–
Losing a father is a drama, a mutilation.
Losing a father in times like this is an atrocity. We are not allowed to mourn for it, we are not allowed to give memories the space they deserve to find a place and help overcome grief. Because the mind runs to the next danger, which is a danger that can be breathed everywhere today. My mother, my sister, my son, myself and anyone who, in some way in direct and indirect contact, could risk their skin. I thought a lot about how to make sure this article didn’t turn out to be a commemoration. My father was a great man like so many have been, too many who have lost their lives. But I believe that there is no other way than to lay bare my experience to bring out how decisive this moment is but above all how it was possible to virtually hug those who until the end did everything possible to save the his life. It’s ours. So let’s start with the facts, and may he forgive me if I talk about it in such a poorly filtered way. My father fell ill with what still today many persist in calling “little more than a trivial flu”. A strong man, of character, a sportsman, the friend, the brother, the grandfather who no one thought could happen. But alas, it happened.
It was a disastrous fall, to paraphrase with words that could be his own, a crash on a bicycle downhill at high speed. Starting from home care, he passed within a few days to the Covid area department of the Modena Polyclinic, then to the sub-intensive and finally, relying on his few remaining strengths, to the intensive. We spent days on the phone with each other inventing an optimism that faded too quickly, we prayed to an unknown god, we talked to medical friends who invited us to hope until the end and all this was done at a distance and waiting to receive. , always later in the evening, a phone call from the ward. That was coming. Not punctual but arrived and it was the one that allowed us to modulate our dreams and not give up. I collected my father’s belongings that were delivered to me in a pink plastic bag just before he died, held back the tears in front of the white ICU door and let them gush in front of an exhausted nurse who cried with me when, beyond the wall, the car still did its duty and kept my father alive, and we with him. Until we received the phone call that we never wanted to arrive and the doctor who assisted him with attention and care did not inform us that he had reached the end, without suffering but reached the finish line.
It could have ended there. Everything else could be at our expense. The processing of the loss, the tremendous chore of practical matters that actually saves you a little and helps you not to lull yourself into that emptiness, the pain of not being able to hug our mother because she had spent too much time in contact with him, but Sunday evening, two days after the dramatic news, we received a call from the intensive care unit and recognized the doctor’s voice. “I called to find out how you are”. He contacted us to make sure we were living in some sort of emotional balance that would allow us to move forward. An undue act, the immense and exemplary effort of those who humanity has it inside from the moment they choose to become a doctor and who at this moment is severely tested by the inhumanity and indifference that often reigns outside those departments. How moved us to know that while he was taking care of our father he was actually taking care of all of us. How much generosity must flow in those souls who, after grueling shifts and unlikely scenarios, remembering that those who remain need more than ever to be supported. A term should be coined that goes beyond the idea of the hero. They do not live in invented sub universes and do the impossible every day to give us back as much of the ground and fundamental as has inhabited our lives. With kindness and with a nobility of soul that many of us are unfortunately unknown to.
Shortly before she called us, we had a bunch of flowers delivered in the name of the family, the flowers she promised us she would go look for. He informed us that there is a clean room where they can store them. We hope you have found them and that those few words of thanks that we wrote from the heart can help you resist.
Elisa Cattini
–
