We Went to Sicily...Then Stuff Happened

Before I can recap our trip to Sicily in late September/early October, I feel the need to add some context. You see, we returned from two magical weeks in Italy on the night of Friday, October 6. My dad died hours later in the early morning of Saturday, October 7. We got to Syracuse and my mom by 8pm that night. Simon tested positive for Covid on Sunday. I tested positive for Covid on Wednesday. Simon recovered then got a rebound infection the next Sunday.

I think that might be why I haven't really processed the trip much less documented it here. Honestly, I'm not sure I remember it with that re-entry being the absolute shock it was. There's a lot to unpack there and a lot of detail - emotional, quarantined, grief-riddled detail - between each of those above sentences, but that's how it happened. Naturally I abandoned all thoughts and memories of Italia in the interest of pure old fashioned survival.

I live to tell the tale, but I now live as a different person. Grief is a funny thing - your entire context, your entire world has changed yet the groceries still look the same on the shelves, the car engine still turns, the same trees still stand in the yard, and the soil is still in the garden, rich with years' worth of plantings. Yet those things all scream to be different. I want the groceries to be spilling from the shelves with their contents spewing about in anger - flour ravaging the air and pasta careening down aisles. How can the car just turn on without even a grinding, cranky revolt at the absurdity of that expectation? How can those trees he planted so long ago just stand there, dropping their leaves into crispy little piles like any one of the other 45 times they've done it? And how does the garden dirt, the dirt that fed humans, fueled a soul-defining drive to nurture, and provided a place to be alone - to be with the pain, to be with the memories, to be with the sun, to be with the trauma - how does that dirt just sit there, empty of its purpose, for the first time in half a century?

How do any of us just sit here?