 Charlotte Chillura standing in the kitchen of the home she shared with her husband Tony Chillura Sr. in Charleston, S.C. It’s the sinking feeling. The one that never completely goes away. Even after you heal and move on, even after the mourning period is over. The way your heart drops and your stomach flips. The way you can’t help but miss seeing her smile and feeling her hugs and hearing her southern accent. These feelings came rushing back when I checked my phone and sat up in bed. “Saturday, January 22.” Nonna’s birthday. Two years without her tender laugh. Two years without the aromas of her kitchen. Two years without the person that inspired me to dream. But it was actually over three years ago when I wrote about her for the first time. In a fruitless effort to capture the essence of Charlotte Chillura and her incomparable shrimp ‘n grits recipe, I wrote about my experience in the kitchen with my grandmother. One morning in December of 2018, Nonna, as we call her – derived from Nonno's Cuban-Italian heritage, welcomed me into her Charleston, S.C. home with a kiss on the check and ushered me quickly into the kitchen. Hours we spent in the beating heart of their house sharing recipes, culinary tricks, stories and laughter before sitting down and enjoying this southern staple with the rest of the family. My father to this day can never order shrimp ‘n grits at the hundreds of restaurants that serve it in the Lowcountry. It never lives up to Nonna’s. I wrote about her secret to the perfect grit viscosity and why she had such a strong desire to leave her small-town southern home. She had patience and creativity and tenderness in the kitchen – all things I do not possess. We spoke about dreams and desires and how she really never knew how to cook until she married Nonno, and his mother taught her how to not burn a pot of rice. I wrote only two short columns for the food section of my high school newspaper about that day. Shortly after, I deleted the voice recording of those hours in the kitchen. My last memory of Nonna in health was May 29, 2020. My dad, mom, sister, aunt Cindy, Nonno, Nonna and I sat six feet apart on folding chairs in the backyard of her home to celebrate my 18th birthday and my parents’ 21st anniversary. We ate dinner. I blew out the single candle lit atop Nonna’s Meyer lemon cupcake (she was so sure that all my life I loved lemon-flavored desserts, which was not the case, and I unfortunately had the heart to tell her this particular night). She smiled at me and laughed. We couldn’t hug or kiss goodnight, and then we went home. Before 9:00 am the next morning, I answered a call from Cindy. Nonna had a massive stroke. The entire summer she was partially paralyzed, with extremely limited speech and cognizance and completely isolated from us because of COVID-19. By autumn, she was gone. By autumn, the centerpiece of our family was gone. The woman who was able to capture the attention of 15 people long enough to say grace before each meal, the woman who became a second mother to mine when she married her son, the woman who never left a room before making someone smile is now simply a memory. Nonno observed her ability to connect with each of her children, each of their children, each of her sister’s children and envelop herself in his Italian family, not quite seamlessly, but with courage and grace. Nonno watched her become a larger-than-life force in her small little piece of this world. And he saw her live for herself and then for him and then for each of their children. “Charlotte never wanted to make Dillon [S.C.] her home,” Nonno said. They met after she had managed to leave all she had known in the small southern town to study Spanish at university and work on Capitol Hill for the state department. She moved to Mexico City as a young woman (where she had a leather trench coat made for her that I now proudly wear) and then to Guatemala City where she met Nonno and immediately confessed that she was going to marry him. “One day I was single and the next I was married,” Nonno said. “I never knew what happened.” She dedicated her young life to traveling and learning, cooking and creating, bringing life to every corner of the world that she could. She lived in over seven different countries, learned multiple languages, lived and became friends with world leaders that she could only dream of from her modest room in the farmhouse in upstate South Carolina. They raised four children, my dad being the most rebellious one Nonno said, in the shadow of their “kindred spirits” of adventure, and she had very distinct relationships with each of them. Her and my aunt Cindy were very close. Cindy was the second of the four children, the oldest daughter and the first child to have a child of her own. While living in D.C. for 32 years when Nonna was in Charleston, they called each other multiple times a day. “It was so funny because she was even better with directions,” Cindy paused to laugh. “She’d always have the answer.” And when Cindy had my cousin Cara in 2000, Nonna stayed with them for three months and helped Cindy become a new mother. They were close before, but becoming a mother forged an even stronger bond. “My first days back after maternity leave… [Nonna] was there helping me and Cara,” Cindy said. “It was so cute because she wanted to bring the baby in to see my colleagues, so she dressed her up in this little pink outfit and put this little headband on her. “Cara was born with hair, but not a lot. Mom ended up brushing her hair and brushed every single new hair off. So she showed up with my little bald baby so proud that she had gotten her all dressed up.” Nonna remained close with Cindy as she raised Cara as a single mom. And when Cindy chose her first international post, she went where Nonna did her first one – Mexico City. Nonno and Nonna were visiting Cindy there when the pandemic gripped tightly on the world, sending Cindy back to Charleston to spend each and every day of quarantine with Nonna in the last three months of her life. “They were always very close,” Nonno said. “That’s a girl thing.” But he noticed in this time they grew closer, relating more to each other than ever. They both were at a point in their lives where they finished raising their children and had watched them leave home and start a new life. Cindy and Nonna were on the porch one quarantine morning drinking their coffee and discovered a dove nest just above them. It is common knowledge that Nonna was terrified of birds and preferred to gaze at them behind the comfort and security of a window, but these baby doves had lost their mother and were frightfully on their own. They spent weeks caring for them, tending to them and even learning how to do a dove call to lead the mother back home. All the cooing and cawing actually proved successful and finally brought the mother dove back to her little ones. “That was one of her favorite places to be like that out on the balcony, overlooking the water,” Cindy said. “She wasn’t a big fan of birds, but we were big fans of those doves.” Nonna always positioned her birdhouse, feeder and birdbath in a visually clear position from the kitchen window in the backyard garden that she so carefully cultivated. Growing up, she would point out the hummingbirds to me and allow me to get lost in the thick branches and leaves of her expansive fig tree. The most profound memories of my childhood are in that kitchen and the dining room of their house. Sitting around the table from 7:00 pm when dinner started to peeling your sweat-soaked legs off the wooden chairs at 4:00 am and admitting that no one won the debate over climate change and that no one could ever really beat Nonna at Spite and Malice. The laughter, the tears, the talking over each other and getting up for seconds – thirds – with extended family. Family that most people aren’t lucky enough to meet, let alone share life with. All of that started with her. Now Nonno lives alone in their home with the two dogs they shared, Dillon and Blue. “The sharing, “The person to talk to, “The person to plan with, “The person to vent with,” Nonno said. “That’s the part about missing,” he said. “That’s a very real thing I still do.” When she first passed, along with the mourning and feeling of extreme loss, I worried about who would cook for Nonno, who would distinguish the “Good!” recipes from the “Excellent!!” ones with hastily scribbled penciled-in notes in the newspaper, who would pull us back together as a family. My dad, the “rebellious” one, was extremely close to his mother because of his emotional distance from Nonno, even to the point of not speaking when he was my age. But his dynamic with Nonno is deeper now, more empathetic. “You know, if there’s someone who is a rock to go to, it would be Chris [my dad] at this point, that’s an important thing in my life,” Nonno said. “There was a time in my life that I couldn’t say that about Chris, but I can now.” Dad and I noticed Cindy’s growing resemblance to her mom. I told Cindy that her laugh is starting to sound more and more like Nonna’s. She adamantly disagreed. “Yeah, those are too big of shoes to fill,” Cindy laughed. “I think we are all trying to do it.” Despite living in two different countries, four different states and hundreds of miles apart, the memory of Nonna and the values she held has continued to allow us to stay close and to lean on each other to repair this shared gap in our lives. We were all able to reconnect this summer for the first time since Nonna’s funeral, spending a week together at the beach. Cindy and Cara cooked linguine alle vongole one night for everyone. We played cards, watched movies, read together, ate together. “I can’t fill that [role],” Nonno said. “I don’t have the inclination to fill that sort of role that she did, but I do think she has instilled it on several of the kids… I don’t know. I don’t know. I’m hoping this idea of getting together often continues… Time will tell.”      
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