Giving back to the world in return for gifts received is something handed down by my ancestors. In both my Italian and American families, there are a strong history and ethos of caring for people and the earth that resonate deeply with me. My paternal grandfather, Cleante Paci, protected Italian Jews in Umbria, Italy during WW2, helping escort them to safety during Mussolini’s and Hitler’s regimes. My maternal grandfather, Roger Revelle, contravened a city ordinance barring Jews from living in San Diego and actively sought and hired people of varying religions and ethnic backgrounds during his tenure as a professor at UCSD and Director of Scripps Institution of Oceanography. In my extended family are teachers, social workers, scientists, political activists, physicians and philanthropists whose mission is to try to better the world now and for the future.

My dear friend River Abeje was born in Harlem, New York in 1958 and died at home in Berkeley, California of metastatic breast cancer in 2015 when she was fifty-eight. We developed a friendship out of the things we shared: breast cancer, being mothers, a passion for art and music, and an interest in politics and intellectual life.

Zia Adriana. The aunt who gave me the moniker “strega.” I can’t remember when she started calling me that. I think it was when I was a girl of six or seven. It seemed natural to me at the time; I assumed she called all little girls by that name. It only occurred to me to question that assumption a few years ago when I took an evening class here in Berkeley, California called — typical to this hippy area of the world — “Conscious Menopause.” With other women transitioning from “womanhood” to “cronehood” I began thinking about how to go about turning into a witch, and hopefully a good one.

Three feet of dry, clumped, grey earth cover the limbs that were adorned in golden fur, save for the white on her paws and chest and spilling from her forehead to her nose. Her Egyptian eyes are shut, the dark edging that outlined them like kohl and that extended exotically from the outside corner towards her ears faded with age. I pulled her skin taut the morning she died to see if I could see that former self in her. Her lids were low, an opaque moon covering the center of one brown pupil, the other remarkably clear of it, looking at me. What was she thinking? What was she feeling? Was she ready to die?