When my mother was 91 years old and six weeks before she died, she told me she was sorry for all the rocky years between us. Then she added, “I have many regrets, but…I’m still learning, don’t you see? It takes a lifetime to learn how to live.” Millennia earlier, the Roman philosopher Seneca wrote much the same thing.

There is wisdom hidden in everyday moments, but why is it so hard to stop long enough to notice them? Why does it take a lifetime?

I try to live in the present moment. I meditate every day, yet outside those quiet ten minutes, my mind races with worries that ricochet through my thoughts, especially in the dark hours of the night, when the devil seems to dance on my chest.

Over these past few days, I was blessed to spend time with my family in Pittsburgh. When my older brother glanced up from his reading and smiled, when my niece stopped to hug me on her way to prom, when my sister-in-law enjoyed a second helping of the chicken pastina soup I made — these were everyday lessons, answers to everyday prayers.

When I slow down and truly pay attention to a conversation, a fleeting kindness, a painful truth, or a small unexpected blessing, something shifts inside me. I breathe more deeply. I listen more carefully. I begin to understand what each moment is trying to teach me.

My prayer today is that you and I do not wait until we are 91 to learn this lesson. Each day quietly offers us another chance to become more patient, more compassionate, more awake to others and to ourselves.

I am still learning. Perhaps we always are.

Maybe it really does take a lifetime to learn how to live.

Ten years ago:
my granddaughter Iysa, brother JF, and Darlene, my sister-in-law

In the last days of my mom’s life, I spent six months with her in hospice. Those months, especially the final weeks, were precious. We had been at odds for much of our lives, but as she faced the end, we found our way back to each other. We made peace. For that, I will always be grateful.

The summer between my junior and senior years in college, my parents gave me a trip to Europe. It was the era of Arthur Frommer’s Europe on $5 a Day, when the idea of backpacking across a continent still felt both romantic and possible.

When my two girlfriends and I arrived in Florence, we made our way to the Piazzale Michelangelo, high above the city. I remember standing there, looking out over the terracotta rooftops, the bell towers, the golden ribbon of the Arno River.

I was completely captivated, and in that moment I knew I was home. I turned to my friends and said with surprising sincerity, “One day I’m going to live here.”

I didn’t question it. I simply recognized it.

Over the years, I’ve heard other versions of that same quiet certainty from different people in different places.

A friend deplaned in Ireland and said that she felt like she had returned to something she already knew.

Another arrived in Alaska and told me the air smelled like Christmas, like a memory she had always cherished.

Someone else traveled to Germany in search of ancestral roots and never left. “I arrived and stayed. I knew I belonged there,” she said simply, as if it were the most natural conclusion in the world.

These are not stories about tourism. They are stories about recognition.

Travel has a way of doing this. It places us in landscapes we have never lived in, yet we respond as if we are remembering them rather than discovering them. As if certain places are not new at all, but strangely familiar, like a word we had on the tip of our tongue and finally remembered.

Is home a place we come from, or can it also be something that, for reasons we cannot fully explain, comes alive in us?

A friend wrote to me after last week’s blog:

“Wow, this really hit home. My husband has been dealing with a difficult family situation for years, and he finally made the decision to get up off those nails. He realized that the pain of staying had become greater than the fear of getting up. I know he is going to be in a better place with himself and his son.”

Her message stayed with me because it reminded me of my son, who suffered a 14-year heroin addiction. In an effort to understand addiction better, several years ago I interviewed 42 recovering addicts and alcoholics from around the world and asked, “What brought you to recovery?”

The majority answered without hesitation: “When the consequences of my actions became too painful to live with.” Only then – when the pain point of using became so intense – did the people I interviewed decide it was time to get off the nail.

Today, my son is 19 years sober, and our family lives in deep gratitude. But my son had to reach that decision himself, in his own time, when the pain of staying the same outweighed the fear of change.

As parents and spouses, we want to protect those we love from making mistakes, but sometimes we can’t. We can support, love, and guide – we can stay close, but each person has to decide when he or she is ready.

My hardest lesson.

I heard this story from a Buddhist practitioner:

“A man notices a dog sitting on a porch, whining in pain.
He asks, ‘What’s wrong with you? Why are you whining?’
The dog answers, ‘I’m sitting on a nail … and if I get up, it will hurt too much.’” 

So the dog continues to sit because he feels safer choosing the pain he knows over the pain he fears might come with change.

I remember this story well because I was like that dog. I was in pain, but I was afraid to move. I was afraid to get up.

We all have nails – some big, some small. Nails that hurt us, poke at us, and keep us in a state of quiet unrest. Some are career nails: work that drains us. Some are relationship nails – we don’t leave for fear of being alone. Others are health nails, friendship nails, family nails.

For me, at age fifty-four, four major “nails” collided in my life: I was diagnosed with breast cancer and had a bilateral mastectomy; my father died; my firstborn son was addicted to heroin; and I left the school community where I had served as Head of School for seventeen years.

With all of these nails, I felt adrift – aching, beaten down, and lost.
But it was because of this pain – not in spite of it – that I finally found the courage to change my life.

That moment became the beginning of It Takes a Lifetime to Learn How to Live.

The truth is simple, and not always easy to accept: At some point, the pain of staying becomes greater than the fear of getting up.

…and we all have the possibility of getting up. The question is when.

In Italy, Easter is known as “the feast of feasts” and is more important than Christmas. Easter marks the resurrection of Christ – the heart of the Christian story. Christmas celebrates Christ’s birth, but Easter is the reason that birth matters.

You can feel it in the days of Holy Week that lead up to it. Churches fill, bells echo through the streets, and towns come alive with processions and reenactments of the crucifixion. From Holy Thursday through Easter Sunday, there’s a sense of anticipation. Everything softens on Pasquetta, the Monday after Easter, when people picnic in the fresh air and enjoy the warmth of a burgeoning spring.

But more than anything, Easter is about gathering. Families and friends arrive, and the day unfolds slowly around the table. There’s time for conversation, laughter, and the quiet comfort of being together.

And then there’s food. Lamb roasting, spring vegetables, slices of Colomba di Pasqua – a soft, dove-shaped cake symbolizing peace and renewal – are passed around at the end of the meal. Children delight in breaking open large chocolate eggs to discover the surprises hidden inside.

In Florence, the celebration returns to a tradition dating back to the late 1400s: the Scoppio del Carro, or Explosion of the Cart. A team of white oxen pulls a towering, 30-foot cart through the streets, stopping in front of the Duomo. During Mass, the priest lights a mechanical dove that shoots from the church’s high altar to ignite the cart in a burst of fireworks. It’s loud, sudden, and dazzling—a symbol of faith, renewal, and hope for the year ahead.

Buona Pasqua! I hope your Easter was filled with joy and a sense of renewal. And if it wasn’t, I wish you peace with the onset and beauty of spring.

Now that our parents have passed, my older brother, JF, is the official holder of memories. Not only that, but he’s the first-born son and grandson. In the Italian tradition, it doesn’t get much more important than that.

He recently wrote, “I’ll be seeing Nana soon…I am 78 and in poor health…and that will be a treat for me. Loved that woman!”

I adore my brother, so I wanted to share something he wrote last week in response to my blog entry:

“When I feel blocked or boxed in, in the grand tradition of Italians everywhere, I complain. Just let it out. And figure tomorrow will be better. And if it isn’t, then the next day. Take your wins when you can, because the losses will find you.

But getting back to Italians…my people…I would never want to be of any other nationality of origin…my sainted Nana (that’s what I called her…my sister uses the more proper Nonna in her book) never had a good day. When I would see her I would always ask, ‘How you feelin’ today, Nana?’ And the answer would always be (read it with a nice Italian accent), ‘Oh, no good, no good. Me no feel good.’ Meanwhile this old Italian lady, who grew up HARD, and never felt good, could outwork me 15 days a week and 55 days a month.

I suppose if you say you feel great you’re inviting the Evil Eye, and Nana was the designated neighborhood remover of the Evil Eye. But what a woman! She was the best.

I remember the first time I ever cried out of sadness—not pain, but sadness. I was maybe five years old, lying in bed, ready to fall asleep, when for some reason I pictured Nana dying. It made me cry like hell.”

Reading that, I realized something: Sometimes, if you’re lucky, someone loves you so much it hurts. The kind of love that fills you up and keeps you safe, even years later.

He loved that woman.

She was Nonna

My granddaughter in front of my grandmother’s home in Rotondella

A friend wrote to me after reading last week’s post: “When I was twenty, I first visited my grandparents’ village of Saint Ippolito outside Cosenza in Calabria. I was fortunate to go from house to house meeting families throughout the town. Since then, I’ve returned a half dozen times, trying to understand my heritage and how it continues to shape our lives.

That first journey helped me understand the significance of place and the incredible reservoir of knowledge and history that has made my life so much richer.

I wish I could transmit my enthusiasm and deep gratitude. I encourage anyone who wants to discover their roots to go. Take the deep dive—it’s so worth it. For me, nothing compares to the warmth and personal connection of time in my ancestral village.”

My reflection: When I read his words, I felt his enthusiasm and gratitude because I felt the same thing when I discovered Rotondella.

Today’s thought: In 2024, more than eight million Americans traveled to Italy. But for those who want to understand their past, the deepest connections happen in the small towns and villages where their families once lived. Stories heard around the dinner table begin to take on new life.

For Americans whose families came from Ireland, Scotland, Germany, Poland, or countless other places, the same opportunity exists: to walk the streets their ancestors once walked and to see the landscapes that shaped their lives.

Millions of Americans travel abroad every year. But a journey to the town or village your family once called home can become something more than tourism.

It can become a return – a return to a place, a story, and perhaps even a deeper understanding of yourself and your family.

Where might your own ancestral road lead if you chose to follow it?

Read the review HERE

I was honored to see my memoir, It Takes a Lifetime to Learn How to Live: An Italian-American Story of Coming Home, recently reviewed in the March issue of The Florentine, an English-language publication based in Florence, Italy.

The author, Alexandra Lawrence, asks the question that sits at the heart of the book: Can the land of our ancestors heal us?

In 2000, when my life was collapsing, I set off alone to Italy to find my grandparents’ ancestral village of Rotondella. There I found the open arms of family, but I also uncovered the lingering shadows of the malocchio, omertà, rigid Catholicism, abject poverty, arranged marriage, patriarchal control, and the Mafia.

Slowly, I began to understand how these forces shaped not only my grandmother’s life, but also my mother’s – and my own. By honoring the courage of the women who came before me, I found the grace to make peace with my mother. And in that understanding, I found peace within myself.

I began writing this story in the summer of 2000. When my mother heard about the project, she was not happy.

“You can write about your grandmother, Missy,” she said. “But you can’t write about me. No one needs to know about my life—not even you.”

Since she was the critical link between my grandmother and me, I set the writing aside.
Twelve years later – just five days before she died – she showed incredible courage and vulnerability. My feisty mom, despite all the fraught and difficult moments we had lived through, said,

“My life would make a good book, wouldn’t it?”
“But you told me I wasn’t allowed to write about you,” I countered.
She paused, then said simply:
“After I die, write.”

And with her permission, I did.

So, to answer Alexandra’s question, returning to the land of my ancestors did help to heal me. And for that, I’ll be eternally grateful.