With Italy on the verge of lockdown, Halloween wasn’t in my cards this year. To celebrate the 31st I just watched people on Instagram going wild with costumes and dances and pumpkin decorations, making me feel lazy and sad.
I thought Sunday was going to be the same: I would lay on the couch in my mother’s lame-ass apartment, wearing my Space Invaders pajamas, and play Starsector until it was time to hit the sack.
But then, on Sunday morning, my grandma calls.
Nonna Gabriella is an alleged medium. She affirms to have predicted the death of two of her friends, five divorces and quite a few triplets at the local bingo. I don’t know if she has superpowers, but she’s definitely good as sensing my mood. Today, for example, she understands something is wrong just from the way I greet her.
“You’re not feeling okay?” she asks.
“It’s just this Covid thing, Nonna. I didn’t get to party last night.”
“Oh, right, you kiddos celebrate the Howleen party.”
“Halloween,” I correct her.
“Right. Well, then we’ll have our own Howleen party. How long’s it been since you saw Nonno Dino and Zio Leonardo?”
“… Quite a while, to be honest.”
“Wanna come with me and visit them?”
After considering my options, and realizing that anything’s better than wasting the day in front of a screen, I say, “At what time?”
Italy started celebrating Halloween just thirty years ago, when American TV series and movies really made it popular. For the older generations, a more important day is All Saints’ Day, which falls on the 1st of November, and is dedicated to remembering the dead. That’s what my grandmother and I do today. After having lunch with spaghetti bolognese, chicken nuggets and a couple of leftover Mars bars, we drive to the graveyard of Silea, where my uncle and grandfather are buried.
Grandma has brought two new bunches of plastic flowers, which she hands me over to change the old faded ones. The process is surprisingly tedious—one of the small copper vases is stuck in its slot and it takes me five minutes just to pull it out—but in the end I manage to do the deed without bothering the other visitors too much. Then we stare silently at the pictures of grandpa Dino, dead at forty-two for a colon cancer, and uncle Leonardo, dead in a car accident at just twenty-five.
There’s a bigger place in my heart for my uncle, maybe because at home I have a picture of him holding a one-year-old version of myself. Or, maybe what really bothers me is that I could’ve got to know him if the incident hadn’t happened. But what-if’s only make it harder to mourn in peace, so I dismiss the thought, and start thinking of the good things. Of how much he was loved by Grandma and Dad, of how much he changed their life. Of how much he and Grandpa changed my life through them. And that’s when my heart really begins to swell. It all happens in a few seconds, but my eyes are wet.
And that’s it. Forty minutes later I’m already dropping Grandma back at her place. Although it feels like an entire day has passed.
Before closing the door, she turns back to me and says, “I’m sorry for your Howleen.”
“It’s fine,” I tell her with a smile. “This has been a pretty good one too.”
And I mean it.