For a free heart

I felt the grace of seeing my brothers leave with great serenity, as I had already felt when my parents left

The years and their memory are marked by events, not always very important, but which leave a trace. The past two years have been marked by the Covid 19 epidemic which has changed many things in society and in our lives. Then the war in Ukraine, which leaves us well lost, as if things like that had promised us never to reappear. Yet from Cain and Abel man has never managed to defeat the war and has always sung the benefits of peace. Just as all the wonderful research against diseases does not stop us from giving in to them, even after a long struggle.

This year, however, for me and my family it was the year of the death of the two older brothers: death touched our generation for the first time. We are amazed, even if it is absolutely natural. Since we don't know how to express what we "feel", we express it in words like sadness, pain, hurt, etc. For me, at least in this case, these words say nothing. I felt the grace of seeing my brothers leave with great serenity, as I had already felt when my parents left. Medicine does a lot to remove, at least in part, physical suffering, but it does not remove the suffering of detachment; yet this grows slowly, as we become aware that it is not an absence that prepares a return and during this growth there is a change in us.

Death always hurts and we are never really prepared to face it, especially that of others, loved ones, because no one has experience of their own and our fears or fantasies about how our death is totally unreal. As always, the medicine that deadens the wounds is humility. Accepting that we are not omnipotent and that this is a right and necessary thing allows us to look at what overturns our desires as opening up to a new world. At first it presents itself as a "world without", an imperfect world, even hostile, but then our inner world is filled with presence. If death at first risks awakening feelings of guilt in us, in fact we were not perfect relatives or friends, slowly it pushes us to recognize that we could not be and that there are many imperfections in us. But we were loved all the same: those who left loved us just as we are.

We discover that what has kept us on our feet is gratuitousness, a real bargaining chip between people who love each other. There is no need to review how much we have been wrong, how many things we have missed, but how important it was to be there for each other, to have talked or been silent together, to have done something or just had a strong bond without any work, work , or project has been a bond that has tightened us and made us walk together. It may have been important to have shared the faith, but even this is not essential for the memory to be transfigured into a light that illuminates the horizon.

The struggle is to purify our heart from the sense of possession, of right over others: no one is ours, we are all only of God, and having loved and still loving despite the absence, is an invitation to gratitude, sentiment. which too often runs the risk of missing us while it is the only duty we have, and it is something beautiful.

If we let the gift of faith inhabit us, even if it does not seem to enrich or console us, this beauty of the gratuitousness with which we are filled gives a new light and lets many holds to which we clung and which seemed indispensable to fade.

Life changes and even the death of those we love makes us discover that we are always new people, neither diminished nor grown, simply new and who need another horizon.

Cesare Falletti

NP Giugno-Luglio 2022