Stop what you’re doing and read Rocco Palmo’s farewell to “The Boss,” his 95-year-old Italian immigrant grandmother, who died last week. Excerpts:

I have never known anyone who embraced the Cross like she did, and doubt I ever will. Gram’s life was full of them – from being raised in a Vincentian orphanage in Italy after her parents died before she was four, to coming to this country and being led under false pretenses into an arranged marriage to a man 23 years her senior, becoming a widow with seven kids before her 40th birthday, then working three jobs to raise the family on her own as her daughters slept three to a single bed. And these were merely the biggest hurdles among many others.

To put it mildly, her road was anything but easy, glamorous or comfortable. But the long, hard path of sacrifice would come to bear as great a reward in the family she always wanted: seven kids, 26 grandchildren, 40 great-grandchildren and one great-great grandbaby. Add in the spouses, and we number well over 100. In other words, we’ve become a tribe unto ourselves.

Not bad for an orphan, by any stretch. Ask how she got over, though, and her answer was always the same: “I do my little part, and God did the rest.”

More:

Now, by no means was Boss ever immaculate – hearing her talk for just ten seconds invariably proved that – but the sword would often come to pierce her own soul, too… and whenever it did over 95 years, all that ever flowed out was love: a love whose true measure, as she always taught us both in strong word and heroic witness, is only ever found in one thing:“sacrifice.” From Castorano to South Philly and everything in between, that word was the song of her life – ever a painful one, but one she sang with everything she had, in faith that she would rejoice in its yield and, above all, so her own would be all the richer for it.

Read the whole thing.  Rocco says:

As she always urged me in her inimitable immigrant’s “broke English,” yet with a pride that broke any language barrier, “Rocky, you write my book. It be better than the Bible.”

Would somebody in publishing please contact that man and sign him to a book contract. I deeply want to know more about The Boss, her world, her century, and the tribe she made.