The words I cannot say

We got home Wednesday afternoon, having left Tuesday morning. I am still in recovery from the trip.

For the first few days it was just that I kept finding myself drained of energy. It was like recharging a battery, but I had never charged quite long enough to get very far.

As that improved, yesterday I found emotions welling up all over the place, making me randomly weepy. It is still an upward trajectory.

Emotionally it was harder because of my mother's condition, my aunt's condition, and my mother's sorrow about my aunt's condition. Not everything enters memory for her, but that did.

Even when none of that is going on, and all that is going on are happy visits with people I love, there is a lot of mental effort for me in communicating in Italian.

My Italian isn't that great. I had the equivalent of eight years of French study and six years of Spanish. I still get rusty when I am not using it, but the base is stronger. The Lao study I did was intensive, and the simple grammar structure helps a lot. I had one year of classroom experience with Italian, and then about four weeks of family time since then. That is not fluency. I know I threw in a lot of Spanish this time without meaning to.

This time was harder not just because of the emotional components, but also they were strange vocabularies with things we haven't talked about before.

Even if you know every word for talking about death, it's not a conversation that makes everyone comfortable. My aunt will be very content to die. She can say that, and if you try and talk to her about eating and getting stronger, she immediate is very tired. It still doesn't feel quite right to say, "Okay, have at it!"

Of course there are varying degrees of comfort with that. One cousin was talking about being caught between two planes and how it is the universal human struggle, and another responded, "Not if you are Highlander. Or make a deal with the Devil."  (Sometimes understanding is not enough to have a response for it.)

Then, even if you accept it, that doesn't make everything easy. I have had this romantic view in the past that death should simply be like passing from one room into another, but birth isn't like that; we come out screaming. With all of the functionality built in to keep your body living, it doesn't all expire at the same time. There are difficulties. They require patience, and reconciliation. They require some judgment. My aunt is 94, so it is easy to think this is a good time, but what if she were 84, or 74? People die younger than that, but they live past it too. Maybe then you do fight it, instead of accepting it.

It's hard for others as well. I am still at an age where one when of my peers dies it seems unfair. This is my mother's last surviving sibling. Of those gone, two spouses are left. For them, it looks different. There is a feeling of being cut off and left alone. They aren't truly, because there are children and nieces and nephews and grandchildren, but for their generation, it is. For the younger generation, they feel losing their elders.

Truly, we do not have to talk a lot about that to feel that, and to feel that we are in understanding with each other. There are other things that we do need to be able to say: "Are you comfortable?" "Do you want us to bring you anything?" "Is there something you want to do again?" On one visit my aunt mentioned polenta. It was seemingly random, and she wasn't really asking for it, but maybe she wants polenta. We should be able to manage that.

I was able to say the things I wanted to say. This came largely from having looked it up more than once, and being patient and listening to the things she kept repeating. I was able to tell her about that moment when I thought I saw Luciana and Paolo, and that I believed there were good people around. When she said she felt outside of the world (which she had been saying a few times), I was able to tell her that there were other worlds. It's not much, but it felt important to say.

That was our last day there, in the morning. We came back in the afternoon she was so out of it that if I had heard that she died while we were in flight I would not have been surprised. And that didn't happen, because death is not an easy and predictable thing, but it is universal. It is not unreasonable to spend some time learning how to deal with it.