Memoir of a Family Tragedy

Excerpts from the Author’s Diary

March 1, 2006

There I was in London walking through the Columbia Flower Market with my thirty-one year old pregnant daughter Rachel and her then boyfriend (now husband) Andrew. It was eleven a.m. Sunday, November 21, 2004 when Christina called my mobile phone from our home in Italy to tell me that she smelled gas in our apartment, and that she had been unable to shower because there was no hot water. She also complained that Assogas, the company with whom we had recently signed a contract because they offered us a substantially lower price per liter of gas than our previous provider, Olivi, had arrived last Thursday with their two-thousand liter tank, dug a hole around the existing in-ground tank belonging to Olivi, left their tank on the ground next to the huge mound of earth from the hole, along with the hole containing our old tank still hooked up to our house, and went away claiming they were unable to finish the work.

I told Christina to open the windows, leave the house, call the plumber who installed the system, and to call Assogas.

I was in London to get away from Christina. Although we had been separated (my choice) three months earlier, we were still living in the same house, albeit in separate bedrooms. As soon as I moved to my own bedroom, I knew it was the right thing to do, I felt happy. We were now trying to sell our house in the beautiful Umbrian countryside so that we could split the proceeds and go our separate ways. Before I left for London, I had suggested that she not stay alone in our isolated seventeenth century farmhouse, I thought she should take a trip to the States or to Israel to stay with friends. She said I was arrogant and insulting, she could do anything I could do, and she challenged me, “What could possibly happen that you could handle and I can’t?” I reminded her that she was usually afraid to be alone, especially at night, and then there were the water system, electrical system, the automatic gate, the hot water and heating units, the alarm system, the pellet stoves we used to heat the north side of the house that always needed tending, cleaning, refilling. Something was always going wrong, and it was usually something we could never have foreseen. She said she could do anything I could do, then she wavered, made plans to go to friends in the USA, then wavered again because of the money – this would be the first time she would be paying for her trip out of her share of our assets. She had planned to leave the Thursday before the accident, the day Assogas came and dug their hole, but at the last minute she decided to stay at home.

Ten minutes after the first call, Christina called again to ask for the phone number of Assogas. I told her where to find it, she did, and she hung up. That would be the last time I would speak with her.

Rachel, Andrew, and I enjoyed the flower market. Then we met my friend Mahesh for lunch at a local Vietnamese restaurant. After lunch Mahesh and I were walking to a café in Hoxton Square, East London, to discuss the feature film we were about to make together based one of my screenplays – he was the director - when I received a call from Lucia in Italy. Lucia, a friend of ours, really a friend of Christina’s, told me that there had been a tragedy, an explosion. The small house we had just built on our property, about forty meters from the main house, had exploded. The roof had collapsed, the house was destroyed, and Christina and the plumber, Giuliano, were seriously injured. She told me I must return to Italy immediately, that it was “a terrible, terrible tragedy,” Christina was in an ambulance on the way to the hospital in Perugia. I had to come now. I told Lucia I would take the next available flight. As Mahesh and I rushed to Rachel’s apartment so I could pack I asked Lucia if Christina was conscious. She said that she had been conscious until the ambulance came. As they put her inside and gave her a drug to put her to sleep, she had said, “Call Harris and call Giorgio”. Giorgio was the local doctor she had fallen in love with, that I had guessed and she had denied for six months until she confessed.

I packed as Rachel booked my flight to Rome, then Mahesh drove me to the airport. While I was checking in for the flight and waiting what seemed endless hours to board the plane, Lucia called several times to keep me informed of what was happening. She told me that Christina’s burns were so severe that the hospital in Perugia was not equipped to treat her. She had called one of her doctor friends who recommended that Christina be transferred immediately by hospital plane to a hospital in Fidenza near Parma, six hours drive from Rome, where they had a new and world-famous burn unit for the early treatment of this type of injury. In addition to Christina’s extensive second and third-degree burns, her throat and lungs had been scorched when she breathed in the ignited gas from the explosion. Lucia asked my permission for her to arrange for the hospital plane to transport Christina from Perugia to Fidenza. I agreed.

Just before I boarded my flight, Lucia confirmed that Christina was already on the hospital plane. At ten p.m. as my plane took off for Rome, Christina was being flown in an intensive care plane to Fidenza.

While I was still packing to go to the airport, I had called mine and Christina’s son Aaron to tell him what was happening. At that time my son from a previous marriage, Adam, was not speaking to me or Christina. My daughter Rachel was badly shaken up by the news of the accident. She had always hoped for reconciliation with Christina. She considered Christina her mother, although she had a mother, my ex-wife Anne, still living in the States whom she loved. But Anne had voluntarily given me custody of both Rachel and Adam when Rachel was ten years old, and Adam was seven years old. Anne was - is - a good soul, but she suffered from manic depression, or as they now call it, bi-polar disorder, that was in the 1970s before the condition was recognized. Several months after she gave me custody of the children she sold her house in Chappaqua, a suburb of New York City, went to stay with her parents in Chicago, and in a short time managed to go through all her money. In her early forties she had a stroke and was now living on welfare in St Louis near her sister. So Rachel, thirty-one years old and pregnant when the accident happened, considered Christina her mother notwithstanding Christina’s temper and the psychological and emotional stress she had caused Rachel and Adam, and despite the brutal fact that when I told Christina three months earlier that I wanted to end our marriage she disowned Rachel as her daughter and had also cut her out of her will, leaving everything she had to Aaron, an act of such emotional brutality on Christina’s part that I feel Rachel will never truly overcome it.

Until then and throughout my twenty-three-year marriage to Christina each of our wills left everything first to each other and then to the three children equally. That was our agreement and on that basis I put her name on bank accounts and the house. However, with her knowledge I had also placed life insurance policies on my life into two trusts, one for the three children that the trustees would independently control and manage for their welfare if something happened to me, and when they reached twenty-one years old they would receive what remained equally. I had also set up a second trust with life insurance policies on my life in which she and the children were beneficiaries, so that if she survived me the trustees would help her if she was in need, but the children would receive the remainder in equal shares at age 21. She didn’t like either of those trusts because they were out of her control. Once the children were grown I dissolved the trusts. Now I asked her not to change her will. I had anticipated that she would want to cut Adam off because of recent animosity between them, but if she also cut Rachel out it would be a terrible emotional blow to her, and it would pull Aaron and his brother and sister apart and Aaron and me apart, it would destroy the family. Christina wouldn’t listen. When I told Christina that I wanted a divorce Rachel had been visiting and staying in one of our guest apartments downstairs. Christina blamed Rachel for my asking for a divorce – Rachel had nothing whatsoever to do with it - and she was so angry that she didn’t want Rachel to enter our apartment. When I invited Rachel into our kitchen Christina screamed from the other room, “I don’t want her in my house!” This brought Rachel to tears. I told Rachel to stay where she was and I told Christina to calm down, it was also my house. Christina kept screaming. At one point she even called the police to try to persuade them to kick Rachel out. God bless Rachel, no matter how hurt she was, especially when she later found out that Christina had disowned her, she still had a daughter’s love for Christina. She tried to talk to Christina but was rejected. She wrote a loving note to Christina, but she scoffed at it. Christina was volatile and insecure, full of anger, and the need to punish, infantile. Now she was in intensive care on an airplane, and I was on an airplane on my way back to Italy.

Just before I boarded the plane, I received a call from a local acquaintance in Italy. He had heard about the accident and he wanted to know how Christina was. He also told me that Giuliano, the thirty-five-year-old plumber, had already died because of the explosion. Lucia hadn’t told me of Giuliano’s death - I presume to lessen the shock, or perhaps he had been alive when she had called.

As I was boarding the plane and about to turn off my phone, Lucia called again to say that I shouldn’t go home when I landed, it was too terrible. She told me instead to go to her cousin Kiki’s house, she also was a friend of ours. Kiki and her husband Dario had been the first to arrive at the scene of the accident. Kiki felt I should spend the night with them, but I told Lucia that I would prefer to go directly to Fidenza to see Christina. She said I wouldn’t arrive in Umbria until one a.m. and that I would be too tired to drive another four and half hours to Fidenza after having travelled from London and driven two hours from Rome to Umbria. I told her I would call Kiki when I landed.

I boarded the plane and settled into my seat. I felt strangely calm. I have never felt my life was in my control. There is a saying that if you keep your wits about you while everyone else is losing theirs you probably haven’t a clue to what is going on around you. But that wasn’t the case with me. It was my nature to be calm and practical in the heat of emergencies. As the plane sped up and lifted off, I knew I would do everything possible to help Christina recover, but I had separated from her for good, there was no turning back. Both of us were to make new lives for ourselves. She was no longer my life partner. As much as I was willing to help her, I wasn’t willing to sacrifice the rest of my life to her disability. Or would my compassion for her condition subsume me as my compassion for her difficult life had subsumed me during our twenty-three-year marriage? A complicated set of feelings arose in me.

After I had moved to my own bedroom, Christina insisted several times with a sincere and innocent look on her face that nothing had happened to justify my breaking our marriage, so why didn’t I just reconcile with her. I looked at her incredulously. She didn’t seem to understand that cutting Rachel out of her life and will were symptomatic of a vengeful and infantile part of her character that I could no longer tolerate under any condition.

March 10, 2006

I have been thinking about Rachel’s feelings about Christina, and their relationship. In 1983 I gained custody of my two children from my previous marriage, Rachel then ten years old and Adam then seven years old. Christina was their stepmother for twenty-three years until her death in 2004. Two months after Christina’s death Aaron – our son then twenty-three years old - and Rachel, then thirty-one years old and pregnant, were with me in my house in Italy for a few days. Rachel was distraught, and trying to control her tears, it was clear that she was grieving Christina’s death, while Aaron and I were not grieving - at least not openly. At one point Rachel said that she felt devastated by the loss of her mother, meaning Christina, and the fact that Christina had disowned her as her daughter. Not because of the money, but because she loved Christina, even after all the emotional stress and unhappiness Christina had caused her she wanted to believe that Christina loved her. She wondered aloud if she and Christina would have reconciled if she had survived the accident – she hoped they would have. Aaron told Rachel that she should know better than to consider Christina her mother after the way Christina treated her and the things she said to her. Rachel was angry with Aaron and they argued. It was heart-breaking for me to witness this. Rachel was truly hurt and suffering while Aaron was trying to be intellectually objective, but he was unable to see Rachel’s point of view. He argued that no matter how much his mother claimed to treat all three children equally we all saw this wasn’t true.

We all did see she had in fact overwhelmingly favored Aaron and treated Rachel and Adam badly. But what was Rachel’s truth.

I remembered that Christina had written to Rachel just a year earlier on her thirtieth birthday. Christina normally wrote longhand if she did write, which was seldom, but I recalled that Christina had written that note on the computer. I searched and found the letter. It was a page and half long single-spaced dated May 22, 2003 - Rachel’s birthday. It started by wishing Rachel “Happy 30th Birthday!” and went on for more than a page about what a great doctor Rachel would be and how Rachel had come through “difficult times” and was “emerging happier and wiser” and so on. Not very personal, more the kind of letter a teacher writes to a pupil. Then on the second page she wrote:

"It is now over 22 years of your life since fate brought us together. You were thrown into the unsettling relationship with an “imposed stepmother” and I into an equally un-chartered territory of becoming a stepmother at a time when I was struggling to deal with my new role as a wife and as a mother to Aaron. So it was that we, all involved, had to adjust, learn, and search for new resources in ourselves to deal with this new boat we were all thrown into unprepared. In hindsight, and in most cases even back then, I realized that I as an adult, could have dealt with the stresses differently, but I am very much aware that at the time I reacted to these strains in a manner which let’s say did not then and ever since make me feel proud of myself. This of course contributed to anger and disappointment with myself, which unfortunately I accumulated in those years. I was truly embarrassed and ashamed of myself following each uncontrolled outburst of anger, which just continued to feed on itself. But we also had I believe many joyful experiences together. Well, this was all part of our joint and separate journey through the challenges that life threw at us. I sincerely am sorry for not always acting in a more emotionally intelligent manner. Setting these experiences aside it is truly important for me that you know that I always loved you and cared for you, and I always saw you as my real daughter, which I still do.

I truly wish you the best. God bless you.

Lots of Love, Christina"

This from the same woman who one year later disowned Rachel, and who from the time she came to live with us when she was ten years old treated her as a scullery maid and an unwelcome guest in our house and she told her so on countless occasions, an attitude that I abhorred and told her many times was not acceptable – for me our home was Rachel’s home.

Rachel raised Aaron not Christina. Rachel took care of him, kept his room in order, did the entire family laundry and ironing, cleaned the kitchen - all this instead of being able to socialize with her friends or have after-school activities - while Christina only paraded Aaron in front of our friends and acquaintances as the world’s greatest prodigy and genius, would encourage him to participate in adult conversations to prove it, not permit him to be disciplined, and at the same time insisted that Rachel “know her place” and not participate. I was always embarrassed and tried to get Christina to stop. Our friends considered Aaron spoiled and argued with her about how badly she was treating Rachel and Adam.

But this isn’t the point I wanted to make. This birthday letter Christina wrote to Rachel one year before she disowned her reveals the kind of antithetical behavior of which Christina was capable.