On February 6th 2017, my oma Yvonne passed away. Four years later, on March 24th 2021, my nonna Giovanna followed. Two women who, despite being born into very different cultures, chipped away at the boxes their respective societies had placed them in. Yvonne never married, and the two serious relationships I’ve been told about were both with married men who, ultimately, stayed with their wives. I can’t know what was said between them. What promises were made, or broken? What did my grandmother expect from these men she spent a considerable number of years with, one of whom she had my mother with? If her relationships hint at her possession of an adventurous spirit, her love of travel confirms it. Yvonne wanted to see the world and travelled to several continents by herself, something uncommon for women at the time. Of course, I didn’t know her then. My memories of her are of knobbly fingers, of toasted bread with butter and honey after school, of burnt meat balls on Wednesdays or takeaway frietjes from Clementine if we were lucky (and nagged enough). She had a favourite chair in the living room, which she would sink into to read books, watch hours of soap operas or sew name tags in my underwear. She cackled loudly at the Nanny, and had a thundering crush on Ronn Moss from the Bold and the Beautiful. She loved Charles Trenet and still remembered the words to Douce France long after most other memories had faded with age. She delighted in telling people that Canadians say “Trawno” instead of “Toronto”; an anecdote which made her slap her thighs with laughter each time, and we would repeat back to her in her last weeks. Her hair was always perfectly coiffed, and she wore tailored two-piece suits with pencil skirts. When I first developed a semblance of breasts, she took me to a lingerie store that catered exclusively to women in her age bracket. Think reinforced nude-coloured E-cups with straps as wide as those on my school backpack, and being prodded by ladies who had long forgotten how embarrassing it could feel to be a thirteen year-old girl. She took no bullshit and liked things done her way. She was charming and funny, and she loved my brother and I to pieces.
Giovanna, the youngest of 11 children, loved learning but was taken out of school at the age of 10 so she could help around the house, a choice I imagine was borne from equal parts economic necessity and patriarchal ideals. Not one for passivity, Giovanna stopped eating for two days in protest. Her teacher, who had seen the potential in Giovanna (a potential which exists in all students should they be nurtured and cared for in a willing environment) pleaded with her parents to let her stay in school. She tried to haggle Giovanna’s academic career: ``Just a few more years, until she’s 14, then she can leave’’. There was nothing to be done. Giovanna left school, made her living as a seamstress and started a family with my grandfather; a man who has nothing but deep respect for the work ethic she espoused in both the domestic and non-domestic spheres. Meanwhile, she continued to devour books in what little free time she had. She was deeply religious. The last time I saw her, she was engrossed in a book either about or by Pope Francis, I can’t remember exactly. Even today, when my non-religious grandfather pulls out his wallet to show us old photos, prints of Catholic saints fall on the table. Traces of Giovanna. Coming to visit her meant being greeted first by incredible smells coming from the kitchen. I remember crostatas, focaccias, bubbling salsa di pomodoro, involtini, orecchiette alle cime di rapa. After my first year at undergraduate school, she told me, delightedly, that I looked healthy, and I knew that my ill-fitting clothes weren’t lying to me: I had put on a lot of weight. She fought tooth and nail to send both her sons to school, so that they could live a life less constrained by hard labour and attain what she had never been allowed to have. She was kind, strong, and the hardest working woman I know. In many ways, she was forced to navigate life within much narrower boundaries than Yvonne did - and yet, she challenged them, by forging a different path for her children and grandchilren. She told me once that education was the most important thing; that the best thing that ever happened to Italian women was the legalization of divorce in 1970; that it does not matter if the person I marry has money, as long as they have a heart of gold.
It’s only now, at 31, that I feel I have the words and life experience necessary to begin to understand their quietly radical lives. I have so many questions I would like to ask them. I wish I could have had even a small glimpse into their inner monologue, to understand how they viewed themselves and their lives. I wonder about their quiet hopes and regrets, and the big and small secrets they kept. My knowing of them will always be through the narrow lens of their identity as grandmothers, which feels much like looking at someone through binoculars. You are either way too close, or lose all detail, and you never quite capture the whole picture.
Last year, I took a class on `climate feelings’, in which we explored the affective side of climate change to understand how it might inform our activism. One week, we spoke about climate grief, and the lack of words, ceremonies and resources that exist to help us process the unprecedented loss we, as a global community, are experiencing due to climate change. As I reflected on the importance of ceremony, I noticed differences in how I had processed the deaths of my two grandmothers. Yvonne died in Nepal and was cremated in Pashupatinath, a highly significant Hindu temple in Kathmandu. My mother, unbeknownst to her, would be asked to circumambulate my grandmother’s body thrice holding a large torch, and then start the cremation process by lighting a small piece of wood placed in my grandmother’s mouth. We were surrounded by everyone who had ever met my grandmother in Nepal, many of whom were sobbing loudly. We were not prepared for this, and yet it pushed us to face the reality of death in a direct and confronting way. It was powerful. We were together as a family, and we were there with intention and presence, honouring my grandmother’s life by witnessing her physical departure from it. Giovanna died during the Covid-19 pandemic, just before she was able to access the vaccines which were beginning to be rolled out. A woman who sacrificed so much to her family died alone in a hospital, and had a small funeral with limited attendance. I remember feeling nothing. I remember skyping with my family once she had passed, expecting that we would talk about our favourite memories with her, memorialize her in some way. We did not - either due to a generational belief that difficult things are best left unacknowledged, or because we were all still grappling with the weight of what happened. I’m not sure which. I do know that I did not feel what was happening; I knew that I had seen her 15 months ago, and that now, people who I trusted told me that she was gone, and that was that. One month later, my best friend Linda and I went trekking together. I have always admired Linda for the ease with which she embodies many of the spiritual values I strive for; her emotional depth yet complete lack of pretension. After a long jeep ride through valleys clogged up with smoke from unprecedented wildfires, a night of dancing in the rain and of eating salty fried chicken and dal bhat in the Gurung village of Sikles, we hiked up to the Kapuche Glacier. We witnessed an avalanche up close, laughing and cheering with the Nepali tourists until it got dangerously close - ``Wait.. Are we safe?’’. After hours of laughing and connecting with this country that meant so much to us both, we sat in front of the Glacier and talked about the impact Covid had had on us. Linda shared the severe pain she felt not knowing when she would be able to go home; how difficult, as an intensely free spirit who loves to travel and experience the world, the imposition on her mobility was. We cried together about the virus - how it felt like mother Earth crying out for help. And then, we performed a little ceremony for Giovanna, and I felt it. Grief, anger and regret mutually reinforced one another within my rib cage, generating a tidal wave that would stop in the choke point of my throat and beat against it furiously, ending in choppy and cathartic sobs. Suddenly, this abstract concept (``Your grandmother was here and now she is gone"‘‘) was a little less abstract. Suddenly, the pain of her departure felt a little more manageable, by virtue of that pain being acknowledged and felt. By virtue of her existence being acknowledged and felt. I am forever grateful to Linda for sharing that experience with me, and forever grateful for the way these women have shaped my life. I wish I could have told them more while they were here.