Friend death

Never before has man hidden death as a shame which has taken the place of modesty once reserved for sex. Today it is death that is obscene. Better to ignore it, better to deny it, even to those who are about to die: But no, you'll see... An absurd lie that deprives those who are on the verge of death of the last opportunity to come into direct contact with their own conscience. We lie to others to lie to ourselves. Instead of exchanging words of love, gratitude, forgiveness, instead of going through the most important experience of life with a loved one, instead of sharing with her the wisdom and also the lightness with which every human being is equipped to face the death. And so we commit a theft, a deadly one: we rob the other of the possibility of living their own death with open eyes. We condemn him to an unawareness that is loneliness and abandonment.

There is one place where this comedy cannot be done: it is a hospice for palliative care. There, people who enter know they won't get out alive. The atmosphere you breathe is opposite to that of the hospital where the tension of patients and relatives is all about getting well. Anyone who enters a hospice knows that they can no longer expect definitive care. Here in the hospice, day after day, people's faces transform. What emerges from gestures, from words, in many just from a look, is the attempt to say the essential thing, what some have not been able to say all their lives. Gestures, looks that give and ask for love. The true one. Not its parody, the emotion of falling in love or the subversion of the senses, but the love that ties a towel to your waist and bends with respect over the wounded feet of the other. The free love that neither asks nor hopes to receive.

In a hospice there is both concreteness and absoluteness. Food matters a lot, but more than food, the love of those who bring you good things from home matters more. What counts is the sense of community, the activities to do together. Gymnastics on wheelchairs. Painting. The seated vegetable garden. Singing together, crying over past memories from which we can now take sweet leave. But the music of the hospice involves everyone, the nurses, the health workers, the doctors, the psychologists, affectionate, very sweet unlike the media narrative on healthcare professions. We all pray for death in a breath, an unconscious death. Which in its brutal speed steals from the person the incredible privilege of witnessing their own passage into another dimension. hospice teaches that a long agony can be the supreme opportunity. It gives the time needed to understand that death is the culmination of life, it gives meaning and value to everything, to the good but also to the mistakes, to everything that has testified to our weakness over time.

Awareness of the meaning of our life is the only success that counts in the eyes of God. Those who have faith try to do so over time: meditations, spiritual exercises, retreats, confessions should help us in homeopathic doses progressively faced with our truth. That is, causing in us, in our conscience, many small deaths of our voracious and presumptuous ego which instead, to give meaning to his life, struggles to build his own monument. Those who truly seek the face of God should do exactly the opposite: meditation after meditation, spiritual exercise after spiritual exercise, retreat after retreat, giving joyful thanks for every piece of the monument that collapses. Better if the whole statue is smashed and the heart remains naked, stripped, humble and joyful before God. Finally free from every comedy to be played on the world's stage. Finally free to meet the gaze madly in love with God.


Flaminia Morandi
NP May 2024