Here’s the saddest story I know:

I met Francesca in an Italian class. I had just returned from Italy, where I had expected to live the rest of my life as an ex-patriot. Instead, I lasted six months. My inability to speak Italian fluently, or even conversationally, made it difficult and frankly, lonely. Plus, I missed baseball.

So I returned to Washington state and took Italian lessons at a community college, believing that it’s every American’s duty to learn at least one other language in their lifetime.

Francesca was our teacher. She was from Milano, that cultured, artistic, moneyed and fashionable northern city. She had been an opera singer, which is how she met her husband. He had come to Italy with his violin.

She couldn’t speak a lick of English. And Brett couldn’t speak a word of Italian. But they stood on stage together, in love and fascinated with one another.

He returned to America. And she stayed in Italy. They wrote each other letters every week. She took hours writing him, correcting her grammar, translating her emotions from Italian to English. A simple sentence, she said, could take a day because she wanted it to be just right, to convey exactly what she wanted him to know.

After a year or more, they finally reunited and ultimately married. This black-haired Milanese beauty with the beautiful voice had made up her mind to move to America, which crushed her parents. Italians really love two things: their family and their country. Leaving both? Anguish.

She admitted it was the hardest thing she ever did.

She left her loud, boisterous Italian family, and arrived to a small town where she lived in a duplex next to her quiet, nosy in-laws, who spent some of their time watching TV and more time coming over to her house to watch her.

I think there’s something wildly romantic about falling in love overseas. There’s all the excitement of new and unfamiliar places. There’s the kissing in palaces and gilded theaters. Of going hand-in-hand along the cobblestones and the fountains, with centuries-old statues watching over you. But even without all that, falling in love is a gift, and the memory of how it happened has kept many a couple going during the seven-year itch, a flu epidemic, and a heated argument. Add the overseas component, though, and you really do begin to think that you have truly been blessed by angels.

Brett went back to teaching music at a local high school. And Francesca got bored. Which is how she came to teach Italian.

In class, she was quick to pick up that I was a connection to her country. I had a leftover Italian accent. It was tinged from the southern city of Rome, which to a northern Italian is like sounding like you’re from Brooklyn: uneducated and unintelligible. But she forgave me and we tried out a friendship.

She would talk about how much she wished she could still sing. She hadn’t done it in so long and she missed it so much. I was very Walt Disney American in my response to her, believing and stating that if she wanted to do something, she should just do it.

She shook me off saying that she had a lung condition. It was from living in Milano with all the pollution. And she’d been a smoker, just like most of the Italians she knew. Even though she’d given up both her country and the cigarettes, it was still very hard for her to breathe.

But still! If you want it bad enough, you should find a way. It’s your dream, after all. She just shook her head at me, both of us not understanding the other.

After the class ended, we drifted. I heard about a year later that she was pregnant. Her family had come from Italy. Everyone was so excited. A new life to celebrate.

They had to deliver the baby via C-section because Francesca was in bad health. The pregnancy hadn’t gone well for her. All the extra weight had made her breathing problems much worse.

After they delivered the baby, Francesca went into a coma. Her mother was beside herself with worry.

A day later, Francesca miraculously came out of it. She laughed with her friends, kissed and loved on her baby boy, basked in her mother’s love and attention, adored and loved Brett’s doting and adoration.

And then she died the next day. Her lungs, they said, had turned to glass.

I think about that little boy every so often, calculating his age, wondering what he knows of his mother, her country, her family. I think about Brett sometimes, too. About how when he first played his violin for her and she first sang to him, how standing there together, enraptured with one another, with their hopes for each other and themselves that neither would ever have thought this would be their future.