Let Them… Die?
Mel Robbins Has Never Met an Italian Woman from Calabria
Mel Robbins is charming. She has great hair and cool glasses. She speaks in a confident, punchy tone that makes you feel like you’ve just figured out your whole life while sitting in a TJ Maxx parking lot listening to a podcast.
Her “Let Them” theory is straightforward in its simplicity: Let them make their choices. Let them disappoint you. Let them be who they are without you twisting yourself trying to control, fix, or manage the outcome. Stop exhausting yourself. Release and detach. Let them.
I’ve read her books and I’ve heard her message. And then I thought about Teresa and I laughed out loud.
Let me explain who Teresa is, because she requires explanation.
Teresa is 99 years old. She is Calabrian, and if you know anything about the people from the toe of Italy’s boot, the ones who survived centuries of invasion, poverty, earthquakes, and pure atmospheric hostility, you understand that Calabrian women are not a breed you casually let anything. She weighs 75 pounds and is, in the most affectionate terms, a curmudgeon of the highest order.
She is also my ex-mother-in-law from a marriage that ended what feels like a lifetime ago.
From the moment I walked into her life as a sixteen-year-old girl on the arm of her precious son, she looked at me the way you might look at something you’ve tracked in on the bottom of your shoe. She never said it outright but communicated in cues. A resting bitch face. A silence three minutes too long. A compliment with an insult buried inside it, like a razor blade in a cannoli.
I was only seventeen when her son proposed. In our family, marriage was the sole path to any kind of freedom, and since her son was the only man my macho Italian father approved of, he decided to step in and fix things.
I’m not sure what my father said to her, but old-school Italian women of a certain generation listen to men of a certain stature, and my father was very persuasive. “She’s a good, tough Italian broad,” he told me, and almost overnight, she was helping plan the wedding.
I was only eighteen when we married. The marriage lasted five years. I gave her a grandson, a kind, genuinely wonderful human being, and then the marriage ended. My father died, and with him went the consigliere who had brokered the peace. Teresa and I were left with each other, connected by a child.
Years later, I remarried, and then I had a daughter. And with my daughter came the clawing anxiety of leaving a two-month-old in someone else’s hands. I had to work.
I had no choice and I was spiraling.
And then Teresa said, bring her to me.
Just like that. No negotiation, no conditions, no performance of generosity, just a statement of fact from a woman who had decided.
So I did. I brought my daughter to Teresa who held her sweet little face and body close and fell in love with her at first glance. She became my daughter’s Nonie, not by blood, not by any paperwork that would make sense to anyone outside our particular group of people, but in every way that counts.
For the next five years, she taught her to bake and how to craft. She sat with her at the kitchen table and passed down the particular genius of a woman who was raised in the Depression era and wasted absolutely nothing. Nestle’s Quik? Teresa made her own chocolate milk powder. Store-bought crayons were a luxury for people with less imagination so she taught my daughter how to make her own. Nothing was disposable. Everything could be remade into something useful. Furniture and clothes came from thrift shops. Comforters were patchwork from old clothing and blankets, hats and slippers were knitted or crocheted.
And that philosophy has carried down to my daughter who is raising her own toddler now. Not a single item of clothing in that child's closet was purchased new. Neither is much of her own. She bakes practically everything from scratch, and if something is listed as free on one of the neighborhood marketplaces, my daughter is in the car before you can finish reading the post. She inherited Teresa's eye for what other people throw away and what those things can still become.
I understood later that this is the philosophy she had built her entire life on. She never threw anything away. As it turned out, that included me.
I will never forget what she gave me in that season of my life when I had nowhere to turn and she rescued me. That is not a small thing, but is, in fact, everything.
Because here is what I didn't fully understand yet, back when I thought I already knew everything about Teresa. I knew she had left her husband. What I didn't know was why.
She was a woman who decided to rewrite the terms of her own life. This was not a common thing to do in 1962. She had a husband with a good-paying job and a house in the Chicago suburbs. She had three young children and a future that looked exactly like every other future available to a wife in mid-century America: cook the meals, raise the children, and be grateful for an allowance. So what did she do?
She packed her three children, all under eight years old, into a car and drove to Los Angeles.
Her reasons, as she has told us over the years, are the reasons of a woman who understood freedom, or wanted it desperately. He wouldn’t let her work. He controlled the money. He wanted her to be a supporting character in her own story. And so she left, which in 1962 was not a lifestyle choice but rather an act of sheer, radical nerve.
She got herself a job at a newspaper. She rented an apartment, eventually saved enough money to buy a house, and then proceeded to build a hold so powerful that her children never fully escaped its orbit. She pulled them back, one by one, not with force, but with something more effective: the calculated warmth of a woman who made her home feel like the only place in the world where things made sense.
If you’ve seen the film “Moonstruck,” you already understand this completely. There’s a moment when Johnny Cammareri flies back to Sicily because his mother is dying, just weeks to live, the doctors say. He tells her he’s getting married and she gets up from her deathbed, walks to the table, and “eats a meal that could choke a pig.” An Italian mother is not subject to the same physical laws as everyone else.
Teresa understood this instinctively.
There’s an old saying: the best thing you can give your children is roots and wings. Teresa gave her children roots and weights. She added rooms to accommodate them. She grew vegetables in the backyard and cooked for them. She covered the windows in blackout shades, actually pieces of cardboard and black plastic bags, so they could sleep late on weekends, which is either the most maternal thing I’ve ever heard or a mild act of psychological warfare. Possibly both.
Her sons devoted their lives to her. They came for Sunday dinner and never quite stopped coming. She didn’t really trap them; she just made freedom feel like abandonment, and so they chose her, again and again, the way Italian sons always do.
Her daughter died in that Los Angeles home too, though her story carries a different kind of grief. After her marriage ended, a terrible car accident had left her completely dependent on the care of others, and when doctors and social workers suggested a group home for her rehabilitation, Teresa didn't deliberate. She brought her daughter home and cared for her herself, until there was nothing left to care for.
Her oldest son, my ex-husband and the father of my son, died a few years ago at 67, single, still living in her house. Her youngest son died recently at 70, single, still home, still taking care of her until the very end.
And then there were none.
Outliving your children is one of the devastations the universe sometimes hands out without explanation or mercy. There is no name for what you become when that happens, no word in English, or even in Italian, for a parent who has buried every child they made.
When they were gone, all that was left behind was a house filled with three lifetimes of memories and a 98-year-old woman inside, alone for the first time in her life.
Her only other living relatives were either too far away or too old to care for her, or shunned for reasons nobody knew or understood.
So the responsibility fell to the only person left to pick up the pieces: my son.
It didn’t matter that he lives three hours by plane from her house. It didn’t matter that he is busy, that he is married and has his own child, or that he is not a trained geriatric caretaker. “Let them figure it out” or “let them go to a nursing home” are not phrases that exist in our vocabulary. We don’t have that setting. It wasn’t installed. You can argue with us about it all you like, but you’d have better luck arguing with the ocean about the direction of the tide.
So my son hopped a plane and moved her back to Los Angeles, staying here for months at a time. He made spreadsheet after spreadsheet, the kind that tracks medications and appointments and the names of doctors in a font size large enough to be read across a room. He got her fitted for hearing aids and took her for cataract surgery, which she protested, and then later admitted was “fine.” He found her a beautiful Italian senior community. He filled her old iPad with free books and hooked up cable TV with her favorite Western movie channels.
What he did is nothing short of remarkable, and also slightly absurd, and also the most purely loving thing I have ever watched a person do.
Piece by piece, he put her back together again, like Humpty Dumpty, except Humpty Dumpty occasionally responds to this level of devotion by being, in the most loving possible terms, an absolute pill. You cannot blame her. She is now 99. She has buried her children and has earned every syllable of complaint.
Here is what I’ve been thinking about in the idle hours when I’m driving in LA traffic and half-listening to podcasts about personal liberation:
The “Let Them” theory is genuinely useful for certain kinds of suffering. The suffering of waiting for an apology that will never come. The suffering of trying to change another adult who does not want to be changed. The suffering of performing love for someone who doesn’t see you and never will. Sure. Let them. Excellent advice.
But there is a different category of showing up that has nothing to do with control, and nothing to do with martyrdom, and nothing to do with whatever a divorce attorney turned motivational speaker might classify as “enmeshment patterns.” There are people in this world, often Italian, but not exclusively, for whom love is not a feeling so much as a practice. A commitment you hold even when your arms get tired.
The stubborn refusal to let someone be alone at the end of their life is not a failure of self-actualization. It's what real love looks like.
My son is living proof of this. He did not learn it from a book or a podcast or a motivational speaker. He learned it the way these things are actually learned—by watching what it looks like when people show up for each other without being asked. He is, in every sense, his own man. He didn’t follow the path of the men before him in this family. He married his childhood sweetheart and has been happily married for decades to someone who gets him, including the part that boards a plane the moment someone needs him. She understood what moving Teresa back to Los Angeles meant before he even finished explaining it. She helped pack a house filled with decades of memories, loaded it into a U-Haul, and drove it back to Los Angeles herself.
The "let them pack their own U-Haul" chapter apparently didn't resonate.
I went to visit Teresa last week.
She was sitting at her table, the one she insisted be brought to Los Angeles because it was the first piece of furniture she ever bought with her own money. It sits by the sliding glass doors that open to a courtyard where the afternoon light comes in sideways and falls across the walls covered in old family photographs and framed fall leaves her children made with their hands decades ago. On the table across from her, ceramic saints stand watch beside her rosaries and her son’s ashes. Among them, the Sacred Heart, which belonged to her mother, and which she will tell you about in detail if you give her half a chance. She has made it her personal mission to educate every nun in the building on the story of each one.
Beside the saints is a basket filled with yarn and knitting needles and crochet hooks, the tools of a woman who has never once sat still. In that light, with all of it around her, the room looks like an old photograph itself. She is so small now. Ninety-nine years of living compressed into 75 pounds of pure, unrepentant will.
But something was different.
On the table beside her: a library book. She told me she won at bingo again. She has made a friend, an Italian woman who speaks her language in every sense, a woman who refers to herself as “one hundred percent dago red.” It is, for the record, an outdated and derogatory term associated with Italian-American culture for a cheap Italian wine. At a combined age of nearly two centuries, they have earned the right to call themselves whatever they please.
She asked if I did something new to my hair. She told me I looked pretty.
And I sat there thinking: she’s free.
Not free the way Mel Robbins means it, and not free from obligation or expectation or the gravitational pull of other people’s needs. Free the way you become free when there’s nothing left to prove, no one left to take care of, no future to protect.
She drove out of Chicago in 1962 because she was done belonging to someone else. She spent the next six decades belonging to her children, which she chose and which was also a long and loving surrender. And now I think she may finally have what she was looking for when she packed three children into a car and pointed it west.
Herself.
I have grown to love Teresa, not despite all of it but because of all of it. She is interesting and her stories are extraordinary, and when we sit together, she talks about her life with the clear-eyed honesty of a woman who made her choices and is still, at 99, examining them without regret and without apology.
She is not a woman who says things for effect, so when I tell you she calls me her daughter, I want you to understand what that looks like in practice.
Three years ago at the ripe age of 96, she came to my daughter’s wedding. Her son was working and couldn’t take her so she boarded a plane alone and flew two hours to Los Angeles. She wore her version of Sunday best and sat near the front in the row reserved for grandmothers, because that is exactly where she belonged.
The universe has a Calabrian sense of humor.
I have known this woman since I was sixteen, more than half a century. She has been a thorn, a mirror, an education, an adversary, a mystery, and eventually, a gift.
You don’t let a woman like that go. You sit with her in the sideways light and you let her tell you she won at bingo, or listen to her complain about the woman who crowds her at the dining table, and you stay.
That’s not self-abandonment or codependence. It’s not a failure to implement a theory about personal liberation. That’s just what you do.
She's Calabrian. She will turn 100 next spring. She survived everything.
The least I can do is show up to watch.
So beautiful and I'm crying so much I'm glad I didn't do my makeup yet. Love you.
Beautiful Story and tribute to a very iconic little lady....