At My Father’s Deathbed I Learned To Appreciate Good Cheese and a Good Life
My father’s last words to me were “Buy real Parmigiano Reggiano, not that s**t I used to buy”.
It was almost the turn of the millennium, a boring, unremarkable evening like many others. I just came back from working in a long-forgotten DOT COM in San Francisco’s Gulch district, when my brother called.
“Mario” he said, “you’d better get on a plane ASAP. The doctors gave dad two weeks to live, at the most. Hurry!”
I didn’t even know he wasn’t feeling well. I’ve come to learn his illness, Bone Cancer, was sudden, but my family is notorious for keeping important things from me. The day I left for the USA from my native Italy, my mother almost died in a car accident and was in a coma for a month. They told me almost three months later, afraid I would be on a plane back the next day.
In order to travel to Italy, I had to buy tickets for me and my 9-year-old daughter. It wasn’t a question of her coming or not. The last time she had met my parents she was barely three years old and her memory of him had faded. She had to meet her grandfather again before he passed. My wife stayed home because her own health was too poor for her to travel.
Somehow, we make it onto the plane, after a great deal of drama with passports…
