L’Aquila earthquake, Giustino Parisse’s letter to his children who died under the rubble. “Guilt follows me everywhere”

Hello lads. Here I am again. 15 years have passed since that night that never ended for you. Writing this letter every 12 months has become a chore. I’m always afraid of telling you more or less the same things and yet when April 6th approaches I can’t help but sit in front of the computer and talk to you a bit. Yes talk. Writing is my job. The PC is my life’s companion. Yet “mending” the threads of memories on a blank sheet of paper and returning to linking the pain to the great void you have left us is difficult, sometimes I even think it is useless.

But this time too I don’t want to give up and I’ll try to tell you about the year we have behind us. In just over a month, you, Maria Paola, would have turned 31 and you, Domenico, would have turned 33 at the beginning of August. I can’t even imagine what our life could be like if you were still here. The other evening together with mother Dina, with a veil of melancholy, we said to ourselves that in this late season of our lives we would have dreamed of spending a lot of time playing with our grandchildren. Taking them for walks in a pram, rocking them to sleep, getting impatient when they would throw a tantrum, preparing lunches and dinners to be together as a big family. But now we are forbidden to even dream. What we have left are your looks and your smiles filtered by 15 years of anger, bitterness, nostalgia, suffering, tormented nights and days that offer no discounts. Life continues amidst a thousand unknowns, bills to pay, stumbles at every corner, health that is shaky and reminds us that we are now in the twilight hours.

This year I can tell you that the reconstruction of our house between via Oppieti and via dei Calzolai has finally begun. But there is little to celebrate. The work will take almost three years. Hopefully we will “get it back” 20 years after those 20-30 seconds that destroyed it, making it your tomb.

I will spare you the details of how the construction site was started. For now I’m writing them down in a sort of diary (a notebook with a black cover) that one day, perhaps, someone will be kind enough to read. L’Aquila model, ethical reconstruction, social rebirth. Good phrases and words for conferences. The reality is very different. Our (your) library-archive – God willing – will return to via Oppieti and will, I hope, be a treasure chest of old and recent memories. Today in Onna you can see rebuilt houses, rubble, some open construction sites, other “aggregates” waiting. It will take time to see the end of private reconstruction. The situation, however, is at year zero as regards public spaces and underground services. Roads, squares, paving, open spaces, lighting, street furniture, equipped green areas, house numbers: everything is yet to come. For now we know that the streets will be asphalted as necessary (bright black) and will remain like this for generations between one patch and another to be put in if necessary. The lighting will be random (a light bulb where needed and off you go). The underground services will be a continuous patch (in via Oppieti the works have been stopped for months). The squares _ as well as the flint road paving _ will be an ancient memory, everyone will go and buy the house number at the nearest shopping centre. Pessimism? Yes. I continue to see the world from under the rubble, a world that now seems to have gone mad and in which even talking about atomic war is no longer a taboo.

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Guys, your friends, as I have always written to you over the years, have not forgotten you. Dear Maria Paola, your friend Paola continues to bring you letters in the chapel of the Paganica cemetery. In one of the last she wrote: “I wonder: who knows what you would be like today, who knows what path your life would have taken, who knows what university or what job you would have chosen… who knows what you would have thought of this situation. Maybe you would have been on the front line as a doctor, nurse or maybe you would have told the reality in a newspaper article, like your father. Who knows if we would have worked together or if we would have told each other our lives over the phone given the distance of kilometers or maybe we could have met in a bar in the same city. In life you meet many people but with some you are lucky enough to choose, find each other and build an important friendship. It was like that with you. You will always be the fifteen year old with whom I laughed, talked about first loves, about homework, about our lives that seemed impossible and complicated things to us. I will always remember you with a smile.”

Rummaging through the mountains of papers that surround me I found an essay that you, Domenico, had written when you attended middle school. The theme was about your family and in one passage I read: “The sensations I feel are: happiness and a lot of love and affection because I feel good with my family and friends because they love me as much as I love them.”

I hope that, after what happened 15 years ago, you haven’t changed your mind. After all, I betrayed that trust you had in me that night. I know I always repeat the same thing but despite the efforts I make the shadow of guilt follows me everywhere. Your memory remains. Broken love. The sweet cry that comes from a complicit tenderness. From the window I see that darkness is falling. Gran Sasso disappears from the horizon. I am writing to you on the evening of Good Friday, the day of death and pain. But in a few hours it will be Resurrection. It is the only true hope we have left. Hello lads. Talk to you in a year. God willing!