Pazzissima Dory

You were a beautiful and very strong little girl, a rare genetic disease, Friederich's ataxia, tried to take away from you the light-heartedness and lightness of someone who enters life, thinking it's all a beautiful game. The awkward step and the balance that was gone, you first stopped running, then walking and standing, your back arching and your heart beating now slower, now faster than normal, you that you always ended up on the floor without knowing why.

According to the laws that govern the world, you were just a problem, good to be sorry and curse Heaven, but you lived according to another law, that of love and you haven't stopped feeling beautiful and very strong . You didn't want to stay in a corner all your life, alone with your sadness, to see everyone cry and pity you for how badly you, poor thing, had turned out.

I don't know where you found the strength and how it occurred to you to want a life too, to be the opposite and to always do the opposite of what everyone said. We saw the wheels on which, slowly, you moved and moved from one place to another, but you had wings, your back was all crooked, but your heart was straight and demanded the same happiness as the others. One day you decided that it goes the way it goes, by hook or by crook, you would take your piece of happiness completely, that ugly disease had already stolen too many things from you, you didn't need a special protective net not to be exposed to further suffering, you wanted to bang your nose like the others did.

The Arsenale della Pace was the place you could reach fairly easily from Valtellina, taking a few hours by train. It was enough to find a friend who came with you or quite simply request assistance to get off and on the trains, you wouldn't have stopped in front of so little. You knew better than anyone how much wrong words and the eyes a person looks at you can hurt; you who, when you cried, you really cried, but you were always beautiful smile, you knew that falling hurts, but that by dint of crawling somehow then you find yourself up, because there is no limit except those that we set ourselves . You had a hotel with a thousand rooms and beautiful mountains around you, but you wanted the world and, while we were thinking about how difficult everything was and we didn't move a step, you got on a plane and went to live where there is always sun, even if you didn't know anyone who could pull you up and off the ground, even if they all spoke a language you didn't know. In Andalusia you found a new home and a new love, you took your life, all of it, until the last day. You never thought that that disease could have prevented you from living, travelling, having a normal life, loving and being loved. It would take a Dory in every school and in every country to encourage with her smile all those who always have an excuse ready, who think they have come badly, that they don't have the strength, that they can't do it.
Hello, crazy Dory, who has always remained as beautiful and strong as you were as a child, now that we look at the sky, we see you, and – poor things – we realize that we came just like that, and how wonderfully you came.


Marco Grossetti
NP February 2023