Memories of a Sicilian Humanist

I have many photos of my dad. He never smiles in those before grandchildren. Once they appear, he laughs. With everyone else his smiles and laughs were fleeting, private. Not with the children. They played Monopoly. They ran. He had asked them to teach him how to take a selfie and had adopted their francophone habit of saying “love” instead of “like.” It suited a man who didn’t like much but loved plenty.

He was the most sociable shy person in the world. The funniest serious man.

He was precise. One afternoon a few months ago he overheard me tell my children to listen with a harsh tone. “Tell them the truth,” he told me, calmly but without whispering so they could hear him too.

“You don’t want to be listened. You want to be obeyed.” He didn’t like obeying either.

He knew the language of strokes. The discussion was the genre in which he expressed himself fully. His masterpiece was the half word.

Those who knew him often felt that they didn’t know him well, but they always knew him all. Whether he was in the fields, at home, at a party, in the classroom, or in his office, he didn’t change much. He was very present in many places, especially where he was not alone.

He didn’t spend himself, as they say. He gifted himself. He always took something in return, usually a note. I found scraps of papers everywhere among his things. (Dad’s death was a big shock for Post-it retailers). Half words to himself.

Dad had recently received a career achievement award from his hometown of Rosolini: The golden carob. (The carob is not a well-known tree. It produces extremely useful fruits if not covered in gold.) There had been a ceremony in the main town square. A nice summer festival, with the mayor, a tenor, local TV and pictures, ourextended family, acquaintances, friends, and the grandchildren. He had felt recognized and had rejoiced, two sentiments he did not experience often and had filled his heart with gratitude and his head with projects.

I was not there that night. We saw each other a few days later. He had had other acknowledgments, and the little vanity he had did not feed on prizes and ceremonies, so I wondered why this one award had so much meaning.

It wasn’t just the bond with his hometown, which he had never left although he had departed for university sixty years earlier, or the memory of his adored mum, that made the prize so special.

It was that for one night his roots had been next to his dream.

The professor, the professional, the person, had been recognized together by family, colleagues, and friends. All and everyone in the piazza. A potent stroke, a rare privilege for someone who lives elsewhere and works with secrets. I feel his gratitude as if he had left it to me.

I first saw the golden carob next to his coffin. Reflecting on that moment, I didn’t remember or imagine my dad. I really heard him, inside me, pronounce the words that I am sure he would have whispered had he witnessed that scene.

“See, some might think: now what use is that award to you? Instead I think: look, he must have been good!”

For my dad to “be good” — declined in Italian as “uno bravo,” an identity that encompasses mastery and good intent — was the most admirable ambition, the finest of all compliments. He never used it lightly. To be good meant to be intelligent, curious, and skillful. To know what to do and why.

My dad was good. Especially at loving.

Dad had a hard head and a big heart, and the virtues and torments that come with a long memory and a deep sensitivity. His strength was lucidity and his weakness, resentment.

He was almost never happy but he seldom lost hope. He never envied. Whenever he met “someone good” — an exemplar of mastery, elegance, dignity, culture, civility — he admired them and tried to emulate them. He believed in goals and models. In motivation.

He was often afraid but never for long. Only two things never frightened him: a journey and a struggle. He had journeyed so far and struggled so much that it was impossible for him to be pessimistic or carefree.

Our love was one of those territories so vast that they encompass different climates. In over forty years we had explored it all and we both knew it well.

I learned love for and through work from him, then I made it my own and he was proud. To have a child who was “better,” in ways that only he should judge, was for my dad a man’s ultimate achievement. A meta-goodness with a view on eternity.

We did not speak often. We spoke a lot. Once, I joined the quire of those who complained that he took much better care of others than of himself.

“It is unfair, but it is not your fault,” I told him. “You didn’t have a good therapist perhaps.”

“You’re wrong, he was very good. Because I raised you well and you get into different trouble than me. Maybe your therapist is too young to understand.”

Game. Set. Match.

Smile. Pat. Kiss.

This is not another half word. It is an intellectual testament. A manifesto.

My dad didn’t see relief as an end, but as a means to make room for the future. And if some wounds might never heal, they had to be cured nevertheless. Success was to not pass them on. He had the attention and patience of those who know and care for olive trees.

He was not a fatalist, like many who shared his origins, or a classic humanist, like many who shared his training.

He was a Sicilian humanist.

He did not believe in the force of destiny or cared too much about the pursuit of happiness. He believed in talent, choice, and sacrifice. He pursued vitality.

Talent without effort and sacrifice without reward annoyed him. He could not tolerate only two sacrifices: the sacrifice of freedom and of love. Real sacrifices brings freedom and love. If they do not the are just efforts without goal or meaning.

Dad loved to travel as much as coming home. He often said goodbye, with a big hug and a small tear. Journeys and homes for him were not places or things. He was interested in stories and people. He loved novelty as much as tradition. When he told me that my wife reminded him of his mother I understood that he had fallen in love with her almost too much.

He loved a walk, a “passeggiata.” If a discussion was his literature, a walk was his metaphor. He had the gift of knowing how to accompany, and he had cultivated it. He understood pain, shared joy. He was proud if people with whom he’d walked a while continued on their way in good company.

Recently I read about a talk he had given where he said that for an adult, only one person is indispensable: him- or herself. I was sad, maybe I believed him. It is easy now to read that line as a forewarning or a goodbye. I’d rather read it as the beginning of another discussion.

In the end, I don’t believe it. Without important people in our lives, for good or bad, we wouldn’t be ourselves or we’d always be the same selves. This is why we never really lose those who helped us find or remake our selves. They stay in those selves. We can be indispensable for adults too, only not forever.

Of those like my dad people say, he leaves a big void. Not at all. He leaves a big full. In me he left a love for the open road and good company too.

In the days after his death I found him everywhere. In his students’ words. In his colleagues’ dismay. In his clients’ messages. In the smile of the kids he had raised in a treatment community. In his friends’ stories, in his siblings’ silence, in my children’s questions. In the homily of a priest he had cared for. In my mum’s fragile stubbornness. In a pasta pie that symbolized all the food, warmth, and cuddles of our family. The three ingredients of well being, he used to say.

I poured my anger into tidying furiously the enormous mess that was his desk. In the silence of the night, the better to hear his voice and answer back should a discussion arise as I read the notes between his books.

It was his study method. He was proud of it. Reading, underlining important passages, and transcribing the most important in a scrap of paper.

I found a large one between the pages of the book he was reading before he died. It had the title and notes from an essay by Milton Erickson. I will transcribe them below. Then I will do one more thing that my dad would have loved even more than having the last word. I’ll make the most of my life.