Death visited our family and enveloped us in a tight embrace of its dark cloak on a dismal April day in 1975. I was fifteen years old. I arrived home from high school as usual, wondering why there were so many parked cars near our house. I went around to the back entrance and was surprised to see my home full of people. They were all friends I recognized, paesani, who lived in the same, predominantly Italian, neighbourhood. Only this time they were not smiling.
Grim faces turned to look at me. I scanned the kitchen, and then further into the living room, looking for my mother or father. I suddenly realized that someone was crying, sobbing… deep, tortured gasps that I had never heard before. My eyes focused on the shaking figure hunched over in the living room chair – my mother. At that moment, she lifted her hands away from her face and reached for me.
“A figghia mia; sinda jìu a nostra Pina,” she sobbed. “Our Giuseppina has gone away!”
I was stunned for a moment; I didn’t know what she meant. Why was my mother in such a state? Where had my older sister, Pina, gone? Wasn’t she still in the hospital?
Days earlier, my worried parents had brought Pina to see the doctor. Stomach flu was the diagnosis, so they brought her back home, expecting the symptoms to eventually pass. When Pina developed severe cramps, they immediately rushed her to the hospital emergency department. Her appendix had ruptured, they were told, and she needed immediate surgery. I accompanied my parents to the hospital, where Pina was recovering, the next day.
That was just yesterday, I thought, confused. Then my mother repeated her words, and the stark truth hit me. Pina was dead. That was the reason all these people were here. I held my mother’s hand, helpless, as she told me that the poison had gotten into Pina’s blood. Peritonitis consumed her delicate body at seventeen years of age, all within a span of one week.
My father, always a strong, hard-working figure, seemed a broken man standing nearby, his body sagging with silent grief, his face etched with tears of helplessness. The stark scene that remains in my mind is that of the total despair and pain of my mother as she wept: “Pina mia, o Pina mia. Ti pighiaru pur ‘a tia. Che dolore, che dolore.” My mother’s older sister Anna Rosa had died when she was eighteen. “They took you, too,” she wailed. “Oh, the pain. The pain!”
I remember someone trying to give my mother some food that evening, telling her she had to eat to be strong, but she refused. From the disjointed cries around me, I understood that a friend called Teresa, who had acted as Pina’s sponsor at Confirmation, was going to be responsible for getting a burial dress.
“What a tragedy!” I heard someone whisper.
“It was God’s will,” a close elderly friend of the family murmured repeatedly to try to console my mother, who, hours later, was still in the same chair, her eyes red and swollen, her pain no less numbed.
I remember the rest of the evening as a blur, except for the absence of my younger brothers, who were picked up directly after school and stayed with my aunt and uncle and cousins that night. I was asked if I wanted to join them.
“Ti spagni u stai sula?”
It was the room I had always shared with Pina… I didn’t understand why I should feel afraid. I stayed there that night and for the nights to come, although sometimes I slept in my mother’s bed when my father was working night shifts at the smelter. On those nights, my mother couldn’t sleep alone.
The small neighbourhood where we lived was shocked by the news, as was the Catholic high school in which Pina had been in Grade 11 and I in Grade 10. At the funeral home, hordes of people came to express their condolences to my family. The two adjoining rooms streamed with people, young and old. My parents wept inconsolably as they sat by Pina’s coffin. She looked like a life-sized porcelain doll.
“Un angelo di Dio,” someone murmured nearby. I remember laying a rose next to her pale, lifeless hands, into which a rosary had been placed. An angel of God.
The day of the funeral was dark and bleak and rainy.
“I hope this is not one of those typical Italian funerals, with all that wailing and crying,” commented a girl in Pina’s class. Her homeroom class, along with several teachers, had come to the funeral Mass.
What cold, insensitive words, I thought as I followed my grieving parents up the aisle. Surely crying was not an act exclusive to Italians. Fortunately, there were kind, supportive friends to ease the slap of those words, although for some time I could not look at the girl at school without feeling a knot of bitterness.
The day after Pina’s funeral, my mother’s cousin came over and filled the kitchen sink with deep black dye. The mixture swallowed up my mother’s light-coloured clothes and the heavy night rain pelted the window above the sink, mirroring the black undulations of the dye working through the fabric. As each article of clothing underwent its funereal metamorphosis and was subsequently wrung out and hung to dry on a clothesline in the basement, I wondered if Canadian families went through this ritual, or if they just went out and bought black clothing for the mourning period. I expected it would be the latter, if they did indeed have such a custom. I instinctively understood that my mother, who was most adept in using her refined sewing skills in clothing herself and her family, wasn’t about to start spending money on new clothes for herself. From the time the dyed clothes were ready, my mother wore black to mark her grief, as was the custom she grew up with.
The one-year period of lutto – mourning – in our household was a long one. At least, I thought it felt unbearably so at the time, given the limited understanding of adolescence. Only much later, when blessed with children of my own, could I fathom the meaning of such a loss. I could understand how devastated my parents must have felt, how painful it must have been to carry on the responsibility of raising their three remaining children.
I no longer had a sister. The pink room we had shared was now mine. I remember quiet moments, strange moments, like helping to pack away her belongings and her clothes. I recall finding a letter that filled me with anguish; it was a letter to Pina from a boy admirer that I had hidden from her in adolescent insensitivity. How I wished I could have taken that moment back, had shown more kindness.
The television set remained off for an entire year. There would be no singing or laughing in our home, my mother told us sorrowfully. The radio was eventually turned on, but only for the news or the weather report. At times I thought life was overly harsh, although I didn’t have any previous experience with which to compare it. Canadian mourning customs were foreign to me; up until that time I had never attended a funeral or even visited a funeral home.
I felt lonely. I didn’t have many friends over during the grieving period. I don’t remember sharing my feelings about my home life with anyone. Perhaps I felt different, vulnerable to what people who didn’t share my culture would say or think. I was sad that I couldn’t attend school dances or other social activities. Meals were solemn, with little talk. I longed for the time when things could be normal, and I could laugh at home again without feeling guilty.
My parents turned to devout prayer and the solace they found in the Church to help them cope with the tragedy. Eventually they began to smile and then laugh once again. I recall cheering inwardly when I heard that first laugh, a sign that my parents could allow themselves to be happy. My brothers Pasquale and Cosimo, who were thirteen and eleven, respectively, sat in front of the television for hours after its one-year moratorium was lifted. I joined them with a sense of relief that life would continue normally once again.
As the years passed, I realized that Pina’s death had made my mother even more protective of me. I did not participate in many social activities. I had friends in the neighbourhood, but I didn’t venture far from home. I didn’t want to add to my mother’s worries after all she had been through, losing a daughter. Occasionally, I resented the restrictions; I saw myself as being different from other Canadians. As an immigrant, I was sometimes embarrassed that my parents weren’t more like Canadian parents, who seemed more permissive and less protective of their daughters. Again, looking back, I can appreciate their fears, their concerns, and their expectations.
I have come to realize that everyone mourns in their own way, in their own time. I mourned my sister’s death sixteen years after it happened. When I was fifteen, I experienced the full gamut of emotions at the time of her death and afterwards, but not until I was coming to terms with another loss in my life did I truly feel the loss of my sister. When I contemplated what we never shared, and would never share, I was crushed.
I felt all my thoughts, emotions, hopes, and fears bombarding me as I grieved the end of my marriage in 1990. In trying to make the pieces of my life fit together, I found some pieces didn’t fit. Much was lost. I learned what pressure was in the process, and I suffered.
I watched my two innocent sleeping children and knew I had to be strong. For them and for me. I felt so alone and at that moment my mind turned to Pina. She hadn’t been in my thoughts for some time, and the dam that had been building up inside of me over the years finally burst. I felt her loss acutely, and I experienced such total anguish at my inability to articulate to her all my feelings, my regrets, my love. I decided to write her a letter to make things right; or, at least, attempt to do so:
November 28, 1991
Dear Pina,
I’m all stressed out and I wish you were here to help me in these trying times. I’m sorry we never got the chance to work out our adolescent immaturities and develop a strong sisterly bond. Life is such a struggle at times. I know a lot of people are far worse off than me, but I can’t help feeling overwhelmed and exhausted. My spirit is low and I’m impatient, short-tempered, and angry. I burst into tears at the slightest provocation. I’m worried because there’s a heaviness in my chest and I feel that stress is taking over my life. All the demands of work, the kids, and the divorce are taking their toll on me.
It’s go, go, go all the time, and I think it has come to the point where I’ve got to make changes or I will become sick. I just want peace to return to my life, and I want my kids to have an emotionally healthy childhood, in spite of the divorce.
You know, Pina, once when Sarah was a baby, her sleeping face seemed to be a vision of you. Maybe I had seen that expression on one of your baby pictures… I don’t know. Could it be possible that there is a part of you in Sarah? I know one thing: she’s artistic, like you were. Maybe what you and I never had as sisters, I’m supposed to have with Sarah…
I’m sorry if I ever hurt your feelings. I miss what we could have had. I know you would have been my friend. My only consolation is that you’re in a better place, close to God.
Dear Pina, pray for all of us – me, my children Sarah and Jordan, our parents and brothers – that we can come to peace in our lives. I will say this prayer for you: Eternal rest grant upon Pina, oh Lord, and let perpetual light shine upon her. May she rest in peace. Amen.
I never told you, but I love you.
When I completed the letter, I was emotionally spent, but at peace. I had finally mourned my sister.
“Angel of God” appears in Product of Italy, Made in Canada: An Immigrant’s Love Letter to Food, Family, and Resilience. Copyright © 2025 by Rosanna Micelotta Battigelli. Used with the permission of Latitude 46 Publishing.
