

Myself and my nonna on my birthday
Just as fireworks were lighting up the broad American skies, my nonna took her last few breaths. Her name was Angela Rosa, but she was a sunflower.
Sunflower translates as Girasole in Italian, which literally means “to turn to the sun.” That is how I remember her—always turning to the sun, to the small pieces of joy among a thousand pains. She had lost her husband, lost a son; she had survived fascism and cancer. In the very end, she was in pain, her body a cage in which all she could do was remember and think and write, thus leaving hundreds of poems and memories behind. Her 90-year-old brother, her priest, her badante and friend, and we her family: We were her sun.
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