An appreciation of an Amazing Grace

Names are important. I don’t mean that every name is a perfect description of the bearer, because we usually don’t have much of a choice in the matter. I was the fortunate product of a mother who had crossed the Christina River in Delaware and decided that her husband’s choice of “April” for their first daughter sounded like a stripper’s name. So I owe my more dignified moniker to a body of a water and quick-thinking Lucy.

But in general, names become an important part of our identity, however we acquire them. Never was this more obvious than with my Aunt Grace, or Gracie, as I will always think of her in my heart. Grace Di Cocco Vizzarri was a force of nature who, even with that wellspring of energy and strength and passion brewing inside of her, was the human personification of that most beautiful word: grace.

I am writing about her because I love her, and because we lost her last week at the age of 90. It is almost impossible to write those words, because they indicate that there is now a world where this bright spirit is temporally gone from us, artificially distant But I am so used to having her and the idea of her with us, so it will take some time to talk about Grace in the past tense.

She was my grandmother’s baby sister, 12 years younger and beloved of her much older siblings. When Grace was playing with toys in their West Philly home, my own grandmother Mamie was married and having babies. And yet the bond that connected them, and connected her to the other sisters and brothers (Fanny, Angie, Tessie, Dom, Albert and baby Freddie, who died at 3) was as strong as titanium. That is not uncommon in first-generation families, particularly ones that suffered through the tragedies of early death and poverty.

I would not have known about those tragedies from Grace, though. She was not the sort of person who complained or dwelled on the obstacles of life. While always appreciative of the past, she had the most modern ability to look forward, toward the horizon. I remember observing her when she and my sweet grandmother were together at some family function, and they inhabited separate worlds. Mamie was the typical Italian matron with the dark rayon dresses that skimmed her shapely knees, hair tightly curled and slightly bluish, no makeup, and a face that glowed with soap and water, and love. Aunt Gracie, on the other hand, looked as if she had stepped out of a Vogue magazine with that sort of effortless perfection that makes some people jealous, and others appreciative in an aspirational way. She was beautiful, by any objective metric or standard, movie star exquisite.

Frank Vizzarri knew that , from the first sighting of this young woman walking down the street in the neighborhood. He snatched her up, knowing that a prize like this would not come by twice in his lifetime, and they made a wonderful home and world and life together for 52 years. That love created my cousin Gail, who is as beautiful as her mother, as wise and entrepreneurial as her dad, and a perfect fusion of their personalities.

Gail’s two children, Francesca and Anthony, are an extension of that fusion, a powerful thing. I look at Grace’s granddaughter and I see in her the faint echoes of her grandmother, with a slightly more modern twist but with the same eyes, and spirit. Life really just flows down the generations, and we are the heirs of our loved ones.

I sit here writing this, and not fully believing that this last link to a family of powerful, resilient women is gone. All of my life I was told about the hardships that the Di Cocco women suffered, from my great-grandmother who tragically lost her young husband and raised eight sons and daughters alone, to losing one of those children at the age of 3 when he was killed in a fire, to all of them having to leave school to work and support the family, and who nonetheless married and raised generations of their own, and created enduring histories.

Grace is of that generation and time where people did not believe in self-pity, even though they had more reason to weep than many of us today. She embraced the life she was given, and made it better by doing things that made her happy. She read books that, as my cousin Gail said, puzzled the rest of us, including the mystical and spiritual writings of Teilhard de Chardin (most of us can’t even spell his name.) She led tours for many years, taking people to New England, the South and of course, introducing them to her beloved Philadelphia. She was an amazing cook, and baked a cookie that to this day makes my mouth water and my mind ache (only because I can’t figure out the secret recipe to those incredibly lifelike peach confections.) She was educated without a formal education, wiser than most Ph.Ds, a fashion plate who could have posed for Scavullo, but had the humility of a cloistered nun.

And she made an art of loving. I miss her with every fiber of my being, but I know that this one, this most amazing Grace, is just a little bit removed and holding out her arms to us from heaven, until we meet once again.