The Closer We Are to Dying

M. Wayne Cunningham is a past executive director of the Saskatchewan
Arts Board and the former director of Academic and Career Programs at
East Kootenay Community College.

In this poignant memoir, Joe Fiorito, the second oldest of the four
brothers in the Fiorito clan of Fort William, Ontario, recounts his
21-day bedside vigil with his father, Dusty, who lies dying in the local
hospital. Joe expertly mingles the details of daily hospital routines
with memories of his years with his father as he retells the many
stories the old man told him about his father, the ancestral family of
six brothers and five sisters, and their lives in Italy and Canada
during war and peacetime.

Out of the family closet come intriguing death-bed tales of, among
others, the horse called King, the skinned cat served in revenge as
rabbit stew, the not-so-bulletproof rubber boots, the littlest
bootlegger, the magic leg, and a couple of family murders. The resulting
book is a moving and revealing family portrait in which Fiorito’s
hard-drinking, trombone-playing, domineering father takes centre stage.
The credibility of Fiorito’s work rests in part in his unsentimental
attempts to verify his father’s stories as he digs through family
documents and paws over the old fellow’s memorabilia—“bits of
detritus,” he calls them.

As he constructs his love-hate homage, Fiorito blends humor and
compassion with toughness and uncompromising honesty. While doing so, he
laconically and vividly evokes the sights, sounds, tastes, and smells
clinging to the people and places he describes, such as with the beer
hall waitress “trailing a scarf of perfume through a cloud of
smoke.” Whereas Dusty told his stories orally and within family
confines, his son has masterfully recorded them as enjoyable reading for
a much larger world, while simultaneously preserving his father’s
image as a man to be remembered, warts and all.