HELLO, MY NAME IS
My Story…
In the fall of 2021 my father passed away at the age of 63 and I started grieving a lot of things about him and our relationship. One of the things that hit me the hardest is when I started to grieve his unfulfilled dreams of traveling the world and all of the thing he would never do and see (with me, or just by himself). I realized my dad had chosen to have my siblings & I young, leaving him to deal with a lot of responsibility and commitment without a lot of room for self exploration. Although he wasn’t always perfect, he loved me and my family enough to always want to provide and give us the best. He always put our future lives ahead of his own present moment.
I started to think, although my father and I were very similar, we had both chosen very different lives. He chose to get married and have a family in his twenties whereas I chose to get my masters and pursue a career. At the moment, I was 35 with no significant other or a child to hold me back from doing what he never could.
I had a flashback of the last time my dad went to New York City to visit me, the city in which I was dwelling at the time. He told me he wanted to have a cigar with me and a talk, that’s when I reminded him that I was a girl. Knowing that my father had only a few years left of his life from a prognosis given to him several years before, I knew this statement meant he had something important he wanted to tell me. It weighed heavy on me then, like it does now just recounting it; and therefore, I did what he had always taught me to do in moments like these-I cracked a joke. He smiled, knowing full well what I was doing, but then his look got serious again:
“I have something I want to tell you, you’re a lot like me. We love hard and we love to have fun, and sometimes that can be hard to manage. Remember that life is about finding the middle ground in-between those two things; love well and have some fun.”
I knew this was his last advice, and I also knew exactly what he was saying to me: you have to find a balance in life. You cannot always just give yourself away in love, you also need time and space for yourself. You also cannot live just for pleasure and fun, life is also about work and finding compromise with those who you deem worthy. My dad always had a way to say simple, yet very profound things, things that I always understood deeply at my core. It felt sometimes like he was speaking to my soul.
My father was a lot like me, he loved people and often saw the best in them, although he often struggled to see his own beauty and worth. He loved to talk to everyone, and always saw that people were just human (and extremely interesting at that). It was one of the reasons he had loved that I moved to The Big City. He told me often that I belonged there and that it made him proud to see me interacting with such surety with people when he came to visit. In that moment, I made a vow to myself:
I would travel. I would meet people. I would see the world in its beauty and splendor and get to meet the people and cultures in it. I would go in with an open mind and an open heart and see where the road would lead me. I only had one direction in mind: Italy. Dealing with grief, I remembered the first person I truly had to say goodbye to in my lifetime: my Italian Nonna. I wanted to eat ragù pasta & load it up with parmesan cheese, I wanted to savor red wine & dine with locals, and I wanted to try to learn the language that I sometimes heard slip from her mouth (especially when she did not want the kids to understand).
…and that’s where this story begins.