I was sure watching my children mourn their father would be my undoing but still I didn’t shed a tear and was able to be the rock they both needed. The girls stayed with me that night and just like when they were small, and Victor would work through the night; they crawled into the king-sized bed I shared with their father and snuggled close.
Victor’s body was released and flown back to New York, Anthony and I went to identify his body. I wish I never stepped foot into that morgue because the man beneath the sheet was not the man I married; he was not the handsome, dapper man I met at Studio 54. He was skin and bones and all the suffering he did in the last few weeks of his life stared back at me and it became evident that my husband died a miserable death. A man who was loved beyond measure died alone and imprisoned with a failing body and broken heart.
I left Anthony in the morgue and ran out of there as quickly as my weak legs would allow and desperately tried to erase the image from my mind. I closed my eyes and begged Victor’s soul to paint me one last picture and envision the young man with the charcoal gray suit and the black turtleneck. The man who promised to marry me and make a life with me. I closed my eyes and remembered our last visit and the way we promised one another we would remember the other.
Still, I didn’t cry, not a tear.
At the funeral parlor I picked out the most lavish casket, the final throne for the king. Anthony gave the funeral director Victor’s favorite suit, and he assured us he would pin it to look like it was tailored to fit. We matched the handkerchief to the tie just as he always did and included a pair of his Italian loafers. Some might say I was being foolish since I had kept the casket closed but I wanted my husband to be impeccably dressed for his final sleep just as he was in life. He would want that too.
Once his wake was settled, it was time to pick a burial plot. The ride around Green-Wood cemetery to decide on where we would both rest eternally, that broke what was left of my heart. He tried so hard to give me what I wanted in life, bought that huge house because he thought it would make me happy. We made that house our home and now I was left choosing our final home. And still I didn’t cry.
The girls met us at the florist and we ordered the traditional pieces. A bleeding heart from me, a broken heart from Nicole and Mike and a piece the florist called the Gates of Heaven from Adrianna and Anthony. We also ordered the rosary beads for inside the coffin and made that from his grandchildren. So along with their pictures, Victor would be buried with remnants of Luca and Victoria.
The night before the wake the girls came over, and together with my in laws, we went through old photo albums to display around the funeral parlor. My daughters marveled over one photograph in particular, one of me and their father. The year was 1984, and it was one of a few where my husband was dressed casually in a pair of jeans. I stared at the photo and the outfit I was wearing, white fitted pants and a turquoise blouse. I wore a lot of that color in the early years and I remember why, Victor loved the color on me, told me it reminded him of the first day we met.
I wound up slipping that photo into Victor’s folded hands the morning of the wake when they allowed me to view him before they closed the casket for the final time.
Victor’s wake reflected his life. It seemed anyone Victor ever met throughout the duration of his sixty-six years showed to pay their final respects. Some of the faces I remembered, some I didn’t. All I thanked for coming and told them how grateful Victor would’ve been. The old time gangsters competed by sending extravagant floral arrangements and stood in the back of the viewing room sharing stories of all the illegal activities they conducted with my husband. The younger ones, the fresh faces like my nephew, sat vigil, quietly taking in the death of a mobster. Whether they were young or old, veterans or new blood they showed up, but I knew that once the dirt settled over my husband, they would fight tooth and nail for everything he built.
Then there were the loyal men who never wanted a piece of my husband but were always there to lend a hand when rough times fell upon him, those were the men in leather. Jack Parrish stood the left of my husband’s casket and his vice president stood to the right. They never left his side, not once, stood like two soldiers guarding his body until it was time to head to church for the final mass.
And even then they didn’t leave his side.
As the hearse pulled away from the funeral parlor, they straddled their bikes and rode alongside him, accompanying him to the church we were married in. But their loyalty didn’t stop there, the Satan’s Knights respectively removed their cuts and carried my husband’s casket into the church.
It wasn’t until I entered the church and the choir sang Amazing Grace as I walked behind my husband’s casket that I lost myself and the tears fell uncontrollably down my face.
Amazing Grace, how sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch like me…
I once was lost but now I’m found,