Searching for my lost grandmother
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My grandma, mother of my dad, recently passed away.
Amina Mascitelli was originally from a small village in Italy called Rapino, and emigrated to Argentina in the 50s with my grandpa, Giuseppe Fosco.
I’ve always had a strange relationship with her. Aside from the obvious geographical distance, growing up in Brazil, there was also a sentimental one. My grandma was always quiet and grumpy, as if she was constantly annoyed at the world around her. The little she spoke would be in a mixture of spanish and italian that has always been hard for me to understand. Speaking on the phone with her was nearly impossible.
I wonder if she felt out of place. My grandfather passed away in the early 90s (I was only 3 years-old), and I can’t help but feel part of her went with him. I always hear stories about how he was the life of the party, cranking jokes and constantly smoking. I wonder if she needed someone like him to complete her stoic nature.
A little over ten years ago, my youngest uncle got married and grandma decided to move back to Italy. It didn’t work out, and she came back to Argentina in less than a year. It must be hard going back to your home town decades later and realize it’s… not really there anymore.
I couldn’t help but feel, at times in my life, that she didn’t like me that much. Maybe it’s because she had four sons and my sister was the only woman in the family after her for many decades. Maybe that’s how she was with everybody and I just never got used to it.
With all the things that come to mind at a time like this, I can’t help but feel a deep regret for not actually knowing her. It’s like I got used to having an image of her in my head, and ignoring the fact that she was still here — albeit in another country. Of course, she was who she was, so the image was probably not too far off from reality. But now I’ll always wonder which details were lost in this interpretation I created in my head.
I used to go to Argentina every year or two growing up, and staying in her house was something I actually loved. I even turned down going out with my dad and uncle once to play there all afternoon. Sure, I had just got new toys that I was much eager to play with, but staying at her house was a common occurrence.
At one point in my adolescence, this image of her kicks in and staying there starts being a chore. Out of the couple of weeks I used to pass in Argentina, maybe I would go to her house once or twice. It’s like she was a living museum, and the best I could do was pay a visit and stick around for a little while.
I suspect old age has a bit to do with this process. I remember, as a small child, being able to have longer conversations with her than I did as an adult. I still didn’t try hard enough, however. I had years to try.
In the 80s, my father emigrated from Argentina to Brazil, where he met my mother and eventually I happened. Growing up, I saw a lifetime of infrequent calls and… well, what seemed as not being really there.
I’m not sure what was going on there, and I suspect that for him, leaving his country, and thus his mother, behind might be related somehow. My dad is also a man of few words, but I guess he inherited some extra parts from my grandfather — he’s as gentle as he is quiet.
Considering how much they spoke whenever they saw each other, they probably had some kind of telepathy going on.
All of this hits me specially hard now that I’m an immigrant myself. There is a certain sense of returning to my origins now that I live in Europe, and I wonder how this will make me distant from my own family living in Brazil.
Grandma had been sick for a while, in and out of the hospital a couple of times in the last year. On Thursday, March 17th 2018, she had a heart attack and didn’t make it.
The last time I saw her was in Buenos Aires in 2014. When I moved to the Netherlands in November last year, my parents were visiting her and I sent a video saying hi. They said she thought I was on Skype and tried to respond. They said she loved to see me.
I wasn’t really sure what I was going to feel once it happened. To be honest, I wasn’t thinking too much about it, almost as if I expected her health just to… hold steady and for nothing to happen. Obviously, that’s not how life at 86 works.
I find myself feeling this missed opportunity to be closer to someone who loved me, in her own particular way that I never understood very well. Someone from another country, on another country, six decades and two languages apart from me, who had her own way of interacting with the world.
I guess we’re always doing the best we can at any given point, but in this case it sure felt like my best wasn’t enough.
I love you grandma, just the way you were. You will be dearly missed — much more than I expected, and this just makes it harder.
Amina Mascitelli
1932–2018
