Dear Friends, Family, Fellow Authors, and Cherished Readers,
It is with a heavy heart that I bring you news of my Great Aunt – whom many of you may know as The One, The Only, The Greatest Great-Aunt Of Them All, My Great-Aunt Jo – and her peaceful passing at the age of 92.
Words are difficult to find in times of mourning; I catch myself reaching for them, anyway, even as they slip from reach. The perfect words don’t exist. Our lives are libraries; the best we can manage is to encapsulate them in a brief summary: an obituary, an elegy, a eulogy. Words fail us because they are not enough. Words, my faithful friends, cannot reach me here: my phone lies uselessly on the desk beside me – I can’t call Aunt Jo ever again. It’s as if grief turns us not to salt nor stone but rather to ice: in the light of other days, better days, in the surety of the sun rising even now that she is gone and I remain: that is where we begin to thaw. It is in the kindness and condolences of others that we find strength enough to light the fire that will allow us to go forth and honor our loved ones even as we grieve.
The work of mourning is never done, as I note in my poem, “Sacrament.”
“Sacrament” concludes as follows:
I wish I could have taken a warship
And set you out to sea at its prow,
Your pyre so bright for one shining moment
That someone, somewhere
Might mistake it for a star.
Though the words don’t comfort me now, and they cannot yet penetrate beyond the fugue of loss and grief and sorrow: I know I will find solace in them one more. Why? Because I remain; and because Aunt Jo would want us to rejoice because she was here, instead of weeping because she is gone.
From left to right: My great-aunt, Josephine Simon (née Cacciatore; 1932-2025), my Grandma, Marie Cacciatore (1939-2016), and my great-Grandma, Annilena Cacciatore (née Rocco; 1911-1996) – together once more in the afterlife. Photo colorized.
Just some of the 200+ letters I have sent Aunt Jo over the past several years.
