Where She Lives Now

When I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, my mind drifted back to a memory I hadn’t thought about in years. It was the spring of 1980, and I was just four years old. That was the year my Aunt Loretta passed away, she was the first person I ever lost.

Loretta Cavallo was born on March 25, 1936. She married Peter Fleming Jr. and had three sons: Peter III (Petey), Michael (Mikey), and James (Jimbo). She was pregnant with Jimbo when she was diagnosed with MS. This was long before there were any treatments, and the disease slowly took her mobility, her voice, and ultimately her life on March 29, 1980.

Even as a kid, I remember loving her deeply. I didn’t care that she was in a wheelchair or that her speech was hard to understand. She was my aunt, and I knew she loved me back. At four years old, I couldn’t fully grasp what MS was or what death meant. But I remember the day I started to understand. It was the day Auntie took me to visit Aunt Loretta.

The following is an excerpt from The Dog Story.

The drive was quiet, the hum of the tires lulling me into a daze. I watched the familiar houses and trees blur past, but something felt different. Auntie wasn’t talking like she usually did, filling the silence with stories or questions about my day. She just held the steering wheel, her face calm but distant, as though her thoughts were somewhere far away.

When we pulled into an unfamiliar parking lot, I frowned, trying to piece together where we were. The area was vast, the grass neatly trimmed, but it wasn’t a park or a playground. There were no swings or slides, no buildings I could see.

Auntie helped me out of the car and took my hand. “Come on, Matty. Let’s go say hello.”

“Who are we here to see, Auntie?” I asked, squinting against the sunlight.

“Aunt Loretta,” she said with a soft smile, her voice steady.

The name stopped me in my tracks. I looked up at her, confused, but she gently tugged my hand, leading me forward.

We walked through the quiet cemetery, the sound of birds chirping the only thing breaking the stillness. The warm breeze rustled the trees, but the air felt different here, heavier, as if the ground itself was holding a secret.

We stopped in front of a polished headstone, Aunt Loretta’s name etched into the smooth stone. My little fingers traced the carved letters, the coolness of the granite under my touch.

“This is where she lives now?” I asked, looking up at Auntie with wide eyes.

She knelt beside me, her hand brushing over my hair. “Her body is here, but her soul is in heaven with God.”

I stared at the headstone, the words tangling in my mind. “So… she’s not coming back?”

Auntie’s smile wavered, her eyes soft and sad. “No, sweetheart. But she’s always with us. Just in a different way.”

“Will we ever see her again?” I asked, my voice barely above a whisper.

Auntie’s hand squeezed mine gently. “One day, sweetheart. When it’s our time to go to heaven, we’ll see her again.”

I didn’t say anything else. I just stood there, my small hand in hers, looking at the stone and trying to understand what it all meant. I put my hand flat on the granite. It was cold, and rougher than I expected, and I didn’t have any words for what I was feeling, because I was four and this was the first time anyone I knew had stopped being a person and started being a name on a rock.

That memory stayed buried for over twenty years, until the day a neurologist told me I probably had the same disease that took her. My father drove me and Jocelyn past that same cemetery on the way home from the appointment, and this time I saw the stone before I even meant to look for it. CAVALLO, right there, front row, close enough to the road to read without trying.

“That’s Loretta’s grave,” I said. “Right there.”

“I know, baby,” Jocelyn said.

“That’s gonna be me,” I told her, my voice cracking, and I didn’t try to fix it. “Wheelchair, then a stone, and that’s it. Twenty years from now some kid is gonna be standing in front of my grave not understanding why I’m gone.”

“Matt, no. That’s not going to happen.”

“You don’t know that. Nobody knows that.” I was crying by then and didn’t try to stop that either. “I saw the finish line, Joc. I really thought I was gonna walk out of this thing a hundred percent, and instead I get handed the maybe version of the worst thing that ever happened to my family.”

She pulled the car over, right there on the side of the road, put it in park, and just held onto me while I fell apart in the passenger seat. She didn’t tell me it was going to be fine. She just held on, the way you hold onto something that’s shaking, until it stops, or until it doesn’t and you keep holding on anyway.

Now, decades later, I stood at that same gravesite with my sons, Mason and Colby, 17 and 15 years old. They never met Aunt Loretta, or Pa, or Nana. But I tell them the stories. I show them where their ancestors rest. Auntie was with us too that day, sharing memories of her own, like the time she and Loretta nearly drowned in Fearing Pond, a story I’ll save for another blog. We laughed, we remembered, and for a little while the fear that used to live in that cemetery for me wasn’t the only thing there anymore.

Loretta’s life, and her loss, was my first introduction to MS, decades before I understood what that word would come to mean for me too. I still think about that day in the car with Jocelyn more than the day at the graveside with Auntie. The graveside taught me how to say goodbye to someone. The car taught me how afraid I actually was of becoming her. Both of those are true, and both of them are still part of how I carry this disease today, one part grief, one part fear I’m still learning how to live alongside instead of underneath.