How Will I Know? / Fever

Your eyes may deceive you, your ears can betray you, but when it comes to love the nose knows. Plus - a reflection on life’s sliding doors and how we can never truly know all the versions of the people we love. This week on Snap, we kick off our FEVER series! Four weeks full of love stories that are not your typical romances... We love you Snap Nation! Catch the Fever. STORIES Smell Ya Later After Laura’s husband gets a fatal diagnosis, he promises to contact her from beyond the grave. But how will she know it’s really him? This supernatural story comes to us from our evil twin podcast, Spooked https://spookedpodcast.org/. Spooked drops weekly, listen on any podcast platform! Thank you, Laura Packer, for sharing this special story. Laura’s a storyteller in Minneapolis. Learn more about Laura at her website https://laurapacker.com/. Produced by Anne Ford, original score by Leon Morimoto. My Dead Mother’s Italian Lover Not long after Peter’s mother Mara dies, a stranger messages him on Facebook. His name is Francesco and he says that before she met Peter’s dad, Mara was the love of his life. Francesco starts sending Peter poetry and links to love songs, describing his romance with Peter’s mom in more and more detail. And the woman in his stories is nothing like the mother Peter knew. So Peter reaches out to Francesco for a phone call. A reflection on life’s sliding doors and how we can never truly know all the versions of the people we love. This story comes to us from Love Me, from CBC https://www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-podcasts/136-love-me. It was produced by Peter Lang-Stanton, Cristal Duhaime and Mira Burt-Wintonick. Sound design by Cristal Duhaime. Mix engineered by Michelle MACK-lem . Featuring original music by David Drury. To hear more stories about the messiness of human connection, check out Love Me https://www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-podcasts/136-love-mewherever you get your podcasts. Season 17 - Episode 6 Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices https://dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:08Glynn Washington?

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• 0:48Glynn Washington?

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• 1:31Glynn Washington?

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• 2:38Glynn Washington?

  The preacher's daughter and the bad man had a very mad affair. When her daddy tried to save her, she said, Daddy, Daddy, don't you dare. He gives me fever with his kisses, fever when he holds me tight. Fever. I'm his lady and Daddy, won't you treat him right?

• 3:07Glynn Washington?

  In searching for love, at some point you may discover, to your surprise and horror, that this is not an analytical exercise. It's not a choice so much as an insistence. A boil, dare I say, an infection with the only real decision becomes no decision at all.

• 3:32Glynn Washington?

  Snap Judgment's new series Fever begins with the promise of love and devotion that takes us from this world into the next. Snap proudly presents, How Will I Know? My name is Glynn Washington. What a lovely way to burn.

• 3:53Glynn Washington?

  You're listening to Snap Judgment.

• 4:16Glynn Washington?

  Now, our first story comes to us from Laura Packer. Many years ago, Laura realized that her best friend Kevin was becoming more than just a friend. Snap judgment.

• 4:32Speaker 01

  It took us a couple of years to realize that there was something else there.

• 4:42Speaker 01

  I remember noticing that tingle kind of at the back of my neck when he was talking. I had just come out of another relationship that had ended pretty badly, and I wanted a break, but there were these feelings.

• 5:09Speaker 01

  We went for a walk in the woods at about midnight, and it was very cold.

• 5:17Speaker 01

  And I was standing there looking at the moon, and he walked up right behind me, and I could feel the heat of his body.

• 5:32Speaker 01

  Very slowly, he put his hands on my shoulders, and I leaned back against him, and I said, "I shouldn't do this now."

• 5:44Speaker 01

  He said, "Is there ever a right time?"

• 5:49Speaker 01

  I was very still, and then I said, "Okay."

• 5:54Speaker 01

  We held hands as we walked back to his apartment and necked for a really long time.

• 6:07Speaker 01

  Holding him was like embracing a tree or a mountain. It just felt so safe.

• 6:20Speaker 01

  By then, I knew that I was falling in love with him, and he was falling in love with me.

• 6:28Speaker 01

  It was a really fun wedding.

• 6:37Speaker 01

  I was barefoot because I don't like wearing shoes.

• 6:42Speaker 01

  Kevin was wearing a pair of jeans and one of his Hawaiian shirts.

• 6:48Speaker 01

  We set our vows.

• 6:51Speaker 01

  We promised to shovel snow and shovel together.

• 7:02Speaker 01

  We kissed and we turned and looked at everybody and they were all laughing and crying and cheering and that was it.

• 7:18Speaker 01

  I found us a house. The first floor was open and bright and the second floor had a room that would be a great office and another room that would be a great guest room. And then the third floor had an enormous closet with a high bar that would work for Kevin's clothing. There was room for this tall man to stretch and not feel like he was going to break something. The kitchen fit me well, I could reach things readily.

• 7:49Speaker 01

  The only problem with it is the way the cabinets were set up. If they were open, the corners were at the exact height to bang me in the eye or in the forehead.

• 8:01Speaker 01

  Within a week of moving in, I was walking into the kitchen and I wasn't paying attention and Kevin had left the cabinet open and I slammed into it and got a gash in my forehead.

• 8:17Speaker 01

  I called for him and I said, "You've got to stop doing this. When you do it, I get hurt." He kind of smiled and he apologized. But he would forget fairly often. I would close them and remind him and close them and remind him. I was very cranky about it. But he got the hang of it after we'd been there for a while.

• 8:47Speaker 01

  We had lived together before, but we had roommates living with us. Having it be just the two of us meant that we didn't have to worry about someone else in the house. It wasn't like we went out of our way to burp and fart at each other. It's just that we stopped worrying about it in front of each other. If he let one loose that was really bad, I would usually ask him if something had crawled up his butt and died. And if I let loose one that was really bad, he would usually ask me if I was planning on fumigating the entire house. We moved into the house in January.

• 9:32Speaker 01

  By August, he was starting to have some back and stomach problems. And it just kept getting worse and worse. Every doctor we went to said, "Welcome to middle age." It was around 10 o'clock at night. I went upstairs to our bedroom, and he was kneeling on the floor, writhing. He said, "Don't touch me." I knew he was in pain. I started crying.

• 10:11Speaker 01

  I said, "Could we please go to the emergency room?" They sent him for an X-ray, and then they sent him for an ultrasound, and then they sent him for an MRI. About half an hour later, two doctors walked in and closed the door and told us, "People don't come back from pancreatic cancer."

• 10:43Speaker 01

  They said, "We're gonna find a bed and admit you."

• 10:48Speaker 01

  He was there for three weeks.

• 10:56Speaker 01

  We hadn't talked much about his dying because he hadn't wanted to. Whenever I tried to bring it up, he would say, "No, I'm gonna fight, I'm gonna fight." But by then, it was really obvious.

• 11:07Speaker 01

  The cancer had stolen his voice. He could barely speak. He could kind of whisper. I asked him, "Do you believe there's an afterlife?" And he said, "Yes." And I asked him what he thought it was like.

• 11:26Speaker 01

  And he said, "Someplace beautiful."

• 11:38Speaker 01

  My beliefs about an afterlife at the time were, at best, nebulous. It had never really mattered to me before, but it was mattering more and more because Kevin was going to die soon.

• 11:54Speaker 01

  By now, I was crying, and he was crying. I asked him to let me know that he was okay, if he could. He nodded. I said, "You know you're gonna have to make it really obvious, right? Because I'm tentative about this stuff." He looked at me, and he smiled, this big smile, and he nodded. And he said, "I know."

• 12:21Speaker 01

  And then, he said, "I can't breathe."

• 12:26Speaker 01

  There was fluid filling up his heart and his lungs.

• 12:31Speaker 01

  He died five days later.

• 12:39Speaker 01

  Kevin had died at 6:20 PM. And the next day, when there were lots of people in the house, people from his work and friends in the community, at about 6:18, I thought that we should do a toast.

• 13:04Speaker 01

  I needed to say, "The world now has had 24 hours without this magnificent man." I told everyone to get up and to stand into a circle and that we were going to toast Kevin with his favorite terrible liqueur, 99 Bananas. And then we passed the glass from hand to hand to hand to hand, each of us taking a little sip. Profound sorrow and extraordinary gratitude, and that's what I was feeling.

• 13:46Speaker 01

  It ended up back in my hand. I took my sip from it. And as I took the sip, I was looking across the room at the mantelpiece over the fireplace. There was a picture of Kevin on the mantelpiece. The picture fell over, face down, with this little smack-y sound, "plop."

• 14:17Speaker 01

  There was a beat after the picture fell over when everyone was quiet. One friend came over to me and said, "Did you see that? I think that was Kevin." I said, "Whatever, someone must have just bumped into it." The thought of him being in any form but alive and healthy was not something that I could even come near.

• 14:53Speaker 01

  On the first day of shiva, my friend John rode over on his bike.

• 15:01Speaker 01

  He leaned the bike on the front porch, leaning against the living room window, and then came in and said, "Laura, look out the window."

• 15:15Speaker 01

  I looked out the window to where John's bike was, and there was a cardinal sitting on the crossbeam of the bike.

• 15:28Speaker 01

  The bright red male cardinal, looking into the house, tilting its head back and forth, and sometimes tapping on the window with its beak.

• 15:41Speaker 01

  And he said, "You know, people say that cardinals are visitors from the dead. What do you think?"

• 15:47Speaker 01

  And I said, "Yeah, it's a cardinal. Kevin's dead."

• 15:53Speaker 01

  And that's how I felt.

• 16:03Speaker 01

  On good days, I was flat. On bad days, I was throwing up because I was crying so much.

• 16:11Speaker 01

  I mostly sat on the couch and watched really bad television.

• 16:19Speaker 01

  But when I did go out, there were always cardinals. There were always some on the front lawn. They were in the trees. They were on the porch. More than I had ever seen before.

• 16:40Speaker 01

  One night, about a month later, I had been up for a lot of the night crying.

• 16:48Speaker 01

  I got up in the middle of the night to go to the bathroom

• 16:53Speaker 01

  and then walked back into our bedroom and stopped because I didn't believe what I was smelling.

• 17:06Speaker 01

  I was smelling Kevin's farts. That kind of rich and unpleasant smell I used to tease him about.

• 17:18Speaker 01

  But I stood there absolutely shocked at this aromatic presence in our bedroom that just filled it up.

• 17:30Speaker 01

  I just knew it was his smell.

• 17:35Speaker 01

  I walked out of the room and it smelled perfectly normal, like wood and dust. I walked back into the bedroom and there it was again.

• 17:50Speaker 01

  I told myself that I was hallucinating, that I was grieving so hard that I was just making it up. It wasn't real.

• 18:03Speaker 01

  I finally fell asleep a little before dawn and woke up in the mid-morning.

• 18:12Speaker 01

  I got up to go downstairs to get some tea.

• 18:17Speaker 01

  And so I went down from the third floor to the first, turned the corner and was walking into the kitchen.

• 18:24Speaker 01

  And something whacked me in the head.

• 18:34Speaker 01

  I looked up and every cabinet in the kitchen was open.

• 18:41Speaker 01

  Including the cabinets on top of the fridge that I could not reach.

• 18:48Speaker 01

  I started laughing and crying at the same time.

• 18:54Speaker 01

  He knew it had to be really obvious. So he made it really obvious.

• 19:04Speaker 01

  It was kind of a turning point for me.

• 19:08Speaker 01

  It's not like I stopped grieving or stopped missing him, but things were a little easier.

• 19:15Speaker 01

  I was able to hold a conversation with a friend. I was able to drive by some of the places that we had liked without having to pull over and sob. I knew that he continued in some way and that all the love that I still felt for him was not just echoing in an empty universe.

• 19:40Speaker 01

  He died in the end of March.

• 19:43Speaker 01

  And in May, we had a service in Boston.

• 19:52Speaker 01

  I decided to drive from Kansas City to Boston. I stopped in Buffalo, New York, and visited some friends of mine who lived there.

• 20:06Speaker 01

  We were sitting out on the porch.

• 20:09Speaker 01

  This woman walked by. She looked and said, "Hey, how you doing?" And then kept walking. My friends said, "She never talks to us." And my friends said that she was a neighbor, but not a particularly friendly one, not someone they knew.

• 20:27Speaker 01

  About an hour later, she came back and she walked right up onto the porch.

• 20:37Speaker 01

  She was a middle-aged woman, slender, a little hunched. She stood right in front of me and she said, "You're not from around here, so I wanted to come over here and find out who you are and what you're doing in my neighborhood." She had such a big smile. I didn't feel threatened or anything. She was just curious. She and I started bantering back and forth. She asked where I was from, and I said, "Kansas City." And she said, "They have some good barbecue there." And I said, "Yes, they do." And she said, "But it's not as good as mine."

• 21:10Speaker 01

  And we just went back and forth. When it was starting to wind down, she looked at me and she tapped her chin and she said, "Kevin says hi." And off she went.

• 21:31Speaker 01

  Holy sh- I had never seen that woman before. My friends swore up and down that they had never talked with her.

• 21:42Speaker 01

  It made me feel warm and loved and happy and satisfied that he came back to say hello. It made me think that wherever he was, he was probably having a great time. Because he was someone who liked playing and liked learning new things. And I could very easily imagine him in the afterlife saying, "So, can I do this? How do I do that?" and just having a good time.

• 22:18Speaker 01

  About a month later, I was in Atlantic City, visiting my parents.

• 22:27Speaker 01

  I was walking on the beach. I was feeling really sad.

• 22:33Speaker 01

  Kevin's favorite thing in the world was the ocean. And it was the first time I had been to the ocean since he died.

• 22:46Speaker 01

  There was a family nearby. The father of the family was tall and broad and built like Kevin, and I started crying. The mom of the family came over and asked me what was going on, and I told her. "My husband died a few months ago, and he loved the beach, and I miss him, and your husband, he looks just like my husband, and I miss him so much." I said, "I know this is really weird, but do you mind if he gives me a hug?"

• 23:17Speaker 01

  And she said, "Oh, honey, of course, of course you can have a hug." And she yelled for her husband. He came over and he gave me a hug, and it was that same sensation of wrapping my arms around a tree or being held by a mountain, and he held me while I sobbed.

• 23:41Speaker 01

  When I finally was ready to let go, he was crying and his wife was crying. They hugged and we gave each other these awkward smiles like you do when you cry on somebody you don't know. They started to walk away and then she stopped. And she said, "This is gonna sound really weird, but was your husband's name Kevin?" I burst into tears again. Her husband looked at her and said, "I told you you had a gift." The only way she could've known was because Kevin told her.

• 24:23Speaker 01

  Every time one of these strange things has happened, I feel this joy and sorrow at the same time. This joy that he chose to do this and this awe that he did it. And then this wave of grief that he wasn't there. But I wouldn't turn it away. I would never turn it away. I don't hear from him much these days, but it's okay. Wherever he is, he's okay. And I get to be okay too.

• 25:28Glynn Washington?

  Now you know what love smells like. Laura Packer. She's a storyteller in Minneapolis. You can learn more about Laura at her website, laurapacker.com. The story comes to us from her evil twin podcast, Spooked. Spooked serves up supernatural stories every week. And if you dug this, you can subscribe to Spooked right now on any podcast platform. The original score for this piece was by Leon Morimoto. It was produced by Ann Ford.

• 26:08Glynn Washington?

  Now, after the break, a fever story from another time. Stay tuned.

• 26:29Glynn Washington?

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• 27:11Glynn Washington?

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• 28:13Glynn Washington?

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• 28:29Glynn Washington?

  Welcome back to Snap Judgment, the Fever How Will I Know episode. When something passes away, it can feel like our relationship with that person ends with that event. Like we'll never get to experience anything new with them. But sometimes, we get to know someone even better. Our next story asks whether we can ever truly know all the versions of the people we love. It comes to us from the CBC Podcast Love Me. Here's Peter Langstetten.

• 29:05Speaker 02

  My mother had a catchphrase, "life takes over." She said it all the time. "Life takes over." If she was out of shape or she'd lost touch with people, what are you gonna do? "Life takes over." In high school, I told my mom I wanted to be a musician. And she said, "I always wanted to be a painter, but life takes over." The more she said it, the more it confused me. How could life take over? Wasn't life just all of it? Everything that happened? For her, life had a very specific meaning. It was the thing keeping her from doing what she really wanted to do.

• 29:49Speaker 02

  Peter, what are you doing? When she said "life," I couldn't help hearing "us," me and my brothers.

• 30:10Speaker 02

  When my mom was 62, she died of cancer, a adenocarcinoma in her small intestine. A few months later, I got a message from a stranger on Facebook. "I loved your mother Mara very much." I clicked through to see who sent the message. The profile picture was an older Italian guy surrounded by books, wispy silver hair and a man bun. "We were together for four years, 30 years ago, in Bonn." His message continued. "I have been very sad since yesterday because I read that Mara died. My name is Francesco."

• 30:54Speaker 02

  My mom lived in Bonn, Germany, in the 70s. Well before I was born, before my mom and dad ever met. A second message from Francesco. Quote from Jorge Luis Borges. It was a poem about how "those we meet take a little piece of us with them." I didn't respond. I didn't know what to say. A few days later, Francesco sent another message. "Peter, don't you want to talk to me?" I could have ignored him. But the thing was, even though I'd never met him, I knew exactly who this man was.

• 31:39Speaker 02

  Growing up, we had photo albums down in the basement of me and my brothers and our family dog and normal things. Hmm. I talked to a radio friend, Sean, about the whole thing. But this one photo album was full of pictures of my mother and this dashing Italian man, very George Clooney-looking guy. And they're gallivanting all over Europe. They're like in each other's arms in Milan and on trains and he's lifting her up in front of statues in Bonn and they look happy.

• 32:17Speaker 03

  In love.

• 32:18Speaker 02

  Totally in love. In a bunch of those pictures, my mom and the Italian man are at dinner parties surrounded by friends. In one, there's a giant pile of spaghetti and they're opening their mouths pretending to take a huge bite. In another, my mom is sitting at the head of the table, holding court, with everyone looking at her. None of this resembles the mother I knew. The dinner parties, the gallivanting. I can't imagine her sitting at the head of the table entertaining a room. She was closed off. She never liked to draw attention to herself. But more than that, she hardly had friends at all. Neither of my parents did. I actually grew up thinking that only kids had friends. Adults didn't need them.

• 33:03Speaker 02

  The way my mom acted, it was like friends were something to be avoided at all costs.

• 33:09Speaker 02

  So I'd be at my friend's house and she'd be coming to pick me up. And she'd tell me beforehand, "When I pull into the driveway, come out to the car." Because she didn't want to come in and talk to anyone.

• 33:23Speaker 02

  And so she'd pull into the driveway and I would run into the house so that she'd have to come in and talk to them. So she'd come into the kitchen and she'd be so effusive and hugs and "how are you?" and laughing. And then we'd eventually leave. We'd get into the car and as soon as the car door slammed, the mask fell off. Wow. And she'd say, like, "Come out to the car next time or you can find your own way home." Wow. I hated seeing, you know, the contradiction between those two people.

• 34:01Speaker 02

  Growing up, I always felt like she was a big faker.

• 34:06Speaker 02

  But maybe it made her good at her job.

• 34:10Speaker 02

  My mother's job was working for the CIA. My father's was too. That's where they met. They worked undercover as case officers recruiting spies from other countries. That is a whole different story, but I only bring it up because their jobs in the CIA, at least in part, defined the culture of our family. Some kids grew up Episcopalian or vegetarian. We grew up CIA. And my mom was especially good at being tight lipped. She did not let people in. I don't mean to make it sound like she was a bad mom. She was involved, she was attentive. When I was about five or six, I wrapped bubble gum all the way around my neck and it dried and hardened

• 34:55Speaker 02

  into a pink collar. I tried to pull it off, but it was ripping out all the tiny hairs on my neck. I went to my mom and without hesitating, she stripped me naked and used canola oil to set me free. She was a good mom and I loved her. I just didn't always feel like I knew her.

• 35:15Speaker 02

  I loved your mother Mara very much. And now here was this Francesco guy telling me that he knew her. But in a gross way.

• 35:26Speaker 02

  It wasn't as if it was her childhood best friend reaching out to me and saying, "Hey, I'm so sorry, you know, I loved your mother so much." It was her ex-boyfriend.

• 35:37Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 35:39Speaker 02

  If this guy had been 10% more charming, I might not exist.

• 35:46Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, I see what you mean.

• 35:48Speaker 02

  And that was weird for me, and I wasn't sure if I wanted to go down that road. Mostly, I put Francesco out of my mind. I vacuumed my car, I closed my mom's checking account, I let life take over. But eventually, my mother's manners got the better of me, and I did write him back, mostly just to apologize for not writing him back. And that opened the floodgates. He sent me a string of messages, the timestamps are from all hours of the day. He wrote me the story of how he first met my mother. They're meet, cute.

• 36:30Speaker 02

  It was 1977, a warm spring night in Bonn, and it was a dinner party with friends. They made eyes at each other through the whole dinner, and she gave him a ride home. Then he rode his bike through Bonn all night long, jubilant, and hopped up on love. They dated for four years, they were happy, and laughed a lot. He said that I looked a lot like my mom, and also, he loved me. And then, a series of links to YouTube videos, Hallelujah by Leonard Cohen, Louis Armstrong.

• 37:07Speaker 04

  He's coming on really straight. It's like he's trying to date you all of a sudden.

• 37:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I do look like my mother. I sent Francesco's messages to my brothers. My older brother responded, "That maybe explains why Mom wanted to name me Massimiliano Alejandro." And Dad said, "Hell, no." When we were kids, my brothers and I found the photo album of Francesco. And we asked my mom, "Who is this guy? Why do you have all these?" We were old enough to sort of make fun of her about it, but she didn't think it was funny.

• 37:45Speaker 02

  Francesco kept writing, telling me that all these decades later, he's never found love like that again. Even though he's married now, with kids, he's still stuck on my mom. And it seems like for a long time after they broke up, my mom was still stuck on him too. According to Francesco, they had a secret reunion, fifteen years after they broke up, in 1995.

• 38:13Speaker 02

  So, my mom was married to my dad at this point. My brothers and I all existed. I was eight or nine, we were living in Europe. And Francesco says my mom met up with him, one last time. "We experienced the same feelings of love for each other. And if we had had more courage back then, we would have gotten back together." Oh my goodness.

• 38:36Speaker 02

  His message ended with, "I still love her, because I believe that when we die, we will meet again in heaven."

• 38:46Speaker 02

  I did not write back.

• 38:59Speaker 02

  For one of my mother's last birthdays, my brother and I bought her a canvas, with an easel and a set of oil paints. Because she said she always wanted to be a painter.

• 39:11Speaker 02

  We set it up in the living room by the window, with a view of the woods.

• 39:16Speaker 02

  After she died, I found the easel and the set of paints unopened in the basement. And the canvas was in the corner, blank, totally untouched. I stuffed all of it into a black trash bag, and threw it away.

• 39:32Speaker 02

  Life had taken over.

• 39:44Speaker 02

  Dear Peter, I hope this letter finds you well. I would like to begin by expressing my deepest condolences for the loss of your dear mother. Ten years after his first message, Francesco reached out again. His message was super formal, like it was the first time he was writing to me. He said he wanted to visit my mother's grave, to pay his respects. But my mother doesn't have a grave.

• 40:13Speaker 02

  She wanted to be scattered in the ocean, but we never actually scattered the ashes. And she's still in an attic somewhere. Oh, sh**. Like, we never did it. Yeah. Maybe we could do that real quick?

• 40:31Speaker 02

  But something about Francesco's message also made me feel kind of bad for the guy. He sounded desperate, like there was some kind of hook still in him. He was trying to find a way to say goodbye. Just like the Borges poem he sent me, I knew he had a little piece of her.

• 40:50Speaker 02

  And I wanted it back.

• 40:55Speaker 05

  Ciao, Peter.

• 40:57Speaker 02

  So I asked Francesco if he wanted to talk. Ciao, Francesco.

• 41:09Glynn Washington?

  After the break, Francesco is on the line with a story you will not believe. When Snap Judgment, the How Will I Know? episode continues, stay tuned.

• 41:27Glynn Washington?

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• 42:12Glynn Washington?

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• 42:39Glynn Washington?

  Today's episode is brought to you by Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Americans United has spent the last 80 years defending your right to live as yourself and believe as you choose, so long as you don't harm others. Through film screenings, speaking engagements, and valuable resources like the Know Your Rights and Public School Guides, AU empowers people nationwide to recommit to the separation of church and state, protecting individual freedoms and strengthening our democracy for all. Freedom without favor and equality without exception. Learn more at au.org/TENC.

• 43:24Glynn Washington?

  Welcome back to Snap Judgment. My name is Glynn Washington. And when last we left, Peter had been contacted by his now-deceased mother's long-lost Italian lover, Francesco. And finally, after giving it some thought, Peter decides to give Francesco a call and get the real story of this mysterious chapter in his mother's life. Snap Judgment.

• 43:51Speaker 05

  Ciao Peter.

• 43:53Speaker 02

  One morning in July, I got on a call with Francesco.

• 43:57Speaker 05

  Buongiorno.

• 43:57Speaker 06

  Buongiorno.

• 43:58Speaker 02

  Ciao Francesco. Francesco's spoken English isn't great, so I got my friend Alex to translate for us.

• 44:05Speaker 06

  Pete ha detto che parlate...

• 44:08Speaker 02

  Francesco is definitely older than his profile picture. His hair is white, combed over and wet, like he just took a shower.

• 44:16Speaker 05

  Ho suonato e non ho aperto la porta. Ho aspettato qualche minuto.

• 44:18Speaker 02

  He tells me more about meeting my mother for the first time. How he saw her coming up the stairs, they locked eyes, and right away he knew there was this connection.

• 44:27Speaker 05

  Poi sono stato tutto il giorno lì.

• 44:29Speaker 06

  Tutto il giorno? L'hai passato bene?

• 44:32Speaker 05

  Sì, sono stato lì e poi sono rimasto anche la notte lì.

• 44:35Speaker 06

  And he stayed the night?

• 44:36Speaker 05

  E dopo ci siamo rimasti sempre insieme.

• 44:38Speaker 06

  Then they were always together after that.

• 44:40Speaker 02

  You stayed the night, that first night?

• 44:43Speaker 06

  La prima notte sei rimasto...

• 44:45Speaker 05

  Beh, penso che era il giorno dopo sì.

• 44:49Speaker 06

  Chad.

• 44:49Speaker 05

  Io ero molto innamorato.

• 44:50Speaker 06

  He was in love already.

• 44:53Speaker 02

  So you hit it off immediately.

• 44:54Speaker 06

  Chad.

• 44:56Speaker 02

  My mom and Francesco moved in together. They were students and had no money. They picked potatoes in the fields. And I'm like, "Wait, I thought you were poor students, not Prussian peasants." I asked Francesco if my mom was his first love. He says no, the most serious but not the first.

• 45:16Speaker 05

  Ci siamo rafforzati sempre di più.

• 45:19Speaker 02

  And then, about thirty minutes into the conversation, Francesco pauses.

• 45:26Speaker 05

  Adesso mi hai fatto una confidenza. Non so se posso.

• 45:30Speaker 06

  He wants to say something.

• 45:30Speaker 05

  Una confidenza è un po' molto privata.

• 45:32Speaker 06

  A very private, he wants to say something very private. Sì. Are you okay with that?

• 45:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:37Speaker 06

  Sì, sì.

• 45:40Speaker 05

  La mamma era incinta di tre mesi, aveva un bambino, a parte mia.

• 45:46Speaker 06

  Oh wow.

• 45:46Speaker 05

  E quindi è abortito una volta, tre volte.

• 45:49Speaker 02

  Alex is going, like, "Oh wow."

• 45:54Speaker 02

  And I'm thinking, like, "What could it possibly be?"

• 45:58Speaker 06

  Tre volte con...

• 46:00Speaker 05

  Abortito.

• 46:01Speaker 06

  Con...

• 46:02Speaker 05

  Sì.

• 46:06Speaker 06

  Saying that there were like three abortions when they were together. That uh they just didn't have enough money to make it work and this was another difficult decision.

• 46:21Speaker 02

  Three abortions?

• 46:28Speaker 02

  Was it more her decision or your decision or the decision of both of you?

• 46:34Speaker 06

  È stata una decisione che avete beh l'avete preso insieme ma.

• 46:39Speaker 05

  Sì ma è stata una decisione sua più che altro io ho rispettato la sua decisione.

• 46:43Speaker 06

  Her decision. He respected it or respected her choice.

• 46:50Speaker 02

  I was just thinking about how it was three.

• 46:56Speaker 02

  Three of them and there's three of us, me and my two brothers. And there's there's a weird symmetry between my mother's alternate Italian life. And then the life she actually had with the three of us. It was just bizarre. What I'm hearing is

• 47:21Speaker 02

  just how close I came to not existing. You know, there's no meeting my dad, there's no maybe no CIA, like that that whole life path that I exist in, it gets pruned.

• 47:41Speaker 05

  Negli ultimi anni era un rapporto.

• 47:43Speaker 06

  He's curious about.

• 47:47Speaker 02

  At one point, he starts asking me questions.

• 47:50Speaker 06

  If you can't ask this question, like how was the relationship between your mom and your dad, especially towards the end, I guess, or just around this time?

• 48:03Speaker 05

  We am gonna respond.

• 48:05Speaker 06

  You don't have to answer.

• 48:06Speaker 02

  No, no, it's okay. I'm thinking, I'm thinking.

• 48:14Speaker 02

  My mother, she was always the outsider in the family.

• 48:26Speaker 02

  This kind of surprises him.

• 48:32Speaker 02

  Turns out, I was surprised too. I had never thought of my mom that way before. But this idea just bubbled up to the surface. She didn't belong somehow, in her own family.

• 48:50Speaker 02

  At family dinners growing up, we would all be joking around. Then my mom would chime in, and it was like a record scratch. It was just clear that she didn't get the joke at all. My mom was Catholic, the rest of us were atheists. She was a huge rule follower. I drank all through high school because we lived in Germany and it was legal. When we moved back to the US, I poured myself a glass of wine with dinner, and she said, "I don't think so. In this house, we obey the law."

• 49:29Speaker 03

  So, man?

• 49:30Speaker 02

  Hey, how's it going? This is my little brother, Will.

• 49:33Speaker 03

  Good, I'm just doing my laundry.

• 49:37Speaker 02

  He's just doing his laundry.

• 49:39Speaker 03

  Yeah?

• 49:41Speaker 02

  Great. Well, after some small talk, I ask Will if he remembers our mother the same way I do.

• 49:49Speaker 03

  I don't have the memory of her being the outsider, or her not fitting in. But I do have, like, some distinct memories of her saying that explicitly. I was maybe like, third or fourth grade, maybe younger.

• 50:04Speaker 02

  Will and I used to wait for my mom to come home from work. As soon as we'd see the Volvo pull into the driveway, we'd run into the hallway closet and hide in the coats. When she came in the door, we'd jump out and scare her. Usually she'd pretend to be surprised or laugh it off, but then one day, it was just different.

• 50:26Speaker 03

  I remember her yelling and saying it was us and then it was her and that pretty soon that she was gonna leave so that it would just be us, you know, us like boys.

• 50:41Speaker 02

  And saying, "Well, maybe nobody needs me here. It'll just be you, boys."

• 50:47Speaker 02

  That period also was when she was saying she was gonna leave a lot.

• 50:52Speaker 06

  Oh, really?

• 50:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. Not that she and my dad were just gonna get divorced. She was gonna leave all of us.

• 51:06Speaker 06

  You hadn't heard from her in 15 years.

• 51:08Speaker 02

  It's in talking to Francesco that I realize it was around this same time that my mom called him up, wanting to see him after having not been in touch for 15 years or so. What else did you discuss when you met up in 1995?

• 51:33Speaker 06

  Well, they kind of caught up what was going on in their kind of lives.

• 51:40Speaker 06

  She was a little bit complaining about your pops. Maybe he had retired or something or was like staying at home more and was like getting on her nerves is what he's saying, but he doesn't... He said that she didn't seem particularly happy.

• 51:56Speaker 02

  Do you think that she was reaching out to you because

• 52:03Speaker 02

  she was having doubts about her life with my father?

• 52:14Speaker 06

  I think it was more just the fact that she was there and it would have been nice to catch up.

• 52:22Speaker 06

  Maybe it was like nostalgia for the good times they had, but he thinks she still potentially had feelings for him. She was like stroking his hand and...

• 52:33Speaker 02

  Did I tell you that he said that she was stroking his hand while they were meeting?

• 52:40Speaker 03

  No.

• 52:43Speaker 03

  Nope, didn't tell me that.

• 52:46Speaker 02

  Do you believe that?

• 52:48Speaker 03

  Uh, I mean dude, I don't know. Like if it's possible, I mean, I don't.

• 52:53Speaker 02

  Growing up, we never saw my parents stroking each other's hands.

• 52:57Speaker 03

  Like.

• 52:58Speaker 02

  Can you imagine that?

• 53:01Speaker 03

  I mean.

• 53:02Speaker 02

  Imagine it, try to imagine it.

• 53:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, dude, when you said it, I imagined it. Um.

• 53:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, but just, no, really try though.

• 53:12Speaker 05

  But Francesco says the handholding, that was it. Nothing else happened.

• 53:23Speaker 02

  Like they both had their own lives and kids and marriages and they just still had like a deep respect for each other, I think. Towards the end of the call, Francesco's wife comes into the room and then leaves. He jokes that she's getting jealous.

• 53:40Speaker 06

  Ciao.

• 53:41Speaker 02

  Then we say our goodbyes and sign off.

• 53:48Speaker 02

  My mom had kept a diary, but I hadn't been able to bring myself to actually read the thing. After the phone call with Francesco, I opened it up. Uh, let's see here.

• 54:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, she says, um, she's talking about how much she loves her boys and how wonderful we are. And she says, but I think it's more that they just don't like me as a person. That's one I can't resolve, however painful. Hmm.

• 54:20Speaker 02

  Another thing that comes up a bunch of times is saying, like, they don't get that. I'm not just mom, I'm a human being. She almost felt like dehumanized or something. Um.

• 54:35Speaker 02

  The boys are all grand, what great human beings they are, even if they don't like me.

• 55:00Speaker 02

  It was just a few years after the secret rendezvous with Francesco that my mom got cancer.

• 55:07Speaker 07

  Oh, really?

• 55:09Speaker 02

  And that maybe saved the family. It saved their marriage.

• 55:17Speaker 07

  It kept the family together.

• 55:19Speaker 02

  Yeah. Something to rally around, something to focus on. You know, suddenly she needed all of us. We all had a part to play. My dad cooked elaborate meals to entice her to eat. We took turns shampooing her blonde wig.

• 55:37Speaker 02

  After a string of surgeries, my mom had a nephrostomy bag, a little plastic bag on her hip for her pee. And one of my jobs was to change the bag. She'd be in bed, napping or something, and wake up and say she needed her bag changed.

• 55:55Speaker 02

  I would do...

• 55:59Speaker 02

  I would do this voice, the voice of the nephrostomy bag boy. I guess. Kind of a medieval page boy voice. So I would like come into the room and I'd be like, "Here's the piss boy!

• 56:16Speaker 02

  I'm the piss boy!" And she just thought that was the fu-

• 56:27Speaker 02

  She just thought that was the funniest thing.

• 56:33Speaker 02

  When we were clearing out my mom's basement, after we found the canvas and the paints, I also found a storage bin. It was packed full of my artwork. From bad sketches of trees I'd done in high school, all the way back to hand-print turkeys from kindergarten. On the back of each page in my mother's handwriting was my name and the age when I did it. I found another bin, then another. She'd saved everything.

• 57:06Speaker 02

  Here, in half a dozen Rubbermaid's, was the evidence of the life that took over.

• 57:12Speaker 02

  A life she'd chosen to stay in.

• 57:33Glynn Washington?

  That story comes to us from Love Me from the CBC. It was produced by Peter Lang Stanton, Crystal Duhaime and Mira Burke-Wentonic. It was sound designed by Crystal Duhaime, mixed engineered by Michelle Macklem, featuring original music by David Drury. To hear more stories about the messiness of human connection, check out Love Me wherever you get your podcasts.

• 58:04Glynn Washington?

  If you missed even a moment, you can listen to the Snap series Fever anytime, anywhere on any podcast platform and tell people about it on the Instagram, on the Facebook, on the podcast platform itself. What about that? The good ship Snap Judgment flies in geosynchronous orbit around KQED in San Francisco. Robots. Please note that no Snap series content may be used for training, testing or developing machine learning or AI systems without prior written permission on Team Snap. The union representatives, producers, artists, editors and engineers are members of the National Association of Broadcast Employees and Technicians Communications Worker of America, AFL-CIO Local 51.

• 58:45Glynn Washington?

  Snap is brought to you by the team that is not afraid of commitment. Except, of course, for the producer, Mr. Mark Ristich. He just wants to see the commitment spelled out in a blood tattoo etched onto the forehead. And this is not the news. No way this is the news. In fact, you could buy one of those saccharine syrupy sweet cards from the drugstore for your someone special. And then when you get it home and read it again, you could shove it into the garbage and write them something from the heart instead and you would still not be as far away from the news as this is. But this is P-R-X.

• 59:36Speaker 07

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