This is my cousin Francesca, sister of the catacombs of Priscilla

Her robes trailed down the steep stairs starkly lit by the lights my grandfather built. Or, was it my grandmother’s father? Someone in my family installed the electricity for the catacombs of Priscilla but my father also had Alzheimer’s and didn’t tell anyone so he could have just been saying things, you see. Could be true. I do know she is my cousin—Francesca, a sister of the catacombs of Priscilla.

My father and I went to Rome every summer for a few years and we visited these crypts significant for being the third largest in the city with a fair amount of Christian martyrs. She took a vow to protect, keep the labyrinths that house some of the earliest Christian art, something like this, named after a wealthy woman who donated the land. 40,000 burials in tunnels 13 kilometers long.

We would always drink from the overflowing cup of stone, the fountain in the courtyard, and I remember looking at the moss and wondering if it was safe, so she pressed her lips to the rim, and so that’s what we did. We refreshed ourselves and headed down.

We were the only ones most of the time; we hung out with her down there. Dusty, dark, grey, her robe would billow through the tight loculi fresh and white that is the cavities in volcanic where bodies were laid. Sometimes, I would get a flashlight in my face through a window around the central shaft.

It’s amazing just how long they are, meaning, my house in Ladera Heights was eleven miles away from Marymount High School on Sunset Blvd. That’s quite a distance. There were three floors if I remember correctly and visitors could only be on the first floor though she might have shown us a little of the second floor, in the shadows, her flashlight leading the way.

We sat in old chapels underground, she showed me the fresco of Susanna, Old Testament, as I was investigating the Catholic Church at the time, so I appreciated this very old link. Pre-Catholic. We would discuss the early church in these chambers, be with the graves. She would walk backward even, she could navigate these tombs with her eyes closed, and she was spritely, even, a kind spirit. And her brother took me on a walk through the Jewish neighborhood when I met up with him last summer since he called Rome more Jewish than anything else. Roman catacombs may have been a Jewish invention. I wondered what the history of this catacomb was, in particular, as I don’t remember.

It makes me want to go back and refresh my knowledge, ask some questions.

I don’t know why I was thinking about her this morning but I remember our conversations and her presence so fondly.

Sister Francesca came to me in a dream, actually, when I went through a tough time. Like a beacon of light in the lush courtyard she appeared and we drank from the same cup and took the same route down into the catacombs where she led me to my father which was strange…he was here but I was also playing with an Aeneas journey since I like those kinds of stories, myth, so maybe I was in that frame of mind. Confronting my father since this relationship would be reframed.

He was lost, odd, way down below too, the very bottom floor. And I looked at her because I didn’t know what to say, even about his psychology, mind. I had the oddest conversation with him. It’s hard to describe but it was almost like the submarines. Finding him at the bottom of a crypt. He had Alzheimer’s, at least, at this time. He was sick the whole time. He was sort of military-like? Stuck. Wandering through these chambers.

He apparently almost beat a man to death when he was in the navy so they put him in the submarines…someone called him a ginny. I know. I had no idea what to do with that. Seriously. I’m just going to leave that. Seventeen years old. I found out about this way later, he was already in a home.

He didn’t talk much, in general. But given how his life went? I mean, quite frankly. I wondered about this dream. I appreciated Francesca obviously for doing her job, in a sense, and thanked her through this, since I was going through a lot at that moment. She embraced me…took me down.

Someone said that I was born to parents who weren’t there. I don’t know what to say, when I’m two years old, but at four, I found myself in this situation.

He ends up with my mother, for one, his child is given away to a total stranger, he’s accused of a heinous crime, and then he gets Alzheimer’s though it’s Parkinson’s first and doesn’t tell anyone…I don’t know what to say about this person.

So I don’t know what it means to transform when we die since everything is energy or even what our ties are to our ancestors, since I was in this dream, lineage. Do some lives have difficulty transitioning? Do they get stuck? This submarine time seemed to have greatly marked him. Did that haunt him? His brother told me. Was that a sign of some kind?

That’s serious denial, no? I understand that he had dementia and was told by his doctor to start making arrangements now when I was ten, not in a few years. And yes, I would have agreed with him given the situation I found myself in at four years old. Not even ten. Look, I know people who had challenging ideas to work out, right, relationships, and ways of operating. That’s where he ended up.

I suppose, more so than anything else, with Francesca behind me, I am clearer as to what the story was. For what I don’t know, don’t know what to say. I mean, when I was four, I was in this situation. And then…this didn’t work out. He was diagnosed with an illness. I cannot speak to the trajectory of his life but pity seemed to be a large problem in him. “Poor Nick.” Poor guy.

He ended up going to this Brazilian woman, which is weird to me, with his complaints about me. He didn’t want to take me away from “a normal family.” If you think about it, the whole situation was so crazy, that in his shoes, I don’t know if I would have…kept this up. I suppose everyone thought, well, my mother did it, so maybe there’s a way to keep these ties since she ended up supporting…us, in a way? This became my family network, I’m just saying. How am I supposed to feel about that?

“Do you know want to know why I let you run around in all these families…” He asked me. “Because I pity you.” For not having a mother. Just get over it. It was the weirdest, most unhelpful perspective that just continued to haunt me. Enough. I said you only pity yourself. This is why we cannot have a relationship. This was one of the roots I saw in his illness. I felt it at four. I suppose that might be a spiritual problem though I would also call it emotional. Whatever, it was a whole body event, but he had Parkinson’s and then it was Alzheimer’s.

People get misdiagnosed. I have no way of confirming who his doctor was. When I said Alzheimer’s to him he yelled at me. “NO!” This doctor was so angry. “Parkinson’s!” I obviously want to look up these neurological conditions just because his way of being was so nostalgic, melancholic, though he seemed to want to have a good time at some father/daughter dance once except I was uncomfortable around him. I didn’t want to dance with him.

I don’t know what to say about my father, at all.

But I appreciate having a cousin who was a sister of the catacombs of Priscilla. I like sharing an old tie to the very early Christian church which might be a time to remember. Even the Jewish connection, obviously.

Strange man, my father. He ended up in that situation at sixty-four years old. And that story haunted him, too.

I’ll get to work, Christmas in Naples is a Sport is going just great. Barbara Harris dancing backward through this party, people yelling, trying to get her to talk, made me laugh. It still does. I’m cruising along now. I keep sharing videos about Miracle Mile on TikTok. That can make me a little nervous but I don’t know why. It was just the real situation I was in and I’m supposed to be leading with my story, no, since that’s what I’m writing about? That’s it. Step one. It’s just a different story when it begins to make sense though the basics were always the same.

Thanks for reading.