Barbara Stefanelli (photo by Carlo Furgeri Gilbert).
F.you have already read Elizabeth’s story. Of Elisabetta, Matteo and their daughter.
I try to summarize it starting from the last photo. It shows Elizabeth pointing a calm smile towards the camera, beautiful in a summer dress, in her hair a headband combined with red flowers on a blue background of the pinafore.
Matteo, in profile in suit and bow tie, kisses her on the cheek: he kisses her closing his eyes and in the meantime holds their little girl in his arms, ten months more or less, whose left hand ends up between her mother’s fingers.
They are at a wedding and they are doing well, together, it is July. Twenty days later Elisabetta Socci, 36, stopped living. Her time, marked by breast cancer discovered in pregnancy, was up.
It is Matteo who tells the story. She goes back to the day when they welcomed with joy and anguish, at the same moment, the double news: that they would become parents and that she, the next mother, was ill.
They hoped to be able to stay in three for a long time in life, at each exam they repeated that “it can’t always go wrong”. There is a sentence, however, that struck me beyond the agony and pain.
Matteo told the reporter of the Corriere della SeraAlfio Sciacca: «My wife was only able to live with our daughter for ten months. But they were very intense. Day after day he poured out an immense love to her … We presume that we have time in our hands, but she, Elisabetta taught me that even the small moments of joy must be lived intensely“.
I was reminded of an article that shortly before, on September 23, I had read about New York Times. Title: I don’t need my life to be remarkable. Freely translated, we could say: I don’t need my life to be crazy.
Writing here is a mother, a journalist of the Opinions page of Nyt, Sarah Wildman. She focuses one day, before she and Ian, her partner, had children: a family friend, a therapist, had tried to give them advice.
Don’t expect every moment to be 10; sometimes it will make sense to celebrate the 4, the 5, the 6. Very young, Sarah and Ian had laughed at that call not to expect the maximum, to accept failure or adversity without thinking of throwing everything away.
American history continues with the diagnosis, a few years later, of a brain tumor that threatens the first child, Orli. And it ends neither with a miracle nor with defeat.
It ends like this, in an evening of convalescence hanging by a thread of light: «I realized that I don’t need to have a life of 10. A solid 6 wouldn’t be bad. Today I would like even a 4. We would all be happy to be able to rest here, together, in area 4 ».
In the pandemic, with the sirens cutting the days and nights, we had learned that: that the sense of being there lies in the moments, between the good moments, where awareness is deposited. Have we forgotten everything?
Aiming high and in the meantime appreciating the little things: can it be done? Write to us [email protected]
All articles by Barbara Stefanelli
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