Counting: A Midlife Inventory of Gain and Loss
An excerpt from memoir My Roman History by Alizah Holstein
by Alizah Holstein
I had been trained as a historian. I had become a historian. Then I had become someone else. You would think I had thought enough about time.
Since college, I had read and discussed theories of time at length. Time as a circle, time as a river, time as a parabola, time as an endless upward trajectory. Yet here I was, at forty, railing against time itself.
It was as if I had blinked and, in that instant, life happened. Since leaving Rome in 2004, I had received my PhD, taught for two years, then had a baby. I held him in my arms, cooing at the sight of his ten fingers, his ten tiny toes. I stopped reading. For the first time in many years, I wore bright colors. With diminishing hope, and eventually diminishing interest, I continued applying for academic jobs. When none panned out, I started a business. Then I left academia for good and had a second child. Although the narrative had taken some hairpin turns, the progress of life felt mostly orderly. Time crept forward. The past was clearly the past, and the future, the future. During this long blink of the first years of motherhood, I stopped thinking about faraway places. Or more truthfully, that faraway place.
That Rome. Here was life and now was love. And that lasted. Until I went back. And remembered.
It was the remembering that split me into pieces.
At the end of my meeting with Paolo, I had thanked him for the many gifts he had given me over the years, the greatest of which was making me feel at home. That expression of gratitude was long overdue. But then came something I did not expect. On the coattail of my words rode in a decade of feelings. They emerged as I was walking back to my hotel, and all at once, as if they had been shuttered for years in a broom closet and suddenly freed. They buzzed around me like a great swarm. I could hardly breathe.
In Rome, and later, at home, I began to count, and to mourn, all the things I had lost. I grieved my beloved city and the unrelenting march of time that had pulled me from it; I grieved, finally, the dead end of my academic career; I grieved the impossibility of coming back, of going back, and wondered at the bristling contradiction between my happy home life and this sudden sad clutching at a time gone by. And most deeply of all, I grieved my lost self, the girl who had followed, even if by a wandering path, the unfurling thread of her own unlikely pursuit. At the same time, I brimmed with gratitude for the gift of this place that had almost been my home, and even for the grief, which, perversely perhaps, proved the worth of the loss I felt.
Acknowledging this loss was not easy. I was married to a man I loved. We had two small children. I had close friends where I lived, and a feeling of connection to the world around me, a home whose windows flooded with morning sun. Dwelling on grief felt indulgent, and potentially hurtful to those I loved. And yet I could see no way around it. The grief was everywhere. It grabbed me by the throat and stole my breath. It hunkered down in my stomach and spit out my food. It demanded that I listen to it, deal with it, barter and trade with it. It took up residence in my mind and in my heart, making infernal calculations and Faustian bargains about how to recover a self that existed only in the past. When I had journeyed half of our life’s way, I found myself within a shadowed forest. And the only way out, as Dante well knew, is through.
After the wedding but before leaving Rome, I walked back to the courtyard of Sant’Ivo. I sat down cross‑legged in the corner, in the same spot where the French mother in the striped shirt had sat almost twelve years earlier. I did not know what to do with the memory of that September day, with the sheer, monumental coincidence of it. It felt like a gift, and a torment. For the first time, I could see that in leaving Rome, in leaving academia, I had left an integral part of myself behind. But that person was still here, in the courtyard of Sant’Ivo, forever looking out over that balustrade. I counted the things I had. They were more than trivial. My husband, the man with whom I had glimpsed a future after only twenty minutes of conversation at a party. Never before had I believed in tales of instant love, but the universe, which often proves my assumptions wrong, had presented me with just that. And then there were our children. Our young boys, their shoulder blades as delicate as almond slivers, their smooth boy bodies that still sought mine in the night. All this—warmth and beauty and bodies nuzzled in sleep—was mine.
And yet. I was overtaken by the need to recover my old tracks, to step back in time. As illogical as it was, I struggled to reconcile the warmth of the present with the need to hold on to, to incorporate, to possess, an ever‑receding past. Past. Future. Present. Yesterday. Ten years ago. To‑ morrow. A thousand years ago. I considered these words, these concepts, from all sides, trying to understand what they meant. How is it that a historian can lose her sense of time? Feel young and ancient all at once? If only I could stay in Rome, I thought. To figure it all out. To calculate precisely what had been lost and what gained, what was dear and what had ceased to be. To be able to say that was past and this is present. For the film between the two had slipped away.
I longed to go on sitting in the courtyard at Sant’Ivo. I longed to stay in Rome. But I did not. I could not. Clutching my bag of tufa stone, tiny conch shells and pine nuts, my body strained its way to the train station. Roma Trastevere. Villa Bonelli. Magliana. Muratella. Ponte Galeria. Fiera di Roma. Parco Leonardo. Each stop farther from where I wanted, or needed, to be. Each stop cinching the elastic tighter, pulling my insides into knots. My mind rebelling.
At the airport, I waited at the gate, looking like anyone else, I suppose, though my heart had turned to lead and plummeted to my feet. When it was time, I dragged my lead heart onto the plane, sat holding it and examining it the way one might a sick child. Once again, incredulous at the fact of being on a plane whose nose was pointed toward the runway, with Rome behind me. And then the jet propelled me and several hundred others across the heavens and set us down gently in the New World, my old one. I stuffed my damp scarf into my purse, walked back into my house. Into the leaping embraces of my children. Into the arms of my husband. Into the pleasant joyful boring satisfying unsatisfying chaotic loving everything of our daily routine. Into the person I was in the present, whoever that was, rather than the one I once had been, or thought I might one day be.
From MY ROMAN HISTORY: A Memoir by Alizah Holstein, published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright © 2024 by Alizah Holstein.
Alizah Holstein is an independent editor with a Ph.D. in History from Cornell University and an International MFA in Nonfiction Writing & Literary Translation from Vermont College of Fine Arts. She lives in Providence, RI with her husband and children.