Suicides do not have end credits that explain everything, that tell every detail. Those who stay see the screen already dark, which can take on different contours – in this case the image of a man strangled by a noose – but which always and only proposes the same scene: the end.
Then you try to understand, and you never fully understand. Not even in the tragedy of Antonio Nogara. There are those tickets addressed to his wife Anna and daughter Federica, but it is their thing, they are words of a man who is saying goodbye to life and is trying in vain to explain why the two women of his life were love deep. Who has the right to peek between those words?
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The company
Did you talk about the crisis, the lockdown, the furniture and shop fittings company forced to close overnight and to start the procedure to lay off employees? No. Not openly, at least. His wife wanted to let everyone know by entrusting a message to the mayor of Cercola Vincenzo Fiengo: the family business was not in crisis, had had to adapt to the rules of these months, but was solid, and would probably have been able to recover despite the blow of the many closing weeks.
Yet Antonio was afraid. In fact, he was more distressed than afraid. A man with a sensitive character and deeply attentive to all those who were part of his life, he had encountered in the past that often elusive evil that is depression. He had fought and come out of it, but when you are bitten once by that feeling where everything is colored black, the scar never heals completely. Something remains silent and impending, and can explode at any moment, but at certain moments more.
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Worries
And this is one of those moments. It is for many and it was also for Antonio who began to magnify the worries common to any entrepreneur today. Concern for those who worked with him, the constant requests for information on when the layoff money would arrive, and the phone calls to each of the employees to offer help, imagining how much they were in difficulty.
Today his friends are looking for the most affectionate phrases to remember their kindness, loyalty, availability. It always happens in social network obituaries, but Antonio Nogara’s story tells that those comments simply report the truth. Perhaps for his affections it will be even more difficult to accept, but the fear that pushed him to the most extreme of choices is not a selfish fear. Antonio Nogara knew he could make it on his feet. He had been working for forty-five years in that activity that previously belonged to his father, and in difficult moments – even if never like this – he had gone through and surpassed others. But he also knew that something would change. And that would have changed what he cared about most: reliability, credibility. He had never failed to honor a payment, the collaborators did not miss anything, and now he no longer knew when all this would be possible again. And then: with the crisis, how many stores would continue to turn to him?
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The daughter
He was so attached to his work, and even more after Federica graduated in architecture and began to take care of some projects that filled him with pride. Of course, she had studied, but how many things had also learned from her father, who was not an architect or designer, but who had made himself known not only in Naples but throughout Italy.
And perhaps it is no coincidence that he chose to end it right in the company, where he had returned from a day and where perhaps he was waiting to return just to end it. These things can only be explained by those who know by profession the dynamics that regulate a terrible gesture such as suicide, but Antonio could have found other places and other moments. Instead he wanted to wait to turn the light back on in the office. Then he turned off his.
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May 6, 2020 (change May 6, 2020 | 11:48 pm)
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