Aldo Moro and my father died on the same day. I can’t pinpoint the exact minute or even hour Aldo Moro died. No one but his murderer can. But his body was found in Rome on May 9, 1978. I didn’t know this when I was 16 and in a hospital in Oakland, California, hovering over my father’s pale and soon-to-be lifeless body. Dying. My father was dying at 11 am on that date, potentially at the same time Aldo Moro—the prime minister of Italy—was shot in the head and stuffed into the trunk of a Renault.

“I’m so thirsty,” my father had whispered.

My mother helped him sip water through a straw. His feet poked up at the end of the bed, thin and white as ghost eels.

Somewhere in Italy, Aldo Moro’s life might have still been in the balance. The government would not negotiate with the Red Brigades, a militant far-left group, not even when Pope Paul the sixth offered to take his place.
On the seventh floor of the Oakland Kaiser’s ICU, there was no negotiating either. My father’s body was letting go, bleeding out. He and Aldo Moro would both be officially dead by nightfall.

Famous people who died on this date: Magnus, King of Norway; CW Post, cereal manufacturer; Vidal Sassoon, hair stylist; Mary, Queen of Naples; and Tan Duc Thanh Nguyen, Australian heroin smuggler.

After my father died, I didn’t lose my virginity, but I got a perm. Do you remember those? The tight cap of fake curls white people sported, from about 1976 onward to the end of the 80s. The process involved small curlers dipped in poisonous glop that ruined hair into springy curls that lasted for months.

“I’m not sure why everyone wants these,” the hairstylist said, his hands sticky with goo.

My perm didn’t turn me into someone whose father didn’t die. Instead, I sat in classrooms, fuming chemically, wishing for my long straight hair, the way it grew shiny and blond in the summer.

Nothing I did made the curls go away, not soakings with Herbal Essence shampoo. Not my mother’s electric curlers in the reverse. Weeks went by, the curls got bigger, worse, brittle. I could barely smile for the school photographer, even though I’d made sure my perm was in a tight, perfect cap on my head. I felt the pimples on my chin and forehead throb. I prayed for emergencies, fire, storm. At home, the house was empty, my mother working at the library, my sisters and me at school. Somewhere, our dog curled into a ball, sleeping.

I faked illness so I could stay with my dog. I stopped plucking my eyebrows. I wore my coat zipped up to my chin. My boyfriend broke up with me because I didn’t have sex with him, even though I was sure I wanted to. My youngest sister was diagnosed with diabetes. When the phone call came from the hospital lab, she took off and ran around the outside of the house until I caught her and carried her back inside.

Famous people who once had bad perms: Tom Hanks, Barbra Streisand, Cher, Justin Timberlake, Bradley Cooper in American Hustle, Mr. Brady from The Brady Bunch, David Bowie.

In the fall after my father died, my mother pulled all three of us out of school and drove us to Santa Barbara, where we stayed off-season at fancy hotel. The weather was warm, the air soft, and college kids scampered on the flat expanse of beach. My perm was still in play, and I was fat, a state I reverted to for many years, but this fat bout started with the casseroles and chocolate cake people brought over after my father’s memorial service. It got worse when I quit swimming competitively in the weeks after my father died. My fat thrived because my father was no longer there to criticize me or offer me money for each ten lost pounds.

My middle sister, two years my junior, wasn’t fat despite the fact she ate half the casseroles with me. Neither of my sisters ran to fat. But this sister was tall and lean and had that flat-chested 70s look and no perm. She looked like Cher before her perm, Cher pretending-to-be-a-Native-American Cher.

On the floating dock not too far from shore, my sister and I met a boy who was more my age, but liked my sister for her long legs and sleek burgundy swimsuit. She was barely 14, but he bantered with her as if they were at a college party. She smiled, flipped her still long and straight hair. He made jokes, she cracked some back. She could keep up: she read a lot.

I wanted to kill her.

Later, I thought she was dead. Or at least dismembered, like Mary Vincent, who just weeks before, was found wandering nude on the highway, carrying her own arms, the ones her rapist had cut off with an ax. Despite the existence of someone like Lawrence Singleton and his horrid weapon of choice, my mother allowed my sister to go out with this college boy. Who knows where they went. Maybe it was just his car. I don’t know all the details, only what I could figure out later from reading her smudgy diary, the one she stashed under her bed.

She and the strange boy stayed out till three. I was awake in the hotel room as my mother dozed, read her book, dozed. She never thought to call the police, much less the hotel manager. But I knew the truth. Another family member was missing, doomed, gone. My sister could have been shot in the head and stuffed in a trunk, and my mother didn’t care. She could be carrying her own arms and legs, and my mother would want to finish her paragraph.

Or maybe, as I also learned later, my mother already knew what was happening, understanding the language of men, the one they spoke when they took what they wanted, as did the close, trusted family friend, grabbing up what he wanted from my mother when she was 12. This was the legacy she passed to her daughter, but my mother had lived through it, right? Why wouldn’t my sister survive, older than she was by two years, clearly capable to live through it on her own.

“He didn’t know what he was doing,” my grandmother told my mother. “He had been drinking. It wasn’t his fault.”

I didn’t know any of this in the 1978 hotel room as I sat on the edge of my twin bed, waiting. All I knew was that I was alone, the only one who knew my sister was a mess of parts scattered in the dunes.

Finally, my sister pushed open the door and sauntered into the room, smug, her pants odd on her hips, her eyes half closed. No one ever spoke of it again.

Famous people who were molested: Ellen DeGeneres, Johannes Brahms, Anthony Edwards, Queen Latifah, Rita Hayworth.

Later, when I was no longer a virgin and had two children of my own, my other sister died. Of course, it didn’t happen just like that. Not like poor Aldo Moro, who was kidnapped but alive—and then not. My youngest sister’s dying was even longer than my father’s, taking years as her pancreas rotted inside her living body, insulin wrecking her nerves, eyes, gut, and extremities.

The last time I saw her, she was in her hospital bed, comatose. The nurses had just taken out her breathing tube and turned off all the other machines. For the first time in a week, the room was quiet. Her tall, lean body was a star on the white bed. The room glowed brilliant and fluorescent, and I held onto her ankle, thin and delicate, so unrelated to me. I compared our bodies, even when she was brain dead and I had no reason to be jealous, not any more.

Next to me, a nun wearing glasses and thick sensible shoes pushed me toward the bed. “Watch,” she said. “See her go.”

How beautiful my sister looked, her hair nurse-braided, her writhing body finally still, her breath a one, a two, a three, and then nothing, no more, whatever stardust she was made of somewhere in the room but not in her body. But she hadn’t been in her body since the paramedics rushed her to the closest hospital. She’d left when she jerked into a coma. She was nowhere on this earth.

Famous people with diabetes: Tom Hanks (two lists!), HG Wells, Chaka Khan, Billie Jean King, Elvis, Halle Berry.

All these years later, I would willingly relinquish sex, the drive gone. I wish to reclaim the time I spent wanting something I would now gladly hand to the next person.

“Here,” I would say. “You can have this sex. It’s really still very good. I’m just, well, done.”

Death is still with me, only closer. A year ago, I held my dying friend in my arms for hours, trying to make her comfortable. She was semi-conscious, wracked with pain, all her insides unloosening as her daughter and I tried to tend to her.

“Feel better,” I said stupidly as I left, kissing the top of her bald head, pretending, maybe, this would not be the last time I saw her.

“I would if I could,” she said, a moment of lucid irony in the death room.

Now, my hair is short, straight, and graying, my body the right size, finally. Now my mother floats in her brain, events unhinged from the timeline, my sister and father alive and then not, alive and then not. Now my remaining sister lives on a continent not mine, her life in a different season than my own. Now my children are grown into their own lives. Now, I am only a few steps behind my dying and then dead friend. Now death comes unexpectedly and for everyone, as it did for Aldo Moro, at least until he felt the gun at his temple. Now, like my mother, my dead are both my past and my present, everything all at once.