Maybe It's Not Too Late

There is a strange thing that happens when you find family you didn’t know you had.

At first, there is excitement. Names you’ve seen on old records suddenly have faces. Places on a map become homes. People who technically were strangers a few hours earlier somehow don’t feel entirely like strangers.

But then something else happens.

You start thinking about all the time in between.

During my trip to Italy, I met people connected to my family that I had never met before. I sat with them, talked with them, walked streets my family had walked generations before me.

And somewhere along the way, I started wondering what it would have been like if that connection had never been lost in the first place.

How many birthdays did we miss?

How many weddings?

How many Sunday dinners, Christmases, births, funerals and ordinary afternoons happened on opposite sides of the Atlantic without either side knowing much about the other?

I don’t know if regret is the right word. You can’t regret a decision you never had the opportunity to make.

Maybe it’s sadness for lost time.

One moment in particular has stayed with me.

During the trip, I met a distant relative and her family. Seeing her young daughter and meeting her father brought me somewhere I wasn’t expecting to go.

For a moment, I remembered what it felt like to be seven years old and meet someone in the family—or extended family—for the first time.

As a child, you look at that person and wonder:

Who are you? How are we related? Why haven’t I seen you before?

But as an adult, I looked at that child differently.

I saw the future.

And suddenly I wasn’t only thinking about where my family came from.

I was thinking about where we go from here.

I found myself wondering what it would have been like to grow up knowing these people. Maybe we wouldn’t have lived around the corner from one another. Maybe we would have only seen each other occasionally.

But we would have known each other.

We would have known that somewhere across the ocean there was another part of us.

And I’ll admit there was another thought running through my head:

Who the hell thought it was a good idea to stop keeping in touch?

Maybe nobody did.

Life happened. People emigrated. Generations passed. Letters stopped arriving. Addresses changed. Parents and grandparents died without passing along every story they knew.

One generation became two, then three, then four.

Eventually, family became history.

Until somebody went looking.

I went to Italy thinking I was going backward.

I wanted to find Pietro, my great-grandfather who left San Fele for America more than a century ago. I wanted to find the houses, the churches, the records. I wanted to understand the people who came before me and the place where our story began.

Instead, Italy has me thinking about the future.

I think about being there for the things that haven’t happened yet.

The next wedding.

The next birth.

The next celebration.

The next ordinary Sunday when everybody sits around a table far too long after dinner is finished.

I don’t want another generation to someday wonder why we lost each other again.

And maybe that explains something I haven’t completely been able to explain even to myself.

Why coming home from Italy didn’t feel like the end of a trip.

Why I keep thinking about going back.

Why the idea of living there even if only for part of my life doesn’t seem nearly as crazy to me as it once would have.

Maybe I’m not trying to recreate the past.

Maybe I’m trying to create the next chapter.

We’ve all heard the phrase so many times that sometimes it almost loses its meaning:

It’s never too late.

I hope that’s true.

I hope there is still time to know the family I found.

I hope there is still time to sit at those tables, attend those weddings, watch those children grow up and be present for some of the moments my family missed for generations.

And I hope there is still time for a family of my own.

There is something beautiful to me about that possibility.

More than a century ago, my great-grandfather Pietro left San Fele and crossed the Atlantic for America. He built a life here, and generations of our family followed.

Maybe my chapter isn’t about undoing what he did.

Maybe it’s about completing the circle.

He left Italy to create a future for his family in America.

And now, generations later, one of his descendants has found his way back—not to erase the American chapter, but to reconnect it with the Italian one.

Maybe someday there will be another generation of Tauriellos who never has to wonder why the two sides stopped knowing each other.

American and Italian.

New Jersey and San Fele.

Past and future.

A family that crossed an ocean and, generations later, found its way back to itself.

I don’t know exactly where this leads yet.

Maybe I spend more time in Italy. Maybe I build something there. Maybe, one day, part of my life really does move back to the place where this story began.

I don’t know.

But for the first time, I’m allowing myself to imagine it.

And maybe that’s enough for now.

Because perhaps this really is one of those times when

maybe it’s not too late.

— Marc

Radici 1898