Notes from a funeral.

Grief, epiphanies, and a name change (maybe).

Hello Everyone,

Happy New Year. From the title I think you can guess that it’s been a rough start to the year for me. My beloved Grandfather died, and it’s made me realise a few things about how I want to spend my time, where I want to focus my work, and what I want this newsletter to be.

This is a long post (please forgive my indulgence as I process my Grandfather’s passing, but I do have a point), and it might be cut off in the email version, so you can head to Substack app or website to read the entirety.

My Grandfather Domenico died on January 3. He was 93 and he lived a hard but honourable life. He was an immigrant, a gardener, a blacksmith, a strong man, a stubborn man, a family man with a temper, a sense of propriety, and a cheeky sense of humour.

Above all he was a good man. I’m going to miss him so much.

His age seems to make people comfortable with his passing. They seem to assume that his age means his death was painless and easy, though it was neither. Sometimes, when I tell someone that my Grandfather has died, I feel them shrug their condolences. Like his death at 93 is somehow meant to make it easier for me to say goodbye to someone I have known and loved my whole life.

It’s not a tragic death in the untimely or unjust sense, but his death is no less tragic for me.

My Grandpa Domenico driving an ATV upstate in August, 2024.

I said goodbye to him just before the clock struck 2025. My dad, our first visitor to Mallorca, had just arrived a couple of hours earlier. We were in the town square getting ready to ring in the New Year when I got a call from my brother in Brooklyn.

My grandfather had been rushed to Coney Island Hospital.

I hurried home and made it in time to say goodbye to my Grandfather over video. He couldn’t speak at all because of the bipap mask forcing oxygen into his mouth. He’d try to pull it off to speak, to respond, but then blaring alarms would go off, and my brother and I told him to just rest.

So, as he lay there with his blue eyes closed, I know he listened and paid attention with one of the sharpest, clearest minds I’ve ever known.

I have never lived in Brooklyn, but I spent every summer there as a kid, and when I went to college in Pennsylvania I would visit Brooklyn for the holidays. Memories of my Grandfather are so deeply intertwined with my first memories of America and of New York, of swimming at Coney Island beach, of eating hot dogs and riding teacups at Luna Park. Of eating giant slices of pizza, and ice cream at Carvel. It’s picking green beans and tomatoes and arugula he grew in the back garden, and pasta with the homemade tomato sauce he made with my grandmother. It’s watching him weld at Lopopolo Ironworks. It’s driving with him, his feet on the pedals, my hands on the wheel, at Greenwood Cemetery, where he is now buried.

I realised, as I walked around the neighbourhood with my brother before the funeral, that if I am from anywhere in America it’s that small, idiosyncratic corner of Gravesend, Brooklyn, and I am American because my Grandfather planted us there.

My Grandfather Domenico at work. He was a blacksmith, a craftsman, who used his physical strength to hammer and twist iron and steel into things of beauty.

On the phone, I told him how much I love him. How much he has meant to me. How grateful I am to have had him in my life and how many beautiful memories I will carry with me. I told him that my kids, husband and I are all happy, healthy, and safe. That we are building a beautiful life in Mallorca and all is well. I told him that my husband is a good man and he takes good care of me and the kids. These reassurances are important to an old-school Italian family man like my Grandfather, and I’m so glad I was able to say these things and mean it.

I watched him nod in silent acknowledgment, and before I could say anything else the cardiac unit suddenly arrived to take him to intensive care. I managed to mumble out the Madonna prayer from the church in Calvello, his hometown, as a kind of blessing, before they wheeled him away.

The whole call lasted only two, maybe three, minutes, and then he was gone. We could have days, we could have hours, my brother said, as he hung up the phone. My grandfather had just signed a DNI/DNR.

My grandparents on their wedding day.

I’m so grateful that I had the opportunity to say goodbye, even though, reflecting now, I don’t think I ever said those words, “goodbye”. It felt too final, at the time, when there was still a chance that he might live a little longer.

But I’m grateful that I had the opportunity to connect, to share some time together, to know what he wanted to say because he had said it a million times before, and to feel his love for me reflected in my love for him.

To feel the reciprocity of deep, unconditional love that exists beyond words or time is a gift I will carry with me always.

I hung up the phone and then, in shock and a fog of grief, I put on my shoes and went back to the New Year Celebration in the town square, where I had left my husband and my Dad.

I reached them as the countdown began, and before I could even tell them about the call I was popping 12 grapes for 12 months of good luck into my mouth, as is the Spanish tradition. We popped a bottle of champagne to celebrate the New Year and our 10-year wedding anniversary, which was also on the 31st. Congratulations to us! The music started and suddenly the party was in full swing.

The town had hired a fantastic seven-piece band for the festivities, and they played a range of English, Spanish, and Catalan hits. Hundreds of people from Santa Maria were there to ring in the New Year, and the atmosphere was amazing, everyone dancing and singing and catching up with old friends.

It didn’t feel like the time to celebrate, and yet, it was.

One of the few photos I took on New Year’s Eve. Town Square celebrations, Santa Maria del Cami.

10th Anniversary! New Year! Dad Visiting! First New Year’s Eve in Mallorca!

But I also felt sorry for my Grandfather. I felt sorry for my mom. I felt sorry for my brother, there in the hospital, dealing with the heartbreak, the paperwork, the end of life logistics.

I felt euphoric and then I felt unbearably sad. I danced and I cried. I was happy and I was heartbroken, all at the same time. It felt less like an emotional roller coaster than the phrase “everything, everywhere, all at once.”

It was a sensitising event. Everything was heightened.

And I realised, as I sang and danced, not knowing when my Grandfather’s death would be, and alive to the possibility that he could be taking his last breath at that very moment, that this ability to feel it all is what it means to live.

We are meant to be present with the pleasure and the pain, with the beauty and the brutality, all at the same time, not denying its existence or trying to dissociate or gaslight or scroll our way through it and pessimistically pass judgment on the world.

Most of us live in a society that wants to categorise, to compartmentalise, to separate, to niche. But that’s not way the world really works. Not only are we all connected and interdependent, but all of us is reflected in the world, and all of the world is reflected in us.

Happiness and Horror co-exist in and around us. This is the paradox of life, and to live our lives fully we must develop the capacity to hold multiple truths at once. People are cruel and people are kind. The world is awful and terrifying. The world is gorgeous and full of wonder.

It wasn’t new information but something clicked that night and I felt and really understood the truth of it in my body.

The people we love will die, and when we grieve, the sunset will be no less beautiful.

Sunset, Mallorca

This experience of grief has given me the opportunity to reflect on life and work and about how I want to approach this year. It’s become clearer to me that I want to focus on planting my roots in Mallorca, and building my in-person classes and workshops on the ground.

And it’s clarified to me why I’ve struggled so much to write this newsletter. I write and then second guess myself. I have a dozen posts stuck in ‘draft’. I worry that what I want to write isn’t the content some of you have signed up for - prenatal, postpartum, yoga, and matrescence resources and information. I get stuck in my head about what you, my dear subscribers, want to read.

“Find your niche!” is always the advice, and I think what I’ve realised is that my niche is Me.

My experience of dancing while crying has awoken something inside, and reminded me that we can’t silo parts of ourselves, and that when we try, or perhaps worse, when we do, we are worse for it.

Better that I show up here as I do in my daily life - as my whole beautiful messy self.

With these things in mind, I may or may not change the name of this newsletter. I’m sitting with it.

But what is clear to me is that the energy of this newsletter has changed. The way I want to approach it and the topics that will be covered here will expand. It will expand to include all of me - my new life in Mallorca, what I’m enjoying or being challenged by in my life, with my kids, in my marriage, in my work, etc. It will do more to reflect ME and my life as I am living it, which means that matrescence, prenatal and postpartum yoga and care will continue to feature here. It is my passion. It is what I do.

But instead of letting my fears and insecurities about what you, dear reader, want to read, I’m going to be guided by what I feel called to share.

Less head, more heart.

Which, quite frankly, is how we should all be living in 2025.

I love you all.

Thank you for reading.

xo, Lydia.