Years Begin, Years End

What matters lies in between

“You know, everybody dies. My parents died. Your father died. Everybody dies. I'm going to die too. So will you. The thing is, to have a life before we die. It can be a real adventure having a life” ― John Irving, The World According to Garp

I was introduced to T.S. Garp while still in high school and though I don’t recall how exactly I came to be reading his story—I’m sure the novel held a place on our family’s beloved bookshelf and so perhaps I picked it up myself, or maybe my mother recommended it—either reason I do remember, quite vividly, in fact, the book’s ending (spoiler alert: you can watch the film version of it here) and how it left me feeling. Speechless, as if I’d witnessed something described in such a way that if it were to happen in real life it would happen exactly as was written.

I loved that about the book, about all books really. The realism. The truthful representation of the world, absent of grandiose, unnecessary words, and exaggeration. A world made to appear ordinary, mundane, true to itself. 

I don’t know that The World According to Garp started it all, but the novel was one that helped set me on the path of gobbling up (sorry, couldn’t help it) other such books based in reality, like The Thorn Birds, Roots, Lonesome Dove, novels by Cormac McCarthy, James Michener, Kingsolver, Clancy and many more.

I’m sure you have read books, too, that left you feeling something more than just a general sense of having finished a thing, those that hit in someway close to home. Maybe they left you in tears (Where the Red Fern Grows, Old Yeller) or in agreement (The Catcher in the Rye) or screaming out loud at the void (Slaughterhouse 5).

Garp’s name alone, T.S., is indicative of what so many of us go through in the span of a day, a week, many years. 

Helen: What does the T.S. stand for?
Garp: Terribly Sexy. I used to be Terribly Shy, but I changed.
And later when the babysitter asks Garp the same question, he replies: Terribly Sad. 

I bring all this up, Garp in particular, because our holidays were broken by the death of someone who’d become very close to us since our move to Sicily. His name is Salvatore Trovato and I’ve shared some of our story before.

In this photo, Salvatore was turning 92 years old. It was taken this past November. He died three days before Christmas. He’d been feeling ill for some months but you can see the vigor with which he appears in this picture that Salvatore was not one to give up on life very easily. In fact, I have a theory about death and old people. If you visit them and they fail to get up off the couch to say hello, their days are numbered. It’s what happened with my grandmother and also with my father (so old people listen up: get up off the couch, your life may depend upon it!).

The last time we saw Salvatore he was looking pretty weak. It was a day or two before we left for the U.S., early December, and at first, when he didn’t get up from the couch to greet us, my thoughts turned at once to where I’d expect them to go: This is our last time together. But after a few minutes he told his wife, Antonia, that he wanted to sit up and she helped him and he did so and all was well again, Salvatore had escaped the inevitable.

Only he didn’t.

Mourning, grieving, and celebrating the life of someone so old is different than any other kind of grieving, I think. I cried when I heard of his death but the tears were short-lived tears as my thoughts turned instead to the way he lived his ordinary, unexaggerated life. 

It was one of simple things, quiet and unencumbered by stuff he didn’t own or in the way people could sometimes behave. He seemed always to act with sincerety and straightforwardness and whenever we showed up at their house he appeared grateful to see us, willing to share stories (often the same ones) and genuinely happy to have us in his life. I cannot stress how refreshing that is, this genuine appreciation for another person. It is the best way, I believe, to spread joy in this world and if I were to have one New Year's Resolution it would be to do, and encourage, more of that.

He knew our names, but referred to us as “The Americans” to others. If it had been a while since we’d seen each other, he’d call to check on us, to know that we were well, that we were still alive. We met him when we first came to Troina, but it wasn’t until months later that he told us, after we’d purchased his son’s house, that he hadn’t been sure about us at first, it was only over time that he came to believe that we were good people. The kind of people that were not, in his words, going to rob him. 

He was right, of course. We weren’t those people. But also he was wrong. I took more from Salvatore than someone of his age could possibly take from me, all without his knowledge. Life lessons. Growing old. Perspectives on being that only he could pass on of the ways he’d spent his life. 

“You only grow ,” Irving wrote, “by coming to the end of something and by beginning something else.” 

It is that which I stole from Salvatore, the knowledge that we are never too old to start something else, perhaps even—no, correction—especially a lasting friendship. 

In honor of the new year and Salvatore, who had been raised on the centuries old back of invasions, conquests and new beginnings—he had baked into his very DNA an understanding of In with the New and Out with the Old—I offer my list of things I’d like to add to the coming new year and things I’d prefer to resist, improve or eliminate.

If you feel in any way encouraged to make your own list, feel free to whisper a word of gratitude to my old friend, Salvatore. He’d probably smile and with a kind nod reply, Grazie a te.

In Out 

P.S. I did write this out in longhand with pen and paper, but present it here for you like this only because I am Terribly Stunned by my sloppy handwriting.

Alla prossima!

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