Monday at five, dinner is on the
stove, homework is being done at the table, I’m in sweats, Grace is having a
fit about something, the house is in a state of post school disaster. And then some Italians come to my door. Claudio, a man who speaks pretty good English, Carmen, a woman who speaks no
English, and a girl who looks to be about thirteen and doesn’t speak at all.
The man explains that this woman
had a son, Lucca, who came to live
here in this house a little over two years ago.
Her son was going to flight school, training to be a pilot, and while he
was here, his plane crashed and he died. Carmen, the mother, would like to come
in and walk through the house where her son lived before he so tragically died. All of this is explained to me while the kids
are running around, asking when dinner will be ready, throwing things and,
well, just doing what kids do. I ask the
three lovely Italians if they can wait five minutes while I attempt to get my
home in some semblance of order. They
nod and smile and I close the door and scramble around throwing piles of things
into closets and begging my children to please, please calm down and
behave.
As I open the door again I notice
how incredibly beautiful Carmen is. She
is tiny with olive skin, in her fifties maybe.
Her hair is black, long, silky, movie star hair. Her eyes are dark as dark can be and already wet
with tears. She glances up at me in between stretches of
floor gazing and a lump forms in my throat.
Claudio is talking, explaining still, but I don’t take my eyes off of
her. Her sadness is heavy and kind of
hangs in the air. If I can take some of it, even for a little while, I will,
because I can’t imagine going through what she’s been through. I can't imagine losing a child, can’t imagine my
son going to another country for school and never coming home.
Claudio is not her husband or the boy’s
father, he is the lawyer who handled getting all of her sons things settled
when all of this happened, he is here to translate for her, but really she has
little to say as I walk her through the house.
She grasps my hand and we walk back to the bedrooms, a tear or two
falling along the way. The translator
does not follow, so when she does ask me a question or two, I have to stumble
through my broken Spanish vocabulary, figure out what she is asking in Italian
and attempt to answer her as best I can.
The whole time I’m whispering “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, I’m sorry…”
“The bunk beds are the only thing
left that was here when Lucca lived
here.” I somehow manage to communicate.
She slowly walks over to them one hand cupped over her mouth and runs her
fingers down the wood. She says
something in Italian that I gather to mean “Where were the beds before?” and I
explain that they were in my bedroom originally. She clutches my hand again and we walk to my
room where again she places a hand on her mouth and a few more silent tears
fall. We stand there for a few minutes while she scans the room and takes in what she can of the place where her son last lived. The man and the girl are still in the
living room where my kiddos are tuned in to PBS and all too impatiently
awaiting dinner time.
As Carmen and I walk in to meet
them, Claudio thanks me and we begin to say our goodbyes. He tells me they will be visiting the crash
site the next day and thanks me again.
Carmen looks up from the floor once more and utters her thank yous. Her shoulders shrug hard with the shudder of
holding back sobs. I hug her, hard. She hugs me back and weeps into my
shoulder. We stand in my kitchen and cry
together. A few minutes pass and we dry
our eyes, look at each other and begin to say our goodbyes again.
I ask Claudio if I can pray before
they leave, they agree. I stare at the
floor, mumble a quiet little prayer for peace for them all, and grace, and of
thanks for Lucca and this encounter
that we’ve had. She holds my hand, looks
at me with her glassy eyes and says something I don’t understand. “She would like to pray for you as well” he
says. And then she strokes my hand and
stares straight into my face and delivers a graceful few lines in Italian that
he translates to “Thank you for these beautiful children and what a wonderful
mother you are. May God never allow you
to be separated from them.”
Tears in my eyes again, I say
“Thank you, thank you, thank you. Thank
you for bringing her. Thank you for
coming here.” I hug them all, the girl
last, the girl who did not make a sound the whole time. I ask if she was his sister, she softly
replies “No, a friend” and I hug her again.
As I walk them to the door, passed my children with their very
bewildered looks, the girl stammers “Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank
you, thank you…” all the way out she mumbled it and as I went to close the door
she pushed it open a little, looked me in the eyes and said it three more
times.
And they were gone. And I stood stunned for a few minutes at our
profound encounter. I hope never to forget
it, the beauty, and sorrow, and pain, and love that passed through my house that
evening. I let it wash over me for a
bit, the emotion, the intensity, the incomprehensible grace that surrounded
us. Thank You, thank You, thank You.
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