As recorded by Rosalie Ragucci-Cook (her granddaughter)
By the time I started dating my husband, John, my grandma was already in the nursing home. She absolutely adored John. He made her laugh and he’d ask her great questions about her life. We still laugh today about “Riley”. Grandma told John one day that someone (I don’t remember who) was “living the Life of Riley”. John asked Grandma “Who’s Riley?” She said “Oh, he had it good!!” She never told him who Riley was (old TV show character) but we still joke about Riley all the time.
One day, she told him about her trip to America. Her family was Italian but lived in Tunis, Tunisia because her father worked there. He came to America and she came with her mother and siblings later. They left from Marseilles, France. She said that she remembered her mother making them be quiet and making them stay away from the windows during the trip and she said that the windows were all painted black. They came to America during the war so they were trying to keep the ship dark at night so that it wouldn’t be bombed. In fact, after the ship dropped them off in America, it was bombed on the way back to Europe.
My grandmother fell twice in her later years. Each time, she literally broke one of her eyes. She was almost totally blind in the last 6-8 months of her life. At that point, she developed “blind senility”. She could see shadows and light and dark but not even enough to make out a shape. It would make her think she was seeing things and it was heartbreaking. In her last year of life, before she became blind, she would ask me if John and I were going to have a baby. I confided in her that we were trying. After she became blind and very senile, she would say to my mother (her daughter Rose) “bring me the boy. I want to see the boy”. My mom would ask “What boy? We don’t have any boys.” My mom was an only child, I was an only child, there were never any boys. Grandma would ask to see the baby, the boy. So I always knew that my baby would be a boy because my grandma told me before I was even pregnant. She never lived to see him but she would have loved him!
