The Mysteries of Life, Love & Loss: A Memoir

By Doris Romano

Every relationship has a story to tell. "So, how did the two of you meet?" seems like a simple enough question, but Doris Romano has always found it difficult to tell the truth about how she met her husband for fear of being judged and misunderstood. What if your story is a complex manifestation of a meeting owed to other meetings and other lives, a vast series of traumatic events, the result of a million sacred moments strung together? What if you accept that some mysteries cannot be unraveled or understood, and instead embrace a future that lies in the space between certainty and trust? Both bizarre and stunning, incredulous and magical, The Mysteries of Life, Love & Loss: A Memoir follows Romano's relationship journey bound in the pages of stories that answer that simple question, but this time, told within a container large enough to hold space for the heightened wonder of a finely tuned Universe and a belief in the Divine.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Tellwell Talent
• Release date: Nov 30, 2022
• ISBN: 9780228882954

Doris Romano

Doris Romano wants to live in a world where kindness is currency, thank-you notes are scribbled by hand, and conversations are held more than devices. After many years as a Registered Nurse and Holistic Nutritionist, she's come to learn that sometimes the best medication is a heaping dose of self-love. When she is not reading in her favourite coffee shop, Doris spends most of her time baking for her family and friends from the menu of her imaginary B&B. She lives in Toronto with her husband, Riccardo. The Mysteries of Life, Love & Loss: A Memoir is Doris' first book.

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The Mysteries of Life, Love & Loss

Copyright © 2022 by Doris Romano

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law.

Tellwell Talent

www.tellwell.ca

ISBN

978-0-2288-8296-1 (Hardcover)

978-0-2288-8297-8 (Paperback)

978-0-2288-8295-4 (eBook)

Table of Contents

Dedication

Preface

A note on the names and conversations in this book

Prologue

1. The Blue Zone

2. Three Weeks Earlier

3. How I Met Jade

4. Jade as Practitioner

5. In a Nutshell

6. (Life) Support

7. Death Doula

8. The Polarity Therapy Sessions

9. The Gift of Time

10. February 28, 2008

11. Grace

12. Mind Mapping

13. What to Not Expect When You’re Expecting

14. August 8, 2008

15. Postmortem

16. Angel of Healing

17. Three Weeks Later

18. Past Perfect, Future Tense

19. Italy

20. Winter Was Never My Season

21. September 13, 2014

A Recipe for a Life Full of Love

Curried Butternut Squash & Lentil Soup

Anna Olson’s Classic Chocolate Chip Cookies

Basic Warming Kichadi

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Dedication

To Riccardo, Mika and Yan: God’s three answers to my prayers

Preface

This story wouldn’t leave me alone. It called to me urgently, ready to be told. But it wasn’t easy. To write this book I had to look back at my most questionable choices through an emotional microscope, and in the process resurrect the deep pain that was hidden within me, much of which has been trapped in my body since the first go-round. And when I didn’t remember, my nervous system reminded me that it was still there, waiting to be uncovered. This book explores heartache and healing, food and family, and worry and wonder. The drive to write my story was an expression of my fascination with the connections between those things. I wanted to answer my own questions about what happened, yes, but also about what it meant. I wanted to explore these questions for me, and for you. What if I said no? How can I be stronger for this? Is this getting me closer to the person I want to be? We often look for answers, but it’s the questions that teach us the most. In hindsight, writing it all down got it out of my body and onto the page so that it lived somewhere else, which was the medicine I needed. It reminded me of the hardest things I had ever experienced. This is the book I had wanted to read back then. I wanted to know that I had every right to have a broken heart, but trading it in for ease would have denied me moments of profound beauty in the breaking.

DR

A note on the names and conversations in this book

There are a few characters in this book whose names I chose to change to protect people’s privacy, and out of respect for the fact that this story is mine and not theirs. The following names, listed in alphabetical order, are pseudonyms: Amy, Catherine, Christopher, Daniel, Elizabeth, Erin, Peter, Phillip, Dr. Robinson, Dr. Thomas Campbell, and William. I have shared the conversations and details in this book as honestly as I remember them, and the emails and letters have been transcribed verbatim. As we all know, memories evolve as we do, and we are all more complicated than the roles assigned to us in a story.

Prologue

So, how did the two of you meet? my friend Michelle asked us. I caught my breath in a startled but silent gasp and clutched my husband Riccardo’s hand under the table, muttering Shit! in my mind. What do we say? How have we not practiced this line of questioning yet? We were bound to get asked by now. I darted my widening eyes at him, searching for an expression that would tell me how to respond, but found none. It was love, he murmured warmly. He turned his body toward mine, gazed into my eyes with a wide smile and squeezed my hand. I blurted out, We met through a friend, and cleared my throat to fill the ensuing silence. I tilted my head downward, breaking his gaze. Neither response was true. Most people swoon over a good love story, but ours was not a fairy tale romance of chance meetings of strangers or childhood crushes turned into something more. Ours was a story of divine intervention. We just didn’t know it until it was developing before our very eyes, like an instant print picture.

1

The Blue Zone

It was Monday, September 20, 2010 around five p.m. I was working as a nurse in the pediatric urgent care clinic (PUCC) at York Central Hospital in Richmond Hill, Ontario, an outpatient clinic located on the pediatric unit right off the fourth-floor elevators. The PUCC was created to enable physicians or midwives to refer children with acute illnesses to the pediatrician on call, where they are seen directly by the doctor and a nurse like myself without the need to visit emergency. Here we assessed children in a timely manner, completed necessary testing, and started treatment as required before discharging our patients to follow up with their family doctor.

Dr. Thomas Campbell and I had one more patient that shift, and I was waiting for him to return to the clinic to reassess a baby named Charlotte—whose newborn skin had developed a yellowish tinge a few days after birth—and send her home. Her mother asked to use the bathroom, so with delight I offered to hold Charlotte, who was swaddled in a white muslin blanket and fast asleep. Charlotte’s mother held her baby out to me and I took her, placed her head in the crook of my left arm and wrapped my right around her little body as her mother left the room. I started to pace the clinic slowly, careful not to disturb Charlotte’s sleep. I instinctively ran my fingers gently over the top of her head, her soft spot feeling as it should: firm with a slight downward curve.

After a moment the clinic phone rang and I picked up the receiver. It was Catherine, the charge nurse in the emergency department downstairs. Um, Doris, I’m calling to let you know that we have a patient in bed one in the blue zone, she began slowly. Her husband says she is your friend. He thought you would want to know that she is here.

My friend? I asked, taken by surprise. The blue zone? That’s not good, I thought. In emergency, patients are sent to differently coloured zones based on the urgency of their illness. The most seriously ill and those who may need resuscitation are sent to the blue zone.

Rosanna . . . Rosanne? No, Rosanna. Rosanna Altav— As Catherine tried to pronounce the patient’s name, I leaned in with a furrowed brow, my heart beating faster, trying to make sense of what I was being told, and what that must mean regarding the patient’s state. I couldn’t recall a friend of mine named Rosanna whose husband I didn’t know but who knew I worked at the hospital. It was an agonizing moment that lasted a few seconds that felt like an eternity. Catherine shook me out of my reverie by pronouncing my friend’s full name correctly, and I realized who she was talking about: Rosanna Altavilla, or Jade, as I knew her. I heard myself gasp out loud, and then felt my heart and stomach churn with dread. I felt unsteady. The phone slipped out of my hand and banged the desk as a nursing colleague walked in, asking a question that I could not discern in my state of panic. Too breathless to respond clearly, I handed her the baby and muttered, Her mom is in the bathroom. I have to go to the ER—my friend is in the blue zone. Let Thomas know. I bolted out of the clinic as fast as I could and found the nearest stairwell. I ran down the flights of stairs and hallways I had memorized after two years at the clinic like an unstoppable rocket.

The next few minutes were a surreal mixture of adrenaline and dread that carried me the distance to where I found my friend unconscious, intubated and on a ventilator, her hair matted with sweat against her forehead. By her bedside holding her hand was a familiar and comforting face: Elizabeth, Jade’s naturopath, and mine as well. Elizabeth was the person Jade trusted the most with her choice to decline conventional treatment when she was diagnosed with breast cancer three years prior at only thirty-nine years old. Tears welled in my eyes and spilled down my cheeks.

Elizabeth, what happened to her? I just saw her . . . she said she was fine, I whispered.

2

Three Weeks Earlier

I drove into the familiar driveway to Jade’s home at exactly nine o’clock that Tuesday morning, an hour before I needed to be at the hospital for work. The left side of the driveway was lined with a symmetrical dwarf blue spruce and a tall red maple with an attractive oval crown and simple green foliage. It was a bright, clear day, the sky an intense blue. I stepped out of the car and shut the door, lingering for a few seconds, delighting in the sun’s warmth despite the slight chill in the morning air. The changing season was obvious by the distinct but indescribable scent that signals the passage of summer into fall. Soon the summer’s green leaves would transition into their autumn colours of red, orange and gold. The trees then quietly undress in preparation for winter, and the ground will look