The sound of silence

I immediately understood that something was wrong, there was an anomaly in the usual routine. I passed away June 18, 2020, finally dead.
I had arrived on September 18, 2012 in what everyone around me called the retirement home, and for me it was just the hospice. I was 84 years old.

I immediately understood that there was something strange, because here the days before that event passed slowly and all the same.
Time was mostly marked by the alternation of meals, which were also all the same. Breakfast at 6.30am, lunch at 11.30am, dinner at 6.30pm.
Even a small variation, in this monotony, is noticeable. What was I telling you?

Ah well, forgive me but the memory comes and goes, even now. I was saying that I immediately understood that something had happened because dinner was served at 20:30 which was usually chamomile tea time. Then in the following days the masks appeared and the visits from relatives disappeared. Besides, Maurizio and Gisella, my dear children, I have never tolerated your visits, to tell the truth. Always fast, by circumstance, you two never together, one Sunday, one Sunday the other.
You always asking the usual questions, and I always giving you the usual answers.
"How are you?" "I'm moving forward." "Are you eating?" "Yes". "Are you sleeping?" «Little».
And while I was answering you, your eyes were already on the phone and mine were busy wandering around the room looking for any place to land. Then you had that excuse not to come anymore and look at your phone in peace at your house that here you always said: "There's no reception, it's not taking well" and I was sorry, thinking it was my fault, but you didn't i never said.
Then when I died you started saying those other things. "They won't show us!" "My God, he died alone, without a hug" But honestly, during your visits I don't remember you ever hugging me, and then I died at 2:34 in the morning and you still wouldn't have been near me.
Since Covid arrived, here in the hospice, the days have become different from each other, we no longer always eat at the same time, and then there's a lot of movement.
One day the mayor and the president of the Region also came to visit us.

Another day the Russian army, who are now the bad guys and were the good guys at the time, arrived to sanitize, we were told. They were dressed like astronauts. They moved us from one room to another, everyone and they dedicated time to us, for the first time, after so many years, I had the sensation of existing again, even the news spoke about us, the grandparents of the RSA called us.
I remember that that day, with the army, there was also a photographer who seemed a bit clumsy to tell the truth. I observed him with curiosity because he photographed everything, the withered flowers on the windowsill, my time-worn slippers, the leftover soup on the plate; he also photographed Caterina being moved in her wheelchair by two nurses.
Random things, which have always been here, have always happened.
Now that I'm gone, all my items have been taken and put in a bag, thrown away.
The postcards you sent me from the sea, my drawings, the notebooks with the poems I wrote for you, he was sorry for that, not for dying. The day of the funeral they took us away in military trucks, Caterina was also there who had died the day before me.
An important funeral. We left in silence, becoming a story that still makes noise.

Roberto Cristaudo
NP April 2023