One Night in Rome: And the end of life as I knew it

By Michelle Merritt

After the death of her parents in 2007, the author embarks on a soul-searching journey with her stepsister until a series of unexpected events send her on a solo adventure. One Night in Rome leads the reader through a true tale of overcoming loss and finding adventure and romance in Italy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michelle Merritt
• Release date: Apr 29, 2010
• ISBN: 9781476273433

Michelle Merritt

Michelle Merritt is a native of Washington State. Born at Seattle's Providence Hospital in 1964 to a Ballard family, she was raised on the East side of the Cascade Mountains. In 1982, Michelle returned to Seattle, where she attended the University of Washington for a short time. Dissatisfied and impatient with academic life, she joined the United States Air Force as a reservist and received a certificate in Aircraft Maintenance technology.In the subsequent years, Ms. Merritt enjoyed a long career in the automotive industry, worked a brief stint as an insurance agent, owned a restaurant, and managed a non-profit. She holds a current merchant mariner's license and is working toward accumulating enough sea time to become a licensed captain on international vessels.Since publication of her first book, One Night in Rome: And the End of Life as I knew It, Michelle has traveled by land, air, and sea to Italy, Monaco, France, England, Fiji, Turkey, Canada, Mexico, Costa Rica, Panama, and forty-five states within the United States of America.She is the mother of two grown sons and a grandmother who now calls Tacoma, Washington her home.Discover more about the author at MichelleMerritt.com.

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What others are saying about

One Night in Rome:

Simple and down to earth about the heartbreak of an everyday person, then showing that dreams can come true...Makes me want to pack up and fly away. Such a wonderful book on the journey of a lifetime, the ups and the downs showing us ends can be new beginnings. ~ Roxanne Thayer

Perfect book for a flight-I couldn't put it down! Laugh out loud funny and poignant at the same time, I am sure the somber guy sitting next to me thought I was nuts as I went from crying to laughing and crying again as I journeyed with the author in her adventure of heartache, loss, self discovery and Italy. Wow! If you ever wondered how people got unstuck from making the same mistake time and time again, if you ever wondered if ever you will meet the person of your dreams after you are forty, if you ever stopped yourself before you thought what if?-BUY THIS BOOK! ~ T. Johnson

This book's about love: love in the family, romantic love - and loving one's self. Merritt is so honest and yet so matter-of-fact she's startling at times, and that's a good thing. She lets us deep inside her head and heart as she reflects on old choices and makes new ones. [A few of those choices are sketchy and one or two seem flat out mad, but none of it's prettied up or wild for its own sake.] This is real life, real time. And shoot, it might even have a happy ending. Good stuff. ~ Ken Miller, Author

How can a guy enjoy a woman's memoir? I asked myself that question when a friend suggested I read One Night in Rome. Now that I have read it -- in one can't-put-the-darn-thing-down weekend -- I can tell you how. Michelle Merritt writes genuinely and from the heart about the hurt of broken relationships, the loss of adored parents, the numbness facing an uncertain future -- and that dash of hope that keeps us all going. Those life milestones afflict women and men. Through her journey, Michelle describes all the raw emotion as she travels through Italy with a long lost sister. She fights to stay open to life's possibilities -- sometimes admittedly staying a little TOO open. Perhaps the best part of Michelle's story? When you get to the end, you care so deeply about her that you want to read more. ~ D. Voelpel, Journalist

I don't like books where a woman is in an unhappy life, meets a man and magically everything is better. This is not that book! In her memoire, One Night in Rome: And the End of Life as I Knew It, author Michelle Merritt shares the details of the sadness and emptiness in her life and the European adventure she strikes out on leading her to live life to the fullest...Yes, she meets a man and falls in love. But the main takeway I had was she really fell in love with life again, a new country and a yearning to have these kinds of adventures all over the world. I'd Suggest this book to anyone that could use reflection on the direction on their own life...which is probably all of us. ~ L. Danforth

*****

One Night in Rome:

And the End of Life as I Knew It

By

Michelle Merritt

SMASHWORDS EDITION

*****

PUBLISHED BY:

Michelle Merritt on Smashwords

One Night in Rome: And the end of life as I knew it

Copyright © 2009 Michelle Merritt

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 1439263310

ISBN-13: 9781439263310

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This is a work of non-fiction. The author acknowledges the trademarked status and trademark owners of various products referenced in this work of fiction, which have been used without permission. The publication/use of these trademarks is not authorized, associated with, or sponsored by the trademark owners.

Smashwords Edition License Notes: This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the author's work.

* * * * *

Dedication

This book is dedicated to the loving memory of my parents, William H. and Patricia B. Lindsay, without whom this particular path in life would not have been possible.

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Acknowledgements

When I set out to write this book, I only hoped that my story would inspire others to overcome their own personal loss, chase their dreams and live again. If I’d realized how many cases of tissue and bottles of wine the cathartic experience would take, I might have re-thought that ambition, but with my infinite army of family and friends, I was somehow able to soldier on to its completion. That being said, I’d like to take a moment to thank all of the people who made this possible: My parents, sisters, brothers, sons, aunts, cousins, and friends; to my editor, Gretchen Russell, who’s patience and guidance brought out my elusive writer’s voice; and a very special thanks goes out to my Angelo for his inspiration and encouragement. Without the support and love of every one of you, this book may have remained just a dream.

While all of the characters in this story are part of my true-life adventure, many of their names have been changed for various reasons. Regardless, I’d like to extend my infinite gratitude for the role that they played in the amazing transformation of my life.

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Table of Contents

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Table of Contents

Chapter 1 – Family First

Chapter 2 – Enter Suzanne

Chapter 3 – Why Italy?

Chapter 4 – Scouting Rome

Chapter 5 – The Hands We Were Dealt

Chapter 6 – Blisters and Band-aids

Chapter 7 - Death Defying Acts of the Sisterhood, Part 1

Chapter 8 – Death Defying Acts of the Sisterhood, Part 2

Chapter 9 – Exodus to Rome

Chapter 10 – The Cavalry Arrives

Chapter 11 – What to Do Now?

Chapter 12 – One Night in Madrid

Chapter 13 – From Katarina to Napoli

Chapter 14 – With Angelo to an Italian Rodeo

Chapter 15 – Dirty Secrets

Chapter 16 – Home

Epilogue

About the Author

*****

Chapter 1 – Family First

How did you meet him? Is usually the first question I’m asked when people find out that I have an Italian boyfriend in Italy.

Well it’s a really long story, but I met him one night in Rome, I reply, blushing to be recounting the tale once again. To my ears, it sounds like a preposterous story. Sometimes I wonder if they’ll think that I’m just a consummate liar or a charlatan snake oil salesman peddling the cure for a lovelorn heart with some secret potion. My sister and I went on a three week vacation last year, I launch into the tale, And it was my first time to Europe.

I suppose that my subconscious had worked on me for a while; allowing me to secretly believe that I could meet a man on that trip, however, on the morning I left Seattle, it wasn’t the first thing on my mind. As I stood on the sidewalk under one of those perpetually drab Pacific Northwest skies, scanning the walls for the name of my airline, escape was the word that was burning in my brain. Escape from everything that I was torturing myself over.

Now, I know that I am not the first woman to have gone through the death of parents. Nor am I the first person to have grappled with that mid-life chasm of empty nest syndrome that shockingly opened beneath my feet once my sons were grown. But I was roasting myself over the fire of a now uncertain future. I wasn’t even sure if I would have a job to come home to. The logical part of my mind knows that regret is a waste of time, so I focused on the positive. What I did have was three weeks of Italy and Spain spanning before me, a blank canvas waiting for the paint of possibilities.

In order to tell you how I ended up at the airport that morning, kicking my carry-on through the switchbacks to ticketing, I must first tell you about the death of my mother. No matter where I lived or what challenge I faced, she was never farther than a phone call away. She was my rock. I believed that she would live to be one hundred years old, so the day my oldest sister called me to say that Mom had driven herself to the hospital, I reacted with calm disbelief, They think she might have had a heart attack?

Yes, but they aren’t sure. Patty was with Mom in the local emergency room. I guess she had a coughing fit this morning then drove herself here when she couldn’t get it to stop. They want to transport her to the hospital in Olympia overnight for observation. Apparently, they don’t have any room for her here.

Unlike me, my oldest sister is one of those solid people who has taught at the same school, lived in the same house and been married to the same man for over thirty years. Not much alarms her, so if something were direly wrong, she would have told me. She’d already enlisted her husband’s help and went on to say, I’m going to the hospital with Mom to make sure she gets settled. Keith is taking Dad to our house and I’ll call you a little later to let you know how things are going.

At that point, I was certain that Mom was probably having a stress attack from taking care of Dad. (The fifteen-year age span between them had gone largely unnoticed for most of their marriage, but could no longer be ignored.) I’d been hounding her for months to hire someone to come to the house and help. Of course, she never did. Taking care of Dad until death do us part was what she signed up for when they got married. In her mind, hiring somebody to take the burden off would have been shirking her responsibilities. (This was a woman who recycled bread bags, saved the twist ties, and clipped coupons - a frugal child of the Great Depression. She even had a can full of saved chicken wish bones on the kitchen counter for that after dinner wish in the event you needed one.)

In telling this story, I realize that I never would have met Angelo on that night in Rome if the chips hadn’t fallen the way they did. I imagine that’s why I still have a few cobwebs of guilt lingering in the corners of my mind.

On the day that my mother entered the hospital, I had a clear mental picture of what the next twenty years would hold for me. My grandmother, my mom’s mom, was still alive at the ripe old age of ninety-four. So it stood to reason that at seventy-three, my own mother would be around for quite some time. We were going to hang out together for the next couple of decades, shopping and traveling. My oldest sister and I even hatched a plan to build Mom’s dream house someday.

Dad, on the other hand, was eighty-nine and legally blind. Although he still had most of his wits about him, things were starting to slip; little telltale signs that he didn’t have a lot of time left on this earth. He was well aware of that and had everything planned for his own demise: all but a contingency for the worst-case scenario, Mom dying first.

Just as she said she would, Patty called me later that evening with a status report, Mom’s resting in her room now, but they want to take her into the cath-lab for tests in the morning.

For the uninitiated, the cath-lab is that place where they take you to check out your plumbing. After injecting your body with blood thinners and dye, technicians send a microscopic Roto-Rooter up through your groin to look for restrictions. That happened to me once with an old house I owned. When the boys were little, my oldest flushed a toy down the toilet just to see what would happen. It was one of those colorful, unsinkable, snap-together beads that float in the bathtub. I suppose he thought the toilet might do the trick. You know how little kids are. When the Roto-Rooter guy snaked out the ancient lines, a lecture ensued about the evils of unleashing feminine hygiene products into the root-infested waste stream of a nineteen-twelve era home. Apparently, I was equally responsible for the mess. This is pretty much what they were going to do to Mom that morning: go looking for unwanted debris and build-up then clear her plumbing if they had to.

Patty was busy the next day. I have a class that I need to teach in the morning, otherwise I’d stay, she informed me. Mom and my sister worked out together three times a week, so she wasn’t concerned either.

No problem, I don’t have any tests tomorrow and I can work from my phone. In a third attempt to finally finish college, I’d ditched my twenty-year career in the automotive industry, re-enrolled in school, and taken on a part-time job that barely made ends meet. The job was flexible and most of my work involved the phone, so I knew nobody would miss me at the office.

After arriving at the hospital at five the next day, I found Mom in her room. She was awake with a nurse prepping her for the procedure. Hey Mom, how are you doing? Smiling, I tossed my briefcase into the chair.

Oh, honey. You didn’t have to come. She downplayed the situation in typical Mom fashion. I’m not feeling myself. I think I’m just tired. You have classes to study for and your new job is so important.

That was my mother. Everyone else’s life was more important than hers.

As part of the preparation for this routine procedure, the nurses instructed me to remove all of Mom’s valuables. Those consisted of simple gold earrings and the rings on her hands. Lathering her swollen fingers with lotion, I pulled off her wedding band and her diamond engagement ring. It wasn’t really an engagement ring though. I’d been with her the day that she bought it. Her real engagement ring was a 1977 Datsun pickup truck. At the time, she thought diamonds were a senseless waste of money and opted for a practical vehicle instead. That truck didn’t even have a radio. I’d been in my twenties when she and I went shopping for the ring. She saved up her pennies and coupon money until she finally thought she deserved one. It was the only diamond she’d ever had in her life. Pulling it off of her finger that day, I told her that I remembered the name of the store where we’d found it. Remember, Mom? I lived in that old house on the South Hill in Spokane. The one with the bad plumbing and newspapers for insulation.

Remembering the day, she laughed with me, Yes. I do, Honey.

The nurses wheeled Mom down to the lab while I staked out a spot in the hospital lobby. I had a busy day ahead of me. My oldest son, Chase (the one who had flushed the toy down the toilet), was stationed in Afghanistan and his young wife was landing at the airport around noon. She’d been lonely, by herself in an apartment in Boise, so she and I had planned for her to stay with me for a couple of weeks. I thought she could help me out at the office or maybe just hang around with my other son and me. Of course, this had been scheduled before the events of the past twenty-four hours and I didn’t have any inkling as to what was about to happen.

Around eight o’clock, the doctor arrived in the waiting area with the test results. Unfolding a black and white photographic image of my Mom’s heart, he said, Everything looks good. We didn’t find any blockages, but we inserted a stint here. He pointed to an area outside of her heart that they’d placed the little tube. There is another area over here that we should keep an eye on, but it should be fine for now. The doctor circled an almost imperceptible narrowing in another artery. It was really nothing to worry about.

Is she in her room now? I wanted to check on her, to make sure she was doing as well as he said. If she was, I could get on with my work. I don’t want that to sound callous or unfeeling because I’m not. It’s just the way my parents raised me. Take care of your family, pull yourself up by your bootstraps, and get on with life.

The nurses should be getting her settled in her room. Give them a few minutes then you can go up. He smiled and said he’d check in on us later, leaving me with the picture of her heart in my hands.

The first person I needed to call was my sister. Everything went fine, I said, The nurses are with her now. I’m going upstairs in a minute. How’s Dad doing?

He woke up in the middle of the night looking for the bathroom. He was a little disoriented, but he’s fine. Keith stayed home with him today and I’ll try to get to the hospital before you leave for the airport. I’d reminded her that I needed to pick up my daughter-in-law, so Patty was going to take over the afternoon shift for me.

I entered Mom’s room just as they were wheeling her in on a gurney. In spite of the fact that my mother was born in a Minnesota farmhouse in the fury of a December blizzard, weighing in at a paltry two pounds, she grew into a long-legged willowy blonde woman, towering over most of the family at five foot ten inches. The nurses must have been unprepared for her stature because while struggling to move her prone, groggy body from the gurney to the bed, they pulled the IV from her arm. Still, nothing seemed amiss. Those things happen, right? That’s what I was thinking when one of the nurses made an excuse, then another one claimed responsibility for the incident. If that sort of thing had happened to one of my kids, I probably would have ripped somebody’s head off. But there were a million reasons why the woman in that bed was invincible to me.

After they tidied her up and reinserted her IV, I went out to the hall. I should probably call other family members. The thought hadn’t crossed my mind until that moment, seeing her barely conscious on the hospital gurney. My brothers should probably be told. Yes, I have brothers - three of them. I called everyone I could think of that morning. My aunts, cousins, and the two brothers that I had phone numbers for. In a calm, cheery voice I informed them of the facts, I’m sure she’ll be fine. It was a very minor procedure.

My other brother was missing somewhere in Alaska. I had an idea as to how to get a message to him because, the year before, I’d organized a family effort to wish him a happy birthday on his fiftieth. I found a bush pilot online who gave me the contact information for the radio station in Bethel. We all called in to the station, uncertain if it would work. Later we heard through the family grapevine that it had and, better yet, we now had a phone number where calls might actually reach him.

When Patty arrived, I’d leave that phone call to her.

As an afterthought, I called Suzanne. I know this may be confusing right now, but she is my stepsister. (We consider ourselves sisters today, even though we barely new each other at that time.) Reaching her voicemail, I left a message, Hey Suzanne, I thought I should call you. Mom might have had a heart attack and she’s in the hospital. Dad’s fine and Mom seems to be doing ok, but I thought you should know. Click. I didn’t know if it would matter to her, but I’d long ago promised Dad that I would try my best to make her feel like she was a part of the family.

To explain the dynamics of my family seems a bit premature here, but unbeknownst to me, Suzanne would become the reason that I went to Italy. She is the reason that we ended up in the hotel bar where I met Angelo at midnight on a Sunday in Rome.

(The Roulette table that we all unwittingly buy chips at every day of our lives is so unpredictable. Let the chips fall where they may, indeed.)

Most people might think that, as the youngest of five children, I would be the babied one or the little princess that everyone takes care of. I admit, I do suffer from a bit of the princess syndrome, but having three older brothers torture the crap out of me probably made me more of a warrior princess. I’ve often had visions of myself in full-on World War II uniform, back-to-back with my troops, battling the enemy until the bloody end. (Undoubtedly from all of those slingshot wars and B B Gun fights.) All that aside, when it gets down and dirty, I’m your man. That doesn’t mean I won’t