Vieste

Thursday 10 May

"What I would give to be in Vieste with you right now, and have a meal with Antonietta."  We agreed strongly.

Vieste is a wondrous little town, a fisherman's village since long, flooded with Italian tourists in the season, sitting on the very tip of the peninsula that sticks out into the Adriatic Sea from the back of Italy's boot. We have spent two summer vacations there with Elisabetta and Nick, our friends from New York, the last time in 2010. I have saved pictures of Lara, bronzed and lush in stark summer dresses. We had many meals there in a string of different restaurants, our favorite being La Tavernetta, with tons of exotic fresh sea fruit prepared with uncanny flavors.

Lara was musing. Perhaps, she said, instead of going in for the second series of chemotherapy, we should have just said "Forget it" and taken a plane to Vieste one last time. It didn't happen, of course. These are afterthoughts, but they are, oh, so pleasant to immerse oneself in. We reminisce about other places we have been together, memorable trips, seminal events we have witnessed first-hand. It is a form of escapism, I reckon, but benign in its effect.

There are regrets, too. We never made it to Antarctica, even though we wandered into a travel agency to check out the offers, less than two months ago. We would have loved to walk up and down Fifth Avenue one more time, with the Sex in the City Girls (the rest of them all live on Manhattan).

I never took you to Mexico City, she lamented. Indeed, we never got around to doing so in all of twenty years (although she went by herself once). There lie footsteps of hers that I have never retraced, whereas she has pretty much traced all of mine. Never postpone, we now know. Grab the moment. Pluck the day.

I promised that in our next lives I would start looking for her earlier and that I would find her sooner. We would somehow find time to cram more music, ballet and theater in our evenings, even though we have done our fair share even in this life. And we promised to be less combative within our marriage and to save a good fight for something that would be really really worth it. Most of them in this life we can't even remember the reasons for. Instead to be mutually supportive at all times.

In other words, we are in closure mode, but we are not giving up. We just wish to be done when the end is inevitable.

I though that my trip to the funeral parlor the other day (See "Parlor") was pretty heavy. What Lara is doing now is even heavier. Before I went ahead, I told her this was going to be tough and she swallowed a sob in acknowledgement. I gave her a design with a text of her own death announcement. As I write this, she is reworking it to her own preference. Just imagine doing that! (My own dad did it, by the way.) We talked about it over dinner just now. How resilient this woman.

She will never stop to impress me.

Even when she is no longer there.