Recently I reread Seamus Heaney’s poem When All the Others Were Away at Mass. It begins simply: a grandson and grandmother peeling potatoes together while the rest of the family is at church. Years later, after her death, he realizes they were “never closer the whole rest of our lives.”

I understood that line immediately because I found myself returning to ordinary Sundays with Nonna Carmela.

She was not a woman who spoke about feelings. Love was food, routine, and feeding everyone before she fed herself. “Mangia, nonnared, mangia.”

For me, it was walking into her kitchen and seeing her at the stove, stirring rich red sugo. It was a heaping bowl of linguine with ricotta she made after Mass – just for me. It was a piece of Mancini bread dipped into sauce before dinner was ready, a meatball set beside it without a word. It was her saying, “I love-a you from t’e top of you head to t’e bottom of you feet.”

Back then, I was young and did not understand the holiness of those moments. Now I think some of the holiest moments in my life happened in her kitchen.

There are memories that seem small while we are living them. A glance. A gesture. A second helping of pasta. Only later do we understand how love quietly survives from one generation to the next.

Heaney’s poem reminds me that intimacy sometimes lives in peeling potatoes, in stirring sauce, in simply being beside someone long enough to remember the rhythm of her breathing.

And years later, after they are gone, we realize we were never closer.

‘When all the others were away at Mass’

When all the others were away at Mass I was all hers as we peeled potatoes.
They broke the silence, let fall one by one Like solder weeping off the soldering iron:
Cold comforts set between us, things to share Gleaming in a bucket of clean water.
And again let fall. Little pleasant splashes From each other’s work would bring us to our senses.

So while the parish priest at her bedside
Went hammer and tongs at the prayers for the dying And some were responding and some were crying
I remembered her head bent towards my head, Her breath in mine, our fluent dipping knives – Never closer the whole rest of our lives.

by Seamus Heaney