Missing Mothers

Amelia is my missing grandmother. She was already gone when I was born, dying when my father was only 12 years old from a wasting disease.  They didn’t know to call in Anorexia then but at some point, Amelia just stopped eating enough.  I recall only one picture of her in my house growing up.  Sepia toned and fraying at the edges, it is a small portrait taken when she got engaged to Louie.  She wears a beret, slightly off kilter, her short brown hair cropped short around her ears.  She couldn’t have been more than 20 and was already pregnant with Mikey when this picture was taken. Maybe it was because of her pregnancy that she was getting married to Louie.  What other choice would she have had?  Not something my father or Louie ever spoke of.  But the story seeped down to me a through the waters of extended family gossip.  

My father spoke very little about his mother.  What he did say was about how sad and hard her life had been. How her own mother has “disappeared” from the family when she was still a child leaving her with no other woman to take care of her.  Whether her mother had been sent back to Italy for some “disgraceful” behavior or left on her own accord we don’t know. But Amelia still a child was left under the control of harsh disciplining father whom I remember as a scary and very old “Great Grandpa”, thick glasses, few teeth, a ‘broken’ English that was hard to understand.  Like my grandmother Philly, Amelia was taken out school early to cook, clean, and tend to her father and three brothers.  “They didn’t treat her well,” was just about all my father said about her leaving me to imagine what her life might have been like in that three-story walk-up in Italian American section of Everett.  

My father had her sixth grade diploma framed and gave it to me as a gift when I was in graduate school.  I have it hanging now in my house near my writing chair.

Louie never talked about how he met Amelia and I never felt it right to ask him.  There was a hush that was expected around her memory and life. When I asked about her Louie and Mikey would look turn their gazes, go silent, and look upset. I felt ashamed for wanting to know something secret.  

Her absence filled our house with a presence. The missing mother, grandmother.  I would not exist without her so she didn’t feel gone to me even if unknown and left to my imagination to fill in the gaps.  And she poured herself out of the hole in Mikey’s heart carved by her absence.  He tried to fit me into that hole.

 When my father was dying and the veil between the worlds thinned, it was her presence more than any other I felt in the room with us, flooding in through the ceiling which had been dissolved into the sky drawing Mikey towards her.  He would not be alone.