I created this site
for a few reasons. I wanted to do something to pay
tribute to my mother’s life and to turn what was a
horrible year and summer into something positive.
But underlying all of this is really a much more
profound force which has been disturbing me since
my mother died: grappling with the concept of death
and what happens to us after we die. In sum,
perhaps this is just about me. In any case, since
others might feel the same way, I figured it
couldn’t hurt to let others know why I created this
space.
In my life, I have
known all 4 of my grandparents and even a great-
grandparent (she didn’t really speak English, but I
always remember her cutting and preparing food with
my grandmother and speaking in an Italian dialect).
Anyway, at one point they were there, and then at a
later time, they died. It was sad that they died,
but it didn’t really affect me that much. Death was
just some weird concept that I didn’t really think
about and was for old people. I also didn’t think
about what happened to life and where “it” went
when someone died.
Last July, my mother
spent 8 days in a hospice after being told by her
doctors that her cancer had spread so much that she
had only 6 weeks to live. This was a complete shock
to everyone and it seemed like time was
simultaneously slowing down but going faster than
ever. It was 8 days from that doctor’s prognosis
that my sister called me from the hospice and said,
“mommy died.” I was planning to go there later in
the day and at that
moment, I was eating
an omelette in a diner with a friend and instantly
became sick to my stomach. A couple of hours later,
I arrived in the hospice and went to the room where
my mother was with my sister. I had never seen a
person shortly after death. There was no life in
her body. Her face was a pale whitish gray and her
body felt a little cold. I was not particularly sad
at that moment, but I was overwhelmed by how
incredibly unfair this was. Unfair that she had to
go through so much pain. Unfair that she had to
spend the last 6 months of her life drugged up on
narcotics because she was one of the 2% of patients
who suffer massive pain from radiation. And really
really unfair that her life, personality, being and
everything was gone and that was it. I found it
colossally unfair that it was entirely possible
that everything that she spent her whole life
building up within her brain had vanished within
seconds, never to be found again—after so much hard
work and experience, gone in a second. That to me
was not fair. And so, unlike others who sobbed and
cried and hugged, frankly I was angry. I have
always been angry when I see injustice and
unfairness in this world. I have been angry when my
friend in elementary school, the only black kid in
the community, was ridiculed. I have been angry
when the President of Iran stated that the
Holocaust didn’t happen. I have been angry when the
highest court of the state of New York said that
gay people can’t get married and aren’t “natural”.
And I was angry when I saw my mother’s lifeless
body because it wasn’t fair—wasn’t fair that all of
her thoughts and all that she worked for and cared
about were gone. As ridiculous as it sounds, to me
her death was such an injustice to her life, cut
short at 63 years old. Not fair.
So, to come full circle, I guess it’s taken me over a year to figure out how to make my mother’s death seem a little less unfair and to deal with my anger and frustration. While only a small attempt, this site is my way of seeing that my mother does live on. She may not have ever thought of herself as an author, but now she is. I hope you enjoy reading her poems. They really show that the most important things to her were the people in her life. And whatever faults my mother had, she certainly knew that relationships with people were the most important. People die, and I don’t know what happens after. Maybe there’s heaven, maybe there isn’t; maybe we go on in another form, and maybe we are just like bugs and other animals and die and that’s it. No one really knows. But I think we can all agree that we live on through other people and it’s our obligation to honor those who have died. To do anything else would be as unfair as death itself.
Peter Castellano
peter.castellano@molecufit.com
So, to come full circle, I guess it’s taken me over a year to figure out how to make my mother’s death seem a little less unfair and to deal with my anger and frustration. While only a small attempt, this site is my way of seeing that my mother does live on. She may not have ever thought of herself as an author, but now she is. I hope you enjoy reading her poems. They really show that the most important things to her were the people in her life. And whatever faults my mother had, she certainly knew that relationships with people were the most important. People die, and I don’t know what happens after. Maybe there’s heaven, maybe there isn’t; maybe we go on in another form, and maybe we are just like bugs and other animals and die and that’s it. No one really knows. But I think we can all agree that we live on through other people and it’s our obligation to honor those who have died. To do anything else would be as unfair as death itself.
Peter Castellano
peter.castellano@molecufit.com
