Auntie Gerita – An appreciation
Gerita was the last of my aunts and uncles.
She was born 94 years ago. She was the fourth child of five – Carmela (my mother), Mikelanġ, Fortunatus, and Marija (the youngest) were her brothers and sisters. The family of Tona and Ġużepp were brought up in a farmhouse with large fields around, a few hundred metres from the parish church of Ta’ Sannat village in Gozo. She was named Gerita after the village Patron, St Margaret.
In her childhood she had already lost her father and sometime after would lose the younger of her brothers after he caught a severe cold. During the Second World War she witnessed the devastation incurred by the two German bombs let off on the village by two Junkers which were being followed by two British Spitfires, on 10 October 1942. Her family – together with many others – lost their home by the explosions; moreover, eighteen men, women, children, and babies lost their lives. On that day, she was still sixteen years of age when she picked up an eighteen year old baby – my elder sister – who was hit by a piece of shrapnel, and saw her die in her arms a few hours later.
While my mother and uncle Mikelanġ married Ġużeppi and Nicolina (his sister) from Xewkija, in Gozo, her sister Marija married Toni from Żabbar, and she Natal from Marsa, both from Malta. And in Malta, in a very humble home, Gerita lived until she was taken to a home for the elderly some years ago.
In Marsa, near ‘Tas-Samra’, in a happy family, she and Natal had four children – Lily, Ġuża, Lydia, and Alfred.
I was still a child when I used to cross over from Gozo and stay for some days with her family; I used to enjoy myself as in a holiday in Malta, and with cousins to play with. And whenever Iz-Ziju Natal came to Gozo he would come to visit my family, and take me for the day out with him.
One day – it must have been sometime in early 1954 – I was with him when he went to see faith healer Frenċ ‘tal-Għarb’, in Għarb, Gozo; Natal was a heavy smoker and started to suffer from lung problems. On that day, after looking fixedly at a small picture of Our Lady of Ta’ Pinu placed on a small table in front of him, Frenċ told him to take a herbal drink while … aside, alone, he told me that my uncle would not live for long. Some months later he passed away – in June – leaving Iz-Zija Gerita a widow. She was still in her late twenties.
Still, she managed to bring up her children with great dedication, and love, and care, as she could … with a widow’s pension.
And she succeeded to enjoy the weddings of her three daughters, one of whom I was asked to lead to the altar in place of her missing father. She kept smiling all her life, and used to feel in the seventh heaven every time her daughters made her a grandmother, and even great-grandmother.
On 8 May 1964, Iz-Zija Gerita had helped me find a carpenter and choose a coffin for my sister Lydia who, at the age of 20, had passed away suddenly, early that morning; I had to organize a funeral for her from Malta to Gozo, on my 22nd birthday.
Mummy Gerita’s son, Freddie – as we used to call him – fell seriously ill some ten years ago. He was admitted to a Home for the Elderly where, in June 2015, he succumbed to the illness. Eventually – without any human respect or might be inadvertently – the authorities organized a private funeral and burial for him, without even informing either his mother or any of his three sisters. One of the latter would learn about the passing away and burial of her brother some days after, when she went to pay him a visit.
As far as I know the children did not tell their mother of Freddie’s death.
Gerita kept riding over the turbulent waves of life for the rest of her life; she never despaired. She used to hear Mass at Maria Regina church nearby, every day, and she never gave up her daily prayers.
Alone, in her home in St Francis Street, she kept living her life respectably and admirably as a widow, a mother, a grandmother, a great-grandmother … and a staunch practising Catholic.
In the meantime she lost her sisters Carmela (my mother), Marija (who had a large family and never moved house from Ta’ Sannat), and her brother Mikelanġ (who brought up a family in Xewkija). And lately – in June of two years ago – she also lost one of her daughters, Ġuża, after a short illness.
Now she went to join them all … her parents, her brothers and sisters, her husband whom she adored and loved so dearly, her son and a daughter. Last Tuesday, 2 June, she passed away, peacefully, at Mater Dei Hospital, with her loving daughter Lydia beside her, and … comforted by the Holy Sacraments.
You were a monument to Catholic widowhood, Zija. May you rest in peace. Your job among us has been completely accomplished. Au revoir.
I will miss you.
Irma and I shall remember you in our prayers; we give our condolences to your children and their families.