Oh Apollonia

I really can’t stop thinking about her.

Oh Apollonia. She enters Michael Corleone’s life in Sicily as this young woman who doesn’t know she’s walking into someone else’s story. He sees in her the possibility of redemption, of existing outside the violence that has already claimed him. I’m haunted by her unbecoming. There’s a devastating precision in how her first act of personal agency coincides with her finality. She dies not as herself, but as the embodiment of what gets destroyed when Michael’s fantasy of escape collides with the inescapable reality of who he is.

I don’t see myself in Apollonia, but I feel her through me. Perhaps because I carry something inherited, an emotional vocabulary passed down through generations of Calabrese women. There’s a recognition that transcends literal experience, the way certain losses echo across bloodlines even when the circumstances differ entirely. Watching Apollonia’s brief existence feels like encountering a ghost I should recognise. This is not because our lives mirror each other, but because my bones carry the same codes of Southern Italian womanhood that shaped her world, my mother, my grandmothers, and my great great grandmothers. It is the lens through which I understood my own becoming. The sanctity of the family unit, marriage as inevitability – embedded in me like memory, shaping what I believed a full life looked like, long before I had the chance to question it.

So when I watch Apollonia, her death lands with the weight of collective grief, of all the women who gave everything, who didn’t get to choose who they became. And in truth, neither have I. Because when I lost my Michael to cancer at 25, I wasn’t only grieving him, I was grieving the version of myself who knew her place within that shared trajectory. It ruptured the framework through which I understood who I was becoming. That rupture forced a question most women are rarely asked to confront: who are you when there is no one to define yourself in relation to?

How do we live with the contradictions of being both destroyed and destroyer, both the woman who died and the one who kept walking?

I discovered how difficult it actually is to know who you are as a woman, separate from the roles and relationships that typically define us. Becoming yourself isn’t just about having the choice to do so; it’s about the profound work of self-knowledge that most of us don’t undertake. Surviving loss, resilience… it isn’t the heroic transformation or clean rebirth it’s made out to be. It’s messier and unsettlingly ambiguous. Apollonia’s death feels tragic because it cuts short her potential; my survival feels complicated because it requires me to live with what that potential costs. I learned to drive, metaphorically speaking, in the crater left behind. But the self-concept I am claiming isn’t the kind I’d imagined as a girl.

I became both the destroyed and the destroyer. The part of me that existed in relation to another no longer lives. But in surviving, I also dismantled the version of womanhood I once believed I had to inhabit. I carry within me the very contradictions that shaped Michael Corleone in the wake of Apollonia’s death. Because I am both the woman who died and the one who kept walking, grief made me Apollonia and Michael simultaneously.

Like Michael, my transformation came with costs I’m still cataloguing. The costs aren’t just grief itself, but what grief rearranged in me. This woman I’ve become no longer fits neatly into the world, one which reads my survival as resilience, empowerment, strength. The truth is more fractured than that. My selfhood wasn’t chosen; it was demanded, extracted in the aftermath of tragedy. It was born from loving so deeply that its ending left me unrecognisable to the woman I’d been. Yet even now, I can’t tell if that makes me the woman who died reaching for agency, or the man who learned to live with what his choices cost.




Jessica Tok

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Oh Apollonia is a personal essay I wrote exploring the complex inheritance of Southern Italian womanhood through the lens of The Godfather’s Apollonia. Born from personal loss, this piece examines how tragedy fractures not just our lives, but our understanding of who we are meant to become.
The essay traces the parallels between Apollonia’s brief existence in Sicily and my own reckoning with survival. Where she dies reaching for agency, I was forced to live with what that agency costs. Through her story, I reflect on the inherited codes of femininity passed down through generations of Calabrese women, and how through my personal grief I lost the version of myself who knew her place within traditional narratives of womanhood.

It’s a meditation on how grief can simultaneously end one version of ourselves while birthing another we never asked to be.