The Healing Journey

July 2, 2026

Back in the olden days, my parents would quibble over who got the newspaper first when it arrived on the doorstep, and since my mother was usually busy preparing dinner — with no help from my father — he sat at the table, flipping through the pages with a single-minded purpose. Reading the obituaries.

He went there immediately in order to, as he said, “See who died.”

It was a grim pastime, this daily search through the chronicles of the deceased for a familiar name.

I was amused, but more often confused, to think my parents knew so many people who passed away, and every so often my mother, like some suburban Cassandra, would utter, “I wonder who’s next.”

They grew up in a different world, in crowded city neighborhoods with large extended families, which meant there was much mourning to be done. It was a fact of life, and death.

At least once a week, with his face buried in newsprint, my father would make a solemn announcement: “Baldie died.” Or “Tommy’s mother-in-law passed.” Or “Do you remember Angela Capone from the old neighborhood? She’s gone.”

His commitment to the cause amazed me. Here was a guy who never accompanied us on vacations and rarely left the house after a hard day’s work as a carpenter; however, when someone died, he put on one of his two ties, a white shirt and his brown tweed suit jacket — as if he were preparing for a job interview at IBM — and drove to the funeral home to say a last goodbye to a second or third cousin or his old buddies from the East Side, who always seemed to have unusual nicknames like Bo, Red, Sloppy and Superman.

Whenever there was a wake for a family member, friend or acquaintance, my father considered it his duty to, in his words, “pay my respects.”
©J Pisani

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