COVID test he had been given before his surgery had come back positive. Unbeknownst to us, he had undergone the entire trauma of the week while dealing with COVID. That same day, he had a heart attack.
By January 3, my father was deteriorating rapidly. Fluid was filling his lungs. He could not get enough oxygen. The treatment he was given to reduce the fluid was damaging his kidneys. My sister was able to go visit him, briefly. We were told that he may not survive the day.
But he did survive. January 4 and 5 went by. On January 6, we had a video visit with him and while he was unable to talk, he was responsive and engaged. January 7 went by. He continued to fight. Then on the morning of January 8, he died suddenly.
That same day, my mother’s blood pressure dropped to dangerous levels. She too was hospitalized. On January 9, we discovered that the COVID test she had had at the beginning of the week was positive. She was asymptomatic, but she too was deteriorating. She had stopped eating and drinking. It was clear that she was reaching the end of her battle with dementia, and that ending just happened to coincide with the COVID-19 pandemic–and with the loss of my father. We did video calls with her every day or two. She seemed peaceful, but she was unresponsive. She had stopped talking. When she passed the ten-day COVID window, she was moved, with our permission, to the palliative care ward, where she was found lifeless just after midnight on January 23.
What follows is the eulogy I wrote for my parents. Because of COVID-19, I was not able to attend their funeral in person. My sister read it on my behalf.
Good morning, everyone, and thank you for being here with us, whether in Toronto or around the world. I know this is a difficult time for everyone because of the pandemic, and my family and I sincerely appreciate you wanting to participate in this farewell to our parents. I can’t describe the sadness that I feel for not being there in person, but I am watching with the rest of you from my home in New York.
I’d like to do a brief reflection on the saints we have chosen for our parents’ prayer cards. Most of the members of our family are Catholic, including our parents, and even though I myself am not religious by any conventional standard, I’ve come to find wisdom and guidance by drawing on many different faiths. And in that spirit, I do find inspiration and insight in the lives of some of the Christian saints, including the two we’ve chosen to represent our parents. For my mother, we chose Saint Lucy, Santa Lucia, the saint whom my father’s mother and I are named after. A young woman born on the cusp the fourth century in Siracusa, in Sicily, Lucia was born into a noble family. A Christian, Lucia wished to devote her life to God and to serving the poor. However, her mother promised Lucia’s hand in marriage to a wealthy young man from a Pagan family. Lucia persisted in her wish to give away her wealth to the poor, an act which led her fiancé to denounce her to the local governor. As a punishment, the governor attempted to force her into entering a brothel. When the governor’s guards came to take her away, it is said that they could not move her. They tried, even with oxen, but she could not be budged. They then attempted to set her on fire, but she would not burn, and in the end, they killed her by stabbing her in the neck. Later accounts of her torture included the detail that they gouged out her eyes, the detail for which she became most famous, and over time, she became the patron saint of eyesight.
Like Lucia, my mom was very generous, and she remained resolute in wanting to be productive and independent. She was also very strong. For various reasons, she didn’t have the opportunity to go to school like she would have wanted, and was unable to get to high school. When she was about 10 years old, she suffered a trauma which caused her left retina to almost fully detach, and so she grew up with very little eyesight in her left eye. Still, like Lucia, she was intelligent and enterprising. She learned how to sew, and as a young woman, she began working as a seamstress and a sewing teacher, running her own business out of her family home.
It just so happened that among our mother’s students were some young women from the Di Rosa family: they were my father’s sisters. And it was through them that my parents met and fell in love. They were married on April 13, 1967, and they had the two of us, Lucy and Elena. In the early 1970s, our parents decided to leave Italy to pursue better opportunities for us. This was when we moved to Toronto, and very slowly, they started their own jewelry business. At the time, our father already knew how to speak English, but our mother could not speak a word of it. It must have been a very scary thing for a woman in her 30s to move so far away from her family back then, but my mother handled it the way she handled everything: with strength and determination.
Over the years, my mother continued to work with my father, to raise us, and to care for her own mother, after our grandfather died. The problems with her eyes grew more serious. She suffered from macular degeneration and glaucoma, but she persevered through all the growing pains and changes that our family went through. When she was in her early 50s, approximately the age I am now, our family moved back to Italy, to Pordenone, and then back to Toronto in 1988. At that point, we really started from scratch, and they started a new jewelry business, Blue Point, which Elena and David continue to manage today. Our mother continued to go to work, taking public transit on her own when she needed to, and to take care of us. Slowly our family grew, and there was a new generation to take care of: her only granddaughter, Isabella. Unfortunately, her eyesight continued to decline. Five and a half years ago, she suffered a tragic fall, and dealt with that, and dementia, and blindness, and hearing loss, but her spirit continued to be a source of strength for us until the end.
And now moving on to my dad, Girolamo. We chose to represent him with the saint he’s named after, Saint Jerome, San Girolamo. Girolamo was born in a Roman colony in Central Europe, coincidentally, at around the same time as Santa Lucia. He was very studious, he knew multiple languages, and he is known for having translated large parts of the Bible into Latin, which opened up the door for the Bible to be read in the modern languages of the world. He was also said to have been extremely courageous. There’s a legend that one day he and his fellow monks came upon a lion, and that while his peers ran away, he stayed with the lion and helped him with an injury to his paw, which resulted in the lion being tamed.
Once again, my dad had some key things in common with San Girolamo. When he was a young man, he insisted on wanting to continue his education. This may seem like common thing to us today, but for him, at the time, it was not. He was expected, as the oldest son of eight children, and the brother of four sisters who, according to the mentality of the time, needed to be taken care of financially, to go to work. But he didn’t settle for the conventions of the day, and he finished not only his secondary education, but continued on to study at the University of Naples – something unheard of for someone in his environment. While he was there, he learned many languages, both modern and ancient, and I’m sure some of you had heard him quote from some of those, including ancient Greek and Latin. In fact, like Girolamo the saint, he did occasionally work as a translator.
Although he left university before he could complete his degree, my dad was a life-long learner. He learned how to run a business all on his own, and was very successful at it. He loved to read and he was very curious. When he was in his 50s, he decided one day that he wanted to retire to Costa Rica (a country which he never ended up visiting, by the way), but he studied the country for a while and decided it was a good place to be and set his mind on learning Spanish, which he did. Eventually, he and my mom started going regularly to the Dominican Republic, and by spending extended periods of time there, he actually became fluent in Spanish. I spent quite a bit of time with them there, as well, and have a lot of great memories from there, including riding the guaguas with my dad, the small vans that serve as public transportation there, and that most tourists would never dare to use. We rode the guagua to get groceries, from one town to the next, sitting beside school kids and commuters during hot, bumpy rides that were part of a big adventure that all came from the fact that my father had an insatiable desire to learn.
As an older man, my father learned many things that as a younger man his culture didn’t give him room to learn – and he excelled at them. When he was in his fifties, he learned to take care of a toddler, becoming my niece Isabella’s favorite babysitter when Elena and David took a larger role in the family business. When he was in his sixties and seventies, he learned how to take care of the entire family, becoming an enthusiastic and talented cook, managing a lot of the household chores, and then becoming my mother’s primary caregiver as she was less and less able to care for herself. In fact, I should note that my father is really the only person who ever cooked for me in my adult years, on any regular kind of basis.
I could go on for much longer, but I will spare you, and my sister, who has been kind enough to read this on my behalf. In closing, I want to remind all of us of the traits that my parents are best remembered for, and that I will always treasure and be grateful for: their generosity, their determination, their warmth, their hospitality, and their characteristically Neapolitan sense of humor. They may be gone, but I know that none of us will ever forget them.
Before I end, I want to say a few words about COVID-19, since it is the reason why my father died, it is one of the issues that my mother dealt with in the end, and it is the reason why I’m not there with you today. What happened to my family is a tragedy, and it’s very personal. But I am very aware that it’s part of a larger suffering that we’re all going through, and I think we need to remember this period, always, to remind ourselves that life is precious, and that we are all connected.
I’d like to close with a verse from Hamilton, a soundtrack to a musical that I love and that I have played repeatedly over the last year to keep myself motivated during the pandemic. It was a soundtrack I shared with my dad the last time I was with him and my mother in September, when I was last able to travel to Canada. The verse goes like this:
Death doesn’t discriminate
Between the sinners
And the saints
It takes and it takes and it takes
And we keep living anyway
We rise and we fall
And we break
And we make our mistakes
I know this is what my parents would have liked us to do, to keep living, and to rise when we fall, and that they would want us to keep striving to live up to the example they set for us.