Sally Mancini - Quite a character - RIP

Sallyann Mancini – 7/26/1931 to 2/2/2023

There are times when all the family history conversations about birth dates and dates of death and stories of our origins become so painful and joyful and so close to the surface. Yesterday was one of those days.

There is a tradition in our church on Pentacost where we get a word on a card, a word to provide an inspiration for the coming year. Mine for this year was “testimony.”

I thought of that yesterday as my sister, my wife, and I sat by my mother’s bedside and watched her take her last breath. What is the single word to best summarize a life? What is the best single word to describe my mom, what she meant, and what she leaves behind?

The one that came to mind was “character.”

One of the benefits of choosing “character” as her word is that there are so many implications of the word, and Sal was a complicated person.

Of course, one interpretation of “character” is “a person marked by notable or conspicuous traits” as in “she was quite a character.” And Sal – we all called her Sal – was quite a character.

As kids, she taught us succinct lessons in both theology AND meteorology, as in, “Jesus, Mary, and Holy Saint Joseph. Clean up this place; it looks like a cyclone hit it.”

She taught us lessons in frugality, handing us each gigantic brown paper bags every morning to take to school, containing a single sandwich, because “why on earth would I buy small lunch bags when the grocery store gives these to us for free?”

She taught us lessons in the nuances of language, conveying that the word “Perhapsssss…” when said properly and with an eye-roll, actually means, “I can’t believe you just said that.” She also taught us that the phrase, “The problem with that is….” is a useful way to stop any debate.

The examples go on and on and are hilarious. As we all said today multiple times, “What a legacy. We’ll be telling Sal stories for a long time.”

But there is another definition of “character,” one focused on someone of high standards, as in a person “of character.” Especially with my mom’s passing, I am struck by how unbelievably blessed the six of us were in our choice of parents (haha, I know that’s not the way it works.)

We had a childhood that was exceedingly normal. And little did we know how the odds were stacked against that outcome given the childhoods of our parents.

My father’s father was an Italian immigrant, institutionalized in 1932 for the rest of his life. My father’s mother was also an Italian immigrant, institutionalized in 1938 for the rest of her life. My father spent his life escaping the traumas of his childhood, and never talked about it.

My mother’s largely absent father was a stowaway on a boat from Sweden when he was barely a teenager, who never seemed to lose the wanderlust that initially drove him to board that boat, and who committed suicide when my mother was 13. My mother’s mother was an immigrant from Ireland, a woman of incredible strength who raised two children – largely as a single parent – in the middle of the Depression. The challenges she experienced were so deep that in an Angela’s Ashes time in the mid 1930s she applied for passports for herself and her two children to return to Ireland. I think the tough shell that my mom sometimes had was her way of protecting herself from what life could sometimes hand you.

And yet… And yet… And yet these two unlikely people combined to create a family of six kids, who grew up surrounded by love and hope and laughter. Yes, we are collectively a weird bunch. But we laugh a lot. And my parents leave a legacy of 16 grandkids and 14 great grands. How does such a blessing happen?

Character.

As my sister noted, “My mom was one of those people I thought would live forever. She survived much yet kept going. The deaths of two husbands. Spinal surgery. Cancer. Knee surgery. Heart surgery. Yet she didn’t give up. We were blessed to have her for 91+ years.”

Oh yes, even the death of my dad when she was 56 – 56! – couldn’t stop her. She found love not once, but TWICE, both times with men of strong “character.” As my mom declined in the past three years, and occasionally showed her spiky side more often, one of the sweetest consolations was her conversations about how blessed she had been in her life to find two such rare men. As we all were.