A Visit to Family

When a family stays in the same city for five generations, a visit to the cemetery requires a bagged lunch and good walking shoes.

I only discovered this after my first visit to the San Joaquin Catholic Cemetery in 2004. That particular Monday my uncle was in between bouts of quitting smoking, so we left a trail of menthols threading through the rows of headstones. After a time, we finally arrived at our first stop: Sebastiano Pierucci. Where the caretaker’s lawnmower couldn’t reach, crab grass stretched out and across the deeply imbedded stone. Handing me the plastic bag of rags, baby oil, and hand clippers, my uncle repeated the instructions he had given me on the walk from the truck: cut the grass, clean the stone and apply a generous amount of oil. I set to work.

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Before that first visit, I had a very definite sense of who my family was. And although I was only vaguely aware of them—the Logorios, Pratos and Pieruccis scattered among the oak trees off East Harding—I knew enough to know they most certainly were not family.

They were my ancestors, maybe, but not family.

And that’s a crucial difference. To be in the family means you are a real, flesh and blood person with your own dreams, biases, peculiar habits and irritating quirks. You exist—in the fullest meaning of that word. Ancestors are two dimensional. Their lives (which I supposed they must have had) are distilled to the dour photos in the cracked, oval frames on the wall and the Ravioli recipe we still use today.

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Above to the left, my uncle said, “Put more oil on it, we have another bottle in the truck so don’t worry about not having enough for the others.”

For the next three hours we visited those others, performing the same ritual at each site. Gradually, as the day wore on and his cigarettes dwindled, my uncle began telling me stories of the people below the stones. There was the no-good booky and conman, the quiet veteran who married a prostitute, and the 30-year hod carrier with the Port of Stockton.

And then there was Bena, my father’s grandmother. Albena Pierucci was a fiercely protective woman, all the fight and cunning manipulation of a Mafia don in a five foot two, blue-eyed Genoese frame. She was protective of her family, yes, but also of her friends, her kitchen and her opinions. Her weapon of choice was guilt, which she wielded with the agility of a fencer. Years later I would find a letter she had written to my mother, a Greek/Portuguese/Swede, who she surprisingly adored (I now suspect the diabetes, that by then had taken Albena’s leg, also did a number on her mind too):

“I’m sorry Candy for not being at your birthday party. You know that if someone had been able to give me a ride I would have been there. Love Bena.”

Step, thrust, parry, riposte—the master at work.

Two bottles of oil later, my uncle and I approached the end of our task. After the first few graves, I had begun noticing a common theme. My family was very business-like in its disposal of the dead. Inscriptions were kept short and to the point. “Here lies so-and-so Pierucci,” more of a declaration than a memorial.

If death says a lot about the living, my family’s graves cut straight to the point.

Their stories, though—the ones my uncle told me—added a post script to that message. Sebastiano, Katarina, John, Bena—the lives of a family I had never known. It’s true, they’ll never have the same depth, the individual clarity as my living family. But kneeling there at each site, their stories filled the once-empty graves with their details, wiping the dust from the picture