I never thought this day would come. Edi tried to prepare me. “Maybe you have to finish my book”, he told me about the pages that helped him die with immeasurable dignity. “No way. “You’re going to get there,” I rebuked him, closing the topic. Because she was going to arrive, she was sure.
Edi was always the almighty for me: the teacher, the reference. The journalist with whom we discussed the Pontaquarto case in 2003 and who later guided me in the magazine NOTICIAS; whom I admired like few others for his acuity in analysis and humor with which he sifted the harshest reality and turned it into a stand-up act. Even when He decided to make a book about his illness. (which more than a book is a devastating and honest essay on human emotions) and asked me to help him in that race against time, I thought once again, as happened to us in so many years of shared profession, that closure would never find him with blank pages.
We talked about death, his death, like someone discussing a journalistic summary: without between the lines. That was the condition he imposed when the doctors gave him the diagnosis and he found me looking for euphemisms so as not to ask about the future. In all these months he wanted him to know how his body transformed, hair loss, the cane, black nails, the chemo drip. The weekends spent in the countryside to write and reflect on his loneliness (“because despite being surrounded by a wonderful family and friends who support me all the time, one always arrives at this alone,” he told me), the nausea of the day after, pain, Sartre’s philosophy, love.
Edi faced death… the Edi way: breaking it down, trying to understand it, dividing it into main notes and sidebars, going through each of its dimensions and challenging the silences that many times she imposes. As she did with journalism. With the same research method – lucid, acidic and frontal – that made him one of the most respected professionals in the country. He appropriated cancer and questioned it, in his own style. Grandiloquent. He did interviews, listened to other cases, looked for thinkers, consulted relatives of cancer patients, investigated, investigated, investigated.
He wanted to leave behind his last great work so that his story could help others and not be confined to a medical file. I never heard him complain. He turned every stumble into a funny exit: I laughed a lot listening to your ideas about how to record your baldness process. Many times he would bother me because I would ask him about his health and he would answer me with a phrase from an editor in need: “I have to give you the texts.” He was a journalist until the end. I cry and write this and it makes me smile. You were unique, Edi. I never thought he would see this day. No one is prepared to grow up so suddenly when the teachers leave and leave you alone.
