Project Rebirth (26 page)

Sergio and Tanya's first kiss was on June 30, 1994, in Miami, Florida—where Tanya was living at the time and Sergio had just come for a visit. He had a healthy head of black hair and thick, dark eyebrows, and he wore a white V-neck T-shirt that would end up see-through by the end of their sweaty night of dancing together. He was a playboy, to be sure, but Tanya sensed something deeper underneath all of his bravado.

They spent five straight days together—making love, laughing, and talking about growing up in the same neighborhood in Queens and their shared taste in music. When Sergio brought up the book
Many Lives, Many Master
s—the story of a skeptical psychiatrist's experience with channeling and reincarnation—Tanya's suspicion was confirmed. She thought, “Wow, not only is he this supermacho man, but he has this spiritual side to him.”

He returned to New York and their whirlwind romance slowed down a bit. Tanya tried to play it cool but was determined not to let Sergio forget her. She sent him funny cards, called him every once in a while, wished him a happy birthday when July Fourth rolled around. As subtle as she tried to be, there was no denying it. Nobody made her feel the way Sergio did. In 1995, she moved back to New York to, as they say, see about a boy.

By two a.m. on Wednesday, September 12, 2001, Tanya learned that Sergio was officially on the missing list. By Wednesday afternoon, Sergio's name suddenly disappeared from the missing list. Everyone let out wild cheers and started crying with relief, but there was still no information about where he was or what had happened to him. The euphoria wouldn't last long. On Thursday, September 13, 2001, Sergio's name mysteriously reappeared on the horrible list.

Tanya then got busy making a missing poster, as she'd learned other family members were doing. Only the best for her Sergio. She made about thirty color copies and passed them out to friends, giving the marching orders—
Put them up everywhere and anywhere. We must find Sergio and bring him home. He's out there.

By Thursday, the majority of her initial visitors had gone home. Tanya realized that she'd need to keep people posted, so she started to send out emails. The first one read:

Hopeful. That's the tone she wanted to strike. There was no way, she figured, that her strong, good-natured Sergio had been taken down by this thing. He had to be somewhere. They just didn't know where.

But a week went by and hundreds of posters were taped onto streetlights, fences, and subway station walls all over the five boroughs, and still there was no sign of him. The news reports were grim—there had been many survivors and many dead, but very few injured. Tanya continued to hold on to hope, continued to send out optimistic emails. On September 17, Tanya wrote:

And then another week went by. The news reports grew even more grim—the rescue crews were finding very few people still alive. The scene was more accurately described as a recovery effort. “Hope in the beginning feels like such a violation of the loss,” memoirist Gail Caldwell writes, “and yet without it we couldn't survive.” On October 2, Tanya wrote:

She heard that someone had once been trapped in the rubble of an earthquake, alive, for twenty-eight days. The number twenty-eight stuck in her mind. She clung with a fierce desperation to the possibility that Sergio could be alive. “Twenty-eight days,” she told people. “It's happened before. It could happen again.”

Yet as the twenty-eighth day was approaching, her hope was running out. She felt like she was going crazy. “Did Sergio and I even exist?” she wondered, sleep deprived and in shock.

Then, as soon as she doubted their love, she would see some sign that confirmed it. Sergio and Tanya had always had a thing for bunnies. They sent each other cards with bunnies on them, called each other bunny, even referred to their impending postwedding bliss as the “bunnymoon.” In the weeks that she waited for Sergio to come home, she saw bunnies everywhere—on the side of a truck, bustling through Jackson Heights, on a candy wrapper, on a magic show on television.

What, Tanya wondered, was the meaning of these synchronous moments? Were these real signs that Sergio was alive somewhere and just needed to be found and brought home? Or was he communicating from another realm?

On the twenty-sixth day, she couldn't stand it anymore. She decided that she had to call a psychic in Florida that a friend had told her about, a woman named Elaine, who was supposed to have a direct line to the spiritual realm beyond. Tanya remembered the discussion she'd had with Sergio about channeling—so many years ago in that messy, blissful bed—as she dialed Elaine's number on the evening of October 7.

After a quick introduction—nothing more than names, niceties, and Tanya's birth date—Elaine launched in: “You are being stripped of everything you know, so that you can come into your own power.” Then she paused, her voice dropped, and she said softly, “Oh dear. You've lost someone. Your soul mate.” The last stubborn bit of hope left Tanya's body with her next exhalation.

Though it had been nearly a year since Sergio's death, Tanya still held on to his favorite cereal: Honey Bunches of Oats. She felt great comfort in touching the box, knowing that Sergio's hands had once touched it as well. She knew it was crazy, but she was too sad to care much about crazy. She says, “One of my fears is that, as time passes, I'm going to forget. And then I go to my boxes. I saved everything.”

It wasn't just the cereal boxes. It was the chocolate drawer (Sergio had a real sweet tooth). And the clothes. Sometimes Tanya would stand at the closet and gently finger Sergio's soccer jerseys, thinking of how much he loved the sport and when she would scream “Goal!” Even his bric-a-brac—old receipts, batteries, and loose coins—became sacred talismans to Tanya. She would rub each item and wonder when he'd set it aside. It amazed her that these things, which had once seemed so mundane, were now sources of longing for her, sacred almost. If only she could see him empty out his pockets one more time, his big hands diving in and coming out with a strange little assortment of things. That one silly action would be so wildly comforting.

Yet he would never do that again. He would never wash his hands with his favorite sandalwood soap or whistle through his teeth. He would never eat another slice of pizza at Old Palermos or make a glass of his signature “Sergio Sangria”—red wine with Fresca. He would never get his hair cut at Jimmy the Greek's. He would never refer to himself in the third person. Worst of all, he would never touch her again. “I just want him to come home,” Tanya said. “I feel like life is so fake.”

The outside world was jarring. People wanted to make small talk about the weather. Tanya was expected to go grocery shopping and do her laundry and keep the store running. Sometimes it made her feel like screaming, as Al Pacino so famously had in
Scent of a Woman,
“I'm in the dark here!” All that was authentic to her, internally, was lost and yet the world went on, bustling along with its Pollyanna brightness, expecting her to live as if living wasn't a dangerous and sad thing to do. The incongruence made her feel alienated from other people and numb to the world.

Even a trip to France with her mother, a vacation she'd once dreamed of, left her feeling empty. Looking out over the fields of dancing lavender, a sight she had anticipated all her life, she experienced nothing, as if her heart were responding with a blank buzz to something so beautiful.

Perhaps even worse than the blank buzz was the gut shot of envy. One of Sergio's old cop buddies called with elation in his voice and told her that he'd had a son and named him after Sergio. Tanya tried to sound joyful in her response, but the words stuck in her throat.
She
would never have a baby with Sergio. She would never hear him call someone, his big hazel eyes wide with disbelief and joy, and tell them that he was a daddy. She admits, “It's so yucky, the feelings of envy and self-pity.”

These are the kinds of feelings that she is able to share with her support group of widows, knowing they will understand. She doesn't want to sound bitter or ungenerous. But when girlfriends hold their lefts hands out to her, revealing the promise of “till death do us part” sparkling on their fingers, she has to repress the sharp pang of injustice and say, “How exciting!” as if she means it, as if she could possibly mean it when her own love story was cut short.

It was Herculean just to mourn Sergio, just to come to terms with the loss of such a gorgeous bear of a man, her “Big Daddy,” her true love. But she also had to mourn their future together. As Carmella B'Hahn, author of
Mourning Has Broken,
explains, “Our stories of how life might unfold, although invisible, are often as powerful and real to us as the actual present moment . . . the more vivid our imaginings of the future, the greater the loss will be felt.”

Tanya reflects, “What I lost was tremendous. It wasn't just losing the love of my life. It was losing my expectations, my dreams, my future, what I thought would be my future.”

Tanya remembers a dusk stroll with Sergio in their neighborhood in Queens. They spotted an old couple, wrinkled hands intertwined, and Sergio leaned over to her and said, “That's going to be you and me one day, babe.”

Remembering this moment is deeply painful, like a broken promise. Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Marilynne Robinson writes:

Tanya treasures the little signs she gets from beyond, the small ways in which she feels like Sergio is reaching back, reassuring her that he is still with her, but she also finds them cruel. She explains, “At moments when I'm really having a lot of despair, I feel that it's such a blessing that I can get these things, but at the same time, it's like ‘Why can't you just come home?' Instead of conjuring up bunnies, conjure up flesh and bone and come home.”

Sergio will not come home. He can't. The finality of it is enough to make Tanya long for her own end. “What keeps me going right now,” she explains, in late 2002, “is remembering him, of course, and remembering that I am capable of a tremendous amount of love and joy . . . and guilt.” Tanya pauses and dives down to the depths of her own suffering, then continues: “Guilt keeps me here. All of my friends and family keep me here. Because, believe me, sometimes the pain is so much that I don't want to be.”