Clarissa Botsford

This is the Tribute from Frederika’s funeral which I officiated in May 2020—one of the first in the world to be conducted entirely (and only) online.

Tommaso says Frederika would have made a great scientist: her powers of observation and description, matching and classifying, were positively Linnaean. Throughout her life, she chose to focus these powers on what she saw as an essential building block of our existence: the sentence. Her ability to pare down a sentence until it perfectly reflected a sentiment, a mood, a character trait, a modulated point of view or a twist of irony was her hallmark as a writer and translator, but also as a lover, mother, colleague and friend, because it was through words that Frederika expressed truth, beauty, generosity and love.

Anyone close to Frederika knows that she has already defied death. As has Vittorio. They made peace with the idea of their end while inventing new beginnings all the time. 

In her memoire she talks of a bird the cat had brought in: “You picked up the poor stiff creature, wondering how to dispose of it. The little body throbbed in your hands and then flew off with a great whirring of wings. It wasn’t dead, just playing dead to fool the cat.” 

Tommaso divides Frederika’s life into three distinct sections: America pre-Vittorio, the experience of living in Italy as “L’Americana”—as she liked to call herself—and her reinvention after the Fall. Rather than a story of Frederika’s life, this will be a series of stills.

Frederika grew up in western Pennsylvania, at the end of a road at the edge of a forest that was not quite rural but had simply, as she put it, “not yet been touched by the earth movers.” She climbed apple trees either reading books or gazing at swooping birds but, in the distance, she could hear the steel mills where her engineer father worked. She internalized a sense of privilege and subsequent guilt that she continued to carry around with her all her life, together with a stubborn determination to get out of that place, expressed in a cutting from Reader’s Digest stuck above her childhood bed: Be True to Thine Own Self.  

Well, she certainly did get away and she was certainly true to herself, always. As a student in Boston, she joined anti-Vietnam protests, and as a young researcher in London, she deliberately picked out radicals and communists for her friends. Back in the US, she developed a career as a journalist and critic, and swore off alcohol—a “weakness” she felt duty bound to keep at bay. 

Her destiny changed when she raised a glass with a man who had come along to a dinner invited by friends. As soon as Vittorio set eyes on her, he knew he wanted to marry her: “There was something sad inside her, I responded to her shyness…” he says. “She was so beautiful, I immediately closed up all my affairs!”

Frederika realized she was interested in people who were born somewhere other than the United States. Vittorio was her ideal companion. “He was,” she writes, “someone with a foreign passport who’s culturally utterly different and psychologically just like you, your twin.” It helped that he was a bona fide card-carrying communist.

As Vittorio says, they were twin spirits. But they were also polar opposites, chalk and cheese, sometimes grating at one another but loving every minute of it. Their arguments were intellectual duels. Vittorio adds “we were opposites that attract,” “plus and minus” that made electricity. Together, he says, “we were able to create positivity out of negativity.” In sum, he concludes, “We were emotionally and intellectually entwined for nearly 40 years.” 

They marked their belief in the future with a toast every anniversary of Frederika’s Fall—or Flight, as she sometimes called it—from a third-floor window, when they blessed the extra year they had been given.

Tommaso was Frederika’s greatest accomplishment, his birth as “thrilling and bloody as the French Revolution” but definitely her “jour de gloire,” she always said. 

Vittorio’s coma and Frederika’s Fall gave Tommaso more freedom than a boy of his age would normally have had. She writes: “He took growing up into his own hands,” becoming a “lovely, sturdy adult all on his own,” with Chiara by his side.

Their wedding in Rome brought together so many elements of Frederika’s past and present that she was momentarily complete and happy.

The fact that Tommaso became an ecologist was a source of huge satisfaction to her, convinced this would somehow cleanse both the guilt of her forefathers in the steel mills, as well as the sins of her husband working for an oil company. A synthesis of the “satanic refineries” and her “tree-hugging faith,” as Frederika puts it in her memoir. 

Tommaso’s character is also a synthesis of his parents: he says he never felt his parents were actually in disagreement. From their dichotomies he learned to see both sides of an argument and be able to tune into anybody’s point of view. A trait he finds very useful at work. He also appreciates how humour and a deep respect for fellow human beings always saw them through their tremendous difficulties, and his life has been guided by these qualities.

Frederika welcomed her recent adventure up on Lake Como, though she was daunted by the prospect and feared the rehabilitation would serve no real purpose. She hated the fact that she no longer “owned the self she projected.” For six weeks, with incredible determination and bravery, she sang opera arias out loud and threaded buttons, fighting the most debilitating effects of the Parkinson’s—or “Pinkerton’s,” as she liked to call it—that had compounded the neurological damage she had sustained with the Fall. 

Vittorio made several trips up to Gravedona, despite his historic hatred of lakes, to spend time with her over the six-week treatment. In that ward, despite her shyness, her foreignness, and her problems with speech, she discovered once again the incredible pull of people’s stories. Her friendships there were fueled by a sense of commonality, and their goodbyes were emotional. 

Frederika longed for home food and the comfort of her beautiful things. Vittorio couldn’t wait to have her back, to pick up the warp and weft of their lives from where they had left off. There was a certain peace in not being able to go out simply because it was against the law during the Covid-19 lockdown, rather than physically impossible for Frederika. These are the words she wrote on her homecoming:

Just seeing, even badly, sometimes double, has become a source of pleasure. A swath of milky blue sky, the great green arboreal fellow creature across the street, two black and grey crows darting in and out of it. This is your Garden now, however diminished it may be. That your senses can produce this thrumming polaroid of the great out there is the very definition of being alive.

You’re going to miss that.

Frederika will be cremated and her ashes will feed the roots of a tree that will be planted in the Jucker family plot at the English Cemetery of Rome. There is nowhere in the world more beautiful, nor could she be in better company. 

We can imagine her there, serenaded by the birdsong she loved so much and surrounded by poets and rebels, discussing the finer points of hegemony with Gramsci and cajoling Keats—if he could be persuaded to take just a few words out here and there, that poem would be so much better…

Ciao bella! I’ll miss you.

Clarissa Botsford has worked in the fields of teaching, intercultural education, editing, translating and publishing and is also a singer, violinist, and lay celebrant. Her translations include Sworn Virgin by Elvira Dones, Condominium of the Flesh by Valerio Magrelli, and The Game by Alessandro Baricco.