MARCH 7, 2025 11:00AM
After my dad picked me up at the airport, we stopped at Huddle House in Weirton, West Virginia to get breakfast. Huddle House, living up to their motto (“a place for gluttons!”) gives out a free waffle with every breakfast order.
I don’t know if it was my dad’s intention to bring me there because he looked so trim in the midst of all the wafflegobblers, but seeing him inside that restaurant did make me think, “did he lose weight?”
MARCH 7, 2025 3:00PM
We went over to Foster’s Funeral Home in Toronto, Ohio for my grandmother’s wake (which can be a confusing term because grandma’s not awake, she’s dead).
My dad’s mom died March 3rd at 96 years old.
Betty Pompa Rogers, or as I called her: Nana, —a bastardization of the italian word for grandma: nonna, —was a very funny, amusing person who I felt ambivalent about. I have a grandmother who was instrumental in raising me and who I love dearly: my mom’s mom, Lucia… whose name I used for the main character of my first book in honor of her. I don’t think I’ll be naming any characters Betty anytime soon.
MARCH 7, 2025 3:01PM
It was interesting hearing about what an important grandmother and figure she was to the other grandchildren in the family like her obituary says,
As a proud Italian, Betty was unsurprisingly a wonderful cook – making Italian classics, hosting spaghetti dinners in her home, and teaching her kids and grandkids Italian cooking and baking traditions (her wedding soup, ravioli, meatballs, pizzelles, biscotti, and an Italian pineapple sponge cake – an Easter favorite, were unparalleled). She attended all of her kids’ and grandkids’ activities from being a den mother when her boys were in Cub Scouts to supporting her kids and grandkids at band, cheering, plays, choir, softball games, and much more.
I mean, this sounds like a wonderful grandmother, but let’s just say I never got invited to one of them spaghetti dinners.
And if you’re thinking, that’s a pretty long obituary excerpt… reader! you have no idea!
The obituary was an immensity. To print the whole thing in the paper it cost $1900. No bullshit. I really liked it.
I texted my dad, “I loved the obituary” and he texted me back, “Long.”
My extremely self-indulgent Nana would’ve loved it too.
I don’t wanna be mean about Nana because truly I did get a big kick out of her and I thought she was a very interesting person.
I came back for the funeral. I got a mom and a sister, and it worked out perfectly that they both happened to be in Rio.
Me and my dad were kinda going OD telling everyone, “they’re stuck in Rio!! there literally wasn’t one empty seat on any plane!! cause Carnaval just ended!!”
The truth is more complicated.
One of the last things my Nana said was that my mom was banned from her funeral. She never completely accepted my mom, —for the ugliest, pettiest reasons, —and I’m not gonna hagiography a woman just cause she’s dead, there were plenty of people doing that already. Looking at it as objectively as possible, my mother was very very good to my grandmother yet she was spit on repeatedly by his family for no reason anybody can pinpoint other than that she was married to my father.
MARCH 7, 2025 4:10PM
But anyway, I was happy to be at the funeral home because there were some characters there that I never get to see. Like my Uncle Frank. My dad’s brother is something of a lunatic. He was a horse dentist and briefly a mercenary in Afghanistan (if he’s even telling the truth, he’s so full of shit) and a destructive lothario-about-town in Toronto when he was young.
A woman he was married to on two separate occasions should up to the showing and she greeted him and he said, “nice to meet you I’m Frank Rogers.”
Later on he said, “I really didn’t recognize her!”
There were also my Cousins Bart. Bart Jr. and Sr., two extremely hirsute Italian gentleman who are shaped like literal barrels. Bart Jr. is actually more shaped like three barrels tied together. I tell everyone my cousin Bart could bench 800 pounds and it’s true! But unfortunately his body is too destroyed to continue lifting weights. I was very disappointed to hear that.
It’s funny being from a small town: this was probably the fucking 12th showing I’d been to at this very funeral home. And you just get the most random people showing up, “I seen you play basketball when you were a kid!”, “I was in the room when you were born, I delivered you little shit!”, “I sucked your dad off in 1975!” (the last one was my Nana’s caretaker).
A guy showed up, Muff (my dad said he don’t know his real name), who is 89 and he worked as a janitor at Toronto High School for 40 years, and then he retired and some random aunt died and gave him a 30 million dollar inheritance. Now he got a big house in town and he wakes up at 5AM every day to pick up trash for the city.
And wait til you tell this unpulchritudinous bunch you live in New York, “NEW YORK?! Do you feel safe?!” My cousin Bart Sr. asked me if I wanted a gun to take back. I said yes.
Now I am carrying Bart’s gun around the city for protection.
MARCH 7, 2025 4:41PM
Nana looked great in the casket. She would’ve been thrilled at everyone commenting, “she does not look 96!”
I don’t know how appropriate this picture is but I think she would’ve been quite pleased with it:
MARCH 7, 2025 5:03PM
My dad’s sister, Aunt M, was the center of the weeping attention.
There is no person who has caused more strife between my parents than Aunt M. A few months ago, my Nana wanted to call my mom and try to make amends and Aunt M talked her out of it, insisting that my mom was evil and moneyhungry.
Evil & moneyhungry!? Pot to kettle: “black!”
But whenever someone dies… I was expecting this wholeheartedly cause I seen it happen twice, it’s like she just came out of an Ayahuasca trip, she’s fucking Madame Kumbaya, just a peace-creep reconciliationfreak.
She gave me a big hug and said, “I love you.” Yeah, bruh, thanks.
She said she would’ve read my book, but she’s been caught up with the Sarah J. Maas novels. I said,
then you’ll fucking love Tropicália. It’s all about dragon cocks and dragons fucking, and all that fucking crap, shit.
She looked very intrigued. But if she owns a copy of my book, I’ll eat my socks.
After her husband croaked at the dinner table in 2009, there was a big family reconciliation. To the extent that me and my sister went over to her house for a sleepover. I mean that shit never ever ever happened. Even though she lived about 5 minutes away from us.
She took us to the grocery store and had us get whatever snacks we wanted. We got Oreos and a bunch of crap, took it home and left it on the counter and then stepped back outside.
We went back in. The dog had jumped up on the counter and eaten all the Oreos. She started screaming bloodymurder. “OH MY GOD HE’S GONNA DIE!” Screaming at me and my sister (both of us 12 at this time) to do something. She was in absolute shambles but eventually she got something to make the dog puke.
We made the dog puke it all up outside then we went back inside and she went right to bed, left us to our own devices in that big creepy haunted house. I slept in a chair by the door without a blanket, shivering all night. That was the last sleepover.
MARCH 7, 2025 5:33PM
From everything I’ve heard, it seems like her first husband, George, was an awesome guy (George’s brother came to the wake, he did 16.5 years in State prison for killing his girlfriend’s kid… though the story was always murky and my dad sat him down at the funeral reception and asked him if he did it… he got the whole story and it really seems like the guy was covering up for his girlfriend…).
Her second husband, my oleaginous Step-Uncle K, is not awesome by any stretch of the imagination. My extremely taciturn grandpa once had a damning comment about him, “he’s no George.”
I met him a few months after the sleepover. My aunt took my sister and I out to eat (the only time this ever happened) in Robinson, PA. We went to Red Robin, and as we’re sitting there, this guy shows up. Oily, creepy, off-putting.
She was trying to soft-roll this motherfucker into my dad’s graces by introducing him to us first! Not to be so dramatic, but his sudden presence felt like getting molested.
A few months later they were married. My parents paid for the wedding (insane!) and Step-Uncle K’s numbnuts son barked an order at my mom like she was waitress. Why? We can only assume a Latin-American-bias.
I wasn’t gonna be so irefull about my oleaginous Step-Uncle K until my Uncle Frank told me that before the funeral K was saying that if me and my sister showed up, he was gonna throw us out.
Frank, —entering my good graces, —said he responded, “well if you try to do that, I’ll be happy to hand your teeth back to you.”
I’m not gonna sit here and call my grotesque Step-Uncle K an old pussy or anything like that, but if he’s ever been in a fight I’ll eat my shorts, and if he’s ever kicked anyone’s ass I’ll eat my fucking couch.
And him and what army? Bart Jr.’s on my side: he’ll launch K into space.
Of course, he was being a behind-closed-doors Tough Guy. When I showed up he greeted me with a handshake so oleaginous, I had to go to the bathroom to clean it off.
One more Step-Uncle K story since I’m going in.
He was out with my aunt and another couple and he got totally drunk at dinner, and as he was leaving, saying goodbye to the other couple, he dipped the woman down and planted a big kiss on her lips like a 1950s movie star.
My aunt was horrified. Step-Uncle K stumbled right out into the parking lot and puked.
Exemplary fellow, him!
MARCH 7, 2025 7:29PM
My dad at these things is always in fine form. Stately, hilarious, charming.
His eulogy was excellent, he crushed for 7 minutes. One of my favorite bits from it is when my dad was saying my grandma wrote a few letters to the editor complaining about the new Bishop, and my dad changed his caller ID to “STEUBENVILLE DIOCESE” and called up pretending to be the Bishop,
So the phone rang and my dad heard STEUBENVILLE DIOCESE and he picked it up and I said, “please hold for a call from Bishop Daniel Conlon.”
My dad said, “Betty it’s for you… you did it now!”
“Betty Rogers I understand from reading the paper you don’t like how I am running things.” She stand her ground, and starts going at him good. I come back with, “I will take away your rights from visiting any parish in the diocese of Steubenville.”
She replied, “I will just go to Weirton.”
I was out of things to say so I said, “this is your son.”
She said, “the Bishop has a son?”
I said, “no Mom it’s me.”
She says, “what are you doing with the Bishop?”
Even though she didn’t realize what was going on she told everyone how well she handled the bishop.
Many people commended him on his eulogy, —not Step-Uncle K, jealous ass.
A priest closed the show with a long-winded discussion about how death comes from the Devil and how my grandmother was fighting off the devil until her very last breath. Which I thought was theologically unsound.
MARCH 8, 2025 9:00AM
We went to mass to celebrate Betty Pompa Rogers’s life at St. Francis Church where I attended my parents’ wedding in 1998.
I hadn’t been to mass in a while so I was especially attuned to how weird and boring (holy crap is it boring!) it is.
The priest from last night, in his glorious robes (a middle finger to the namesake of the church), was going nuts with his little smoke machine: which is a golden egg hanging from a golden rope with incense in it. The place was smokey like a tacky strip club.
I did take communion. Though the priest looked at me quite skeptically. But I wasn’t gonna come to mass and not eat a slice of Jesus.
MARCH 8, 2025 9:45AM
My dad was weepy at the mass. He hadn’t cried the whole time, but now he was letting his tears go. Which nearly even made me cry because he is a very sad crier. Seeing him cry made me feel something like love for my Nana.
Regrettably, my Nana’s favorite priest Monsignor Kemo wasn’t there to perform the mass because he is not allowed back in Ohio after his conviction for embezzlement of church funds.
MARCH 8, 2025 10:30AM
There were 65 people at the mass. More than half of them accompanied our procession of cars over to the cemetery in Steubenville for the priest to say his last prayers and put her into the ground.
We put my grandfather’s urn in the casket (which should’ve cost extra but my dad snuck it in there). My grandma used to say that when she would buy stuff on Amazon, the urn would shake in disapproval.
My dad went over to the funeral home director to get the bill for the whole funeral, and when the man said, $21,000, my dad said that my grandfather’s urn must’ve exploded.
MARCH 8, 2025 11:05AM
Yes, my Nana is dead and buried. I will definitely miss her. Hearing how much the other grandkids got from her, I did feel like I missed out on knowing her in any kind of gracious, loving, uncomplicated capacity. And I did feel excluded from that love, even though I lived not more than 20 minutes away from her most of my life.
If everyone’s wellwishes are certain, then she is in heaven right now having sex with my grandpa, right above the bowling alley where Nana once bowled a 300, and my grandpa liked to take his girls.
RIP NANA.
MARCH 8, 2025 11:05AM to 11:59PM
Exorbitant drinking.