The Stories of my Fathers

It started - for us, at least - way back in 1907, on a ship, in Genoa, Italy.

My great, great grandfather Giovanni Passariello and his family, along with his brother and HIS family, boarded a ship to take them from their little town of San Felice a Cancello to the United States. Upon arriving in Ellis Island, the brothers were ushered into separate lines to obtain their paperwork and documents. During this process, they were given shortened (albeit, barely) versions of their now-different last names. My side became Passerello, and the pair was so happy to be on their way to new lives that they never went through the process to change them back, or match them again.

Last names were not where the changes ceased.

Once settled, my great grandfather Gaetano - Giovanni’s son - was about 5 years old and attending kindergarten. One of his teachers quickly became tired of calling him by his unfamiliar, slightly long first name, and took it upon themselves to decide that, from then on, he would be called Tom. No questions asked, and it stuck. Therefore, later in life, Gaetano’s son would also be Tom (Thomas Arthur, to be specific).

Now, the first official Tom was my grandfather; a hardworking, family-oriented man from South Jersey with hair to match his favorite rockstar (The King, of course), even when it turned snow white. He didn’t have time for Elvis’s rhinestones - not while raising six kids, running a pizza shop, and seemingly remembering the names of everyone he’d ever met - but a wardrobe full of shiny white jumpsuits was about all he managed not to accomplish.

When the oldest of his children, Cindy, who had a knack for cooking, decided she didn’t want to go to college, Tom made a decision. He would build her a bakery; a place for her to make all of the fantastic cakes she dreamed of. And he did - though this bakery turned into quite the project for the entire family.

When my dad - Mike, a middle child - and his oldest brother - another Tom, of course - were in school, my grandfather (Pop, as he is to most of his kids and all of his 13 grandchildren) enlisted the boys’ help to quite literally build the bakery. Once they had a foundation laid and walls set up, they took note of a mention from a friend that a farmer he knew wanted his barn torn down, and went across town to take care of it for him. The wood they got from this small job would become the roof of their bakery.

When Pop heard of another restaurant in town closing its doors, he quickly bought it and used all of the equipment inside to ensure a full, working kitchen in his own place.

And just like that the Passerello’s had themselves a….pizza shop?

Sure enough, living up to their Italian heritage, the family worked together day in and day out to craft handmade pizzas every day, and doughnuts on the weekends - even the guy they got their cheese from was special, as his grandfather had come to the States on the exact same boat as Pop’s grandfather. With this well-oiled machine of a bakery up and running, Cindy got a place to make her ever-impressive wedding cakes, and the family turned a profitable business. This went on from about 1975 to 1981, when they finally made the difficult decision to close the business. (Which is still standing, and running as a pizza shop, in South Jersey today.)

As fun and impressive a story of family this might be, it’s not necessarily the one I grew up with. Don’t get me wrong, my dad’s family is just as loving and hard-working as I’ve led you to believe, but I didn’t grow up in the walls of the pizza shop.

The Pop I knew was older, much grayer, gruffer…. I remember waking up when he and Grammy (Barbara, his red-headed wife of about 65 years, and my very Catholic, mild-mannered grandmother) would stay at our house for any random two-week period during the year after we moved to Florida, and finding Pop at the kitchen table with a coffee, his newspaper, and probably a box of doughnuts he got up early to go buy for everyone. A feat in itself, considering he was also always up until probably 2 am, blaring the TV so loud my dad would often stomp into the living room, half asleep and disgruntled, just to whine at him for it.

I grew up only visiting Jersey a couple times - once for Cindy’s funeral, after a long and heartbreaking battle with cancer, and the only time at that point I remember seeing my dad break down; and once for Pop’s 80th surprise party. The latter event was maybe the most influential of my childhood; as the third oldest grandkid, and the oldest girl, it was probably the first time I realized all of the cousins were finally old enough to have their own personalities. (I remember when the youngest - Hope - was born. My dad and Cindy were her godparents, and I remember her baptism like it was yesterday, so it’s a realm of insanity to think she’s in college not an hour away from me now.) Even with something as simple as a birthday party he didn’t know was happening, Pop was bringing the family together.

Since we didn’t make it up north very often - and because both of my dad’s brothers and their families had moved to Florida around the same time we did - Grammy and Pop would make annual trips to spend time with each individual family for a week or two at a time. I didn’t love giving up my room, but it was nice that they cared enough to make sure we had the time with them when they could offer it. My sisters and I were home-schooled, so we perhaps had more time than my cousins sometimes did, and we made the most of it. We’d go on walks with Grammy almost every day of their visit, just around the neighborhood. (Once, we found several boxes of old vinyl albums out for the trash; never one to pass up a deal, she insisted we keep them, so we came back with their minivan after our walk. My mother was thrilled at our excessive hoarding, but I’d be lying if I said I didn’t still have a number of those albums on a shelf in my living room right now, over a thousand miles away.)

One time, later on in our high school years, they took my middle sister and I to the Florida Strawberry Festival. We spent the day wandering around the tables of strawberry-filled-everything, and listening to the bands they’d managed to get on the ticket - The Drifters, The Coasters, The Platters. I still think about that day whenever Under the Boardwalk or Yakety Yak comes on.

They were a hearty couple who made their family their life and enjoyed the retirement they’d worked so hard for, even taking time to visit Italy (much to everyone’s awe; my grandfather hated airplanes). They earned their relaxation and were always the first to give everything they could while expecting nothing in return.

My dad has always been very similar in a lot of ways.

He may have had to get up against his will to make pizza and doughnuts when he was in high school, but when *I* was in high school I remember him going to his construction painting jobs (of course the same thing his dad and his older brother did for a living; family, I tell ya), coming home for all of 20 minutes some days, just to rush to his next job bartending or serving banquets at a nearby resort hotel, often with my mom on the same shift.

The Passerello’s are nothing if not hard-working, but that comes with its downsides too.

In March 2017, my dad had a stroke.

I was a city or two away - although I lived with my parents at the time - house sitting for a coworker when I heard from my sisters, and my mom. My middle sister - Rachel - was living out of state at the time, and the youngest - Jackie, only a few years younger than me - had been home with our dad; mom had gone to bed already. Jackie had noticed Dad complaining about discomfort, and in her typical whirlwind of googling her fingers off at the slightest sign of something abnormal, checked his symptoms and realized what was happening. She woke mom up, explaining quickly that they had to get to a hospital. With the help of a neighbor and the luck of a late-night lapse in Orlando traffic, they made it in time to keep things from getting much worse.

It was a recovery period, and a learning process. Immediately, we found out that this was not the first stroke - smaller ones had already occurred over the December prior - and was certainly not the end of the medical hardships.

As time went on, my mom (who got her BA and subsequently MA in natural health online while I was in high school, when my dad was diagnosed with the stress-born autoimmune disease Grave’s Disease after his sister’s death in 2005) spent what seemed like every waking hour - not that she slept much at that point - researching every symptom, every possible outcome and cure, everything she could find, in tandem with their doctors.

There were good and bad days, and good and bad months. Dad would go stretches of time with nothing wrong, feeling like a million bucks, only to eventually be told something new was wrong.

In the summer of 2020, amidst the Covid-19 pandemic, he was diagnosed with renal failure, and needed a new kidney. Already a devastating blow, his colon was starting to fail him only a few months later.

Much to our family’s gratitude, a nurse where he was hospitalized finally realized what was going on, making a likely life-saving discovery: Dad had another autoimmune disease. Vasculitis: a rare condition in which blood vessel walls thicken and narrow, cutting off blood supply to organs. It’s hard to diagnose, and can be brutal. Often, patients die before ever being diagnosed. We were ecstatic to have found out the root of all of these seemingly-endless, obscure problems, but we were still very much in the woods.

In December of 2020, my dad was intubated to remove hopefully only part of his colon, intended to stop the internal bleeding he was struggling with at that point.

December 2020 was maybe, probably, the worst overall month of my entire life. I’m grateful to be able to say that, because I know so many people who have had worse days than this one month, but from my perspective it was damn near the end of the world.

For one, it felt like the world WAS ending.

We were almost a year into Covid with no true end in sight. I’d recently started a new job at the post office and was having a much harder time than I was used to getting the hang of it. My car had been broken into in the office parking lot; a shattered window, passenger door broken and unable to open, entire center console including controls for air conditioning and music missing; I didn’t have the insurance to fix anything on a car that was already scraping by, and didn’t have the credit to get a new one on my own. Several months before, I had broken up with the guy I’d been with for a couple years and was stuck living with him due to money and general difficulties of being a 20-something away from home. On that note, I was very much away from home: I hadn’t seen any of my family in over a year - it would be another one before I got to see my parents - and my dad was intubated, unconscious, possibly dying, over a thousand miles away, and there was nothing I could do.

And then my grandfather had a stroke.

When it seemed like nothing could get worse, my mom texted me one day at work to explain that he wasn’t expected to make it, and that I should give my Aunt Gena - the youngest of the six - a call when I could, because she was the only one allowed at the hospital with him due to the restrictions.

I planned on calling her when I got out of work because I was already too stressed to function, but she beat me to it. Pulled over in my mail truck on a route I was then unfamiliar with, in the ice-covered parking lot of a very nice restaurant, my aunt called me to say goodbye. She insisted Pop could hear me, and for her sake I tried to stave off tears and muffled sobs as she encouraged me to get out whatever I had to say. She mentioned the strawberry festival, and the yearly visits. I tried to thank him for everything - for my dad. For buying his truck back when we filed bankruptcy. For the lemon cakes they brought every time they visited. For the doughnuts. For the walks, and the festivals, and the pizza. For being one of the most hard-working, generous men I’d ever met, and I knew I didn’t even know the half of it.

I think I choked out a general thank you, an I love you, and an I’m sorry to my aunt, before she, brave as ever, told me it was okay, and that she was going to call one of my sisters. I said goodbye to both of them. Slumped in the back of the truck sobbing, trying to pull myself together to make the next delivery, only to slip on the black ice I already knew was in the parking lot; I had absolutely inherited both my grandfather’s and my father’s stubbornness.

On Saturday, December 19th, 2020, just a few days after his birthday, I got the text. Pop had passed away.

Dad was still sedated.

My sisters and I were constantly filling our group text, terrified of what was going to happen when he regained consciousness. Mom was going to have to tell him that his dad had a stroke. That he didn’t make it. That the doctors had to remove my dad’s entire colon in order to stop the bleeding, and he was going to have to deal with a bag, at least for the foreseeable future. How was he going to handle any of that, much less all of it, on already very shaky nerves after the year he’d had? After all, the last time a family member had died, he’d managed to cook himself up a whole disease from the stress, and we couldn’t get past the ramifications of this news. Granted, his 48 year old big sister and mid 80’s father’s passing were very different situations, but who was to know how he’d react in this case?

Before the colon issue popped up and ruined his kidney transplant timeline, we’d each been ready to do whatever tests were necessary, whatever surgeries or recovery times were required, to see if we could give our dad one of our healthy kidneys. After all, we only needed one; and if we went through life knowing that was all we had, we’d take care of it. Of course we would. It would be fine.

Neither parent was having it, but they were grateful we’d consider it.

Of course we would. Of course we all did. We spent days throwing tantrums at each other, venting about how ridiculous it was that they wouldn’t even get the tests done to see if we were able to donate before they said no. (Not that we’d even be able to until his colon was dealt with and other levels were in order.) This was our dad. The man who worked just as hard as Mom, just as hard as his dad, to make sure we always had everything. Who got excited when we introduced him to YouTube because he could find old Speed Racer cartoons and episodes of the Three Stooges. Who bought us Big Wheels bikes for Christmas when we were kids and absolutely stole a bike from one of us every day we rode them to take it for a spin himself - knees up to his ears, flying down the neighbor’s steeper driveway into the middle of the cul-de-sac we lived at the end of, just to spin out in doughnuts and probably get whiplash from the whole ordeal. He made sure we grew up with dogs despite our mom not being an animal person and she eventually loved them herself. Who got us into good music - we had only spent $200 a seat to see The Rolling Stones a few short years before this. The guy who had us obsessed with Star Wars (because now this is podracing), and watching Jackass on repeat to my mother’s dismay. I think Rae and I lost count of how many times we’d watched Step Brothers or the first Transformers movie with him in the living room with the dogs curled up on the couches with us, each of us getting annoyed every time Mom decided she just had to do the dishes mid-movie.

Of course we’d give him an organ. Who needs a spare kidney? We needed our dad.

Not more than a couple days after Pop left us, Dad was woken up. We bit our nails in different cities waiting for calls, for texts, for an update. Mom said he handled it well; his only concern was that the three of us were okay before she told him what had happened.

Of course it was. It always was.

And then began the funeral planning.

I went back and forth with my still-new managers about the time off I absolutely did not have available, but they pulled some strings and gave me the two days I asked for to attend the services. I spent days trying to book a rental car to take to New Jersey, considering my car was in no shape after the break-in for a several-state drive. After all, it was missing a window and air conditioning, so in the dead of December in New England I couldn’t even defog the windshield. The guy I’d been seeing for barely two weeks - truly the single saving grace for the year over all, and certainly my month of hell - dropped me off at the rental place downtown. Because I’d only ever rented cars from airports with return flights and I was terrified of credit cards, I’d researched this one and had a car booked, no problem. He wished me luck, left, and I was completely turned down for the car I’d booked, due to not having a credit card. There had been no flights available for the timeline I needed even though my aunt had offered to buy me a ticket, so he came back, picked me up, brought me back home, and I hopped in my rundown, windowless (I had taken the very efficient precaution of taping several layers of clear packing tape over the hole where my window used to be for some level of protection), AC-less, music-less, ‘05 Xterra with a failing transmission, and drove the roughly five hours by myself to my aunt’s house in New Jersey.

I’ll admit, it was nice to see everyone, even under the circumstances. I do say ‘everyone’ lightly. My sisters and their boyfriends all got to come; 90% of my aunts, uncles, and cousins made it. My parents, due to my dad’s condition and Covid still being pretty rampant, couldn’t leave Florida to join us.

I think most of the family was a bit surprised to see my very-green hair; I’d have dyed it red again if I’d known, but since when does death strike with enough time to do your hair?

We had maybe an hour at my aunt’s before we had to head to the funeral home for the wake. I quickly changed, spent a few minutes with my grandmother who was just happy to have everyone together, and we left.

My sisters and I stayed together, mingling with our cousins and our extended family the best we could, suppressing our tears for the most part. Missing our parents and feeling awful more than anything that our dad couldn’t be with us for something that was so much more his than it was our’s. One of us had the idea to Facetime our parents while we were in line to pay our respects; we managed to get them up right before it was our turn, and as quietly as we could we brought them with us.

“It doesn’t even look like him”, said Dad.

Handling it better than expected, as always.

We stayed on Facetime with them for a few minutes - touring them around the funeral home to say hi to everyone before whoever we were talking to got swept away towards someone else in the room. They thanked us for thinking of them, said it was good to see us together, that they were glad we got to go, before hanging up.

The next morning was a much more somber affair.

Gena was running around her enormous house like a chicken without a head, making sure everyone was ready with the directions, the timelines, the paperwork, the printouts of the readings, etc. My sisters and the couple cousins that had stayed over were shuffling around trying to help or stay out of the way, nibbling on bagels for breakfast, getting dressed.

We all split up on the way to the home - Rae and Jackie in the rental car the latter got, with the boys in tow. I went with my aunt, Grammy, and a cousin or two. We chatted about the post office, about my life in New England, about how they were doing, making small talk to keep ourselves entertained and our minds busy.

We shuffled into the church - not somewhere I frequented past roughly the age of 12 except in cases like these - trying to politely smile or ignore the people already in pews who weren’t related to any of us. I held it together - at least, until I finally caught a glimpse of my grandmother as our now-grown cousins carried the casket in. She was always so strong, the matriarch of such a big family, and watching her break down as everything finally hit her, I lost it; quietly sobbing in our row towards the front left of the building, glancing at my sisters who were misty-eyed but had clearly not seen what I saw. Grammy and I pulled ourselves out of our hysterics, across the room from each other, about the same time, and settled into our seats as the service started.

It was your usual, very nice funeral. My aunt’s eulogy was perfect, as was everything else she did. My grandparents had gone to that church for years and knew many of the people in the congregation. The night before, at the wake, I’d heard countless comments about how if it hadn’t been for Covid, the place would have been mobbed because “everybody loved Tommy”. He really did know everyone.

As we filed out of the church and made our way to the cemetery grounds, it was cold, typical for December; the sky released the tiniest round of flurries on an otherwise reasonably sunny day, and just like that it was over.

We spent the rest of the afternoon, as most do after these things, at a restaurant; eating, drinking, catching up and being glad the worst of it was over while wishing it had never had to happen. I was planning on leaving to come home as soon as we left, but spent another hour or so at my aunt’s with everyone before heading out. Jackie got drunk; the most talking half the family had probably ever seen her do. Rae and I hugged quickly on my way out (because her boyfriend hated that we never did, and we’d be damned if we didn’t just to spite him even though we made sure he didn’t see), and I left to about ten “let us know when you get home”s, and “be careful”s, and terrified glances at the state of my car, everyone absolutely not convinced it was going to make the drive back.

My uncle - Jeff; the youngest of the three boys, and the most like my dad - walked me out.

He told me it was going to be hard; his brother was stubborn, tough, but would still need a lot of support even if we weren’t able to physically be there. Mom was going to need help. I assured him that it was a lot better with Rae being home again, and I’d check in, and that I appreciated it, and hoped to see them soon when Hope started college near me the next year.

He sent me off, waving from his sister’s driveway as I blasted She’s a Rainbow by the Rolling Stones for my dad from my phone on my way out.

I stopped at a Target on my way home, just to get a cheap Bluetooth speaker and phone charger so I could listen to something - anything. It got me through about half the drive before it gave up on me, but the way the packing-tape window caught the wind I could barely hear it anyway, so I spent most of the last couple hours in the middle of the night screaming Bohemian Rhapsody to myself just to stay awake, and trying to wipe the windshield from the inside whenever it fogged up too badly to see.

I made it home - or, to the then-new-guy’s place anyway - very late, very tired, very happy to be out of the car, and sent a text to the family chat about having made it.

My dad always really liked the Marvel movies, and we grew up on those along with Star Wars and all the typical nonsense. Seeing Guardians of the Galaxy 2 with him, I vaguely remember him getting a chuckle and maybe a damp eye out of Yondu’s exclamation that “he may have been your father, but he wasn’t your daddy.”

Mine has always been both, and so was Pop. We may not agree on everything, or even most things, but I’ve been incredibly lucky to have grown up with two of the most selfless men I know looking out for me, and everyone around them, no matter what they’ve gone through themselves. For teaching me that working hard does pay off, even if it can be an exhausting hell; that family means more than you think; and that rock n’ roll - be it the Stones or Elvis - is absolutely important.

Almost as important as pizza.