The days

At twenty-three years old, while facing an incurable evil, Simona has discovered the true meaning of life.

Dear reader,

I offer you my twenty-three years, my youth so that others know you. O my Lord, pour out your Spirit upon me, so that I won't deny this cross. Let me look at your face and consume myself in the love ... and from consummation will born life, perhaps the healing ... this I do not know ... My good Jesus, Father, my friend. Thy will be done. It's for the eternal life that I ask You to live. Not for the death...

This is what Simona wrote in her diary few months before her death. Leaving to us a disconcerting witness. At twenty-three years old, facing an incurable evil, Simona has discovered the true meaning of life: a gift for the others so that others may know You.

I read this testimony of Simona at the end of the homily of the deceased in the great monumental cemetery of our city crowded with worshippers. It seemed to me an exemplary testimony for all of us who went to visit our departed loved, we looked for a response to that pain. To that trial, that is the disappearance of a loved person. At the end of her life with death.

The attention and the silence of the audience gave me a measure of how the power of faith embodied in the suffering can involve our spirit and open it to a true dimension of hope. The same witness, I tried to reproduce to a mother that was crying: for months her daughter goes up and down in Europe, in a pilgrimage of hope to the great luminaries of the medical science. But in despite of the sacrifices, the love, the dedication, seems that the hopes are still declining due to the progression of the illness. If decreases the hope in the intervention of the mankind, can not fail the trust and hope in God. But this step is difficult because the mind and heart are rebelling facing a life that is put at risk, it seems impossible that a young girl can be battered even when she is opening at the existence.

Certainly the Simona's witness has a unique charge, it's the dimension of life that expands into a gift of love that overcomes even the same nature, the same human instinct to take on a dimension of true charity. But the words are not sufficient facing the pain and tears of a mother who did everything humanly possible to stop an evil that seems incurable. Thought there is an area, a small chink of opportunity in that broken heart: not everything can be calculated in human terms, life has a value that exceeds even the existence and is placed on that infinite who is also present in our being finished and limited.

The Christian hope. Here a long silence interrupted our conversation. I can testify this virtue, but I can not impose it. I can support its research but I can not offer it for free. But at that moment I thought the only glimmer of hope could pass through the sharing: the bear of the sufferings of ... As if she was my daughter, as if the pain of that mother was my sorrow to make my hope be also her hope. I've immediately understood that it was not a painless or convenient operation. To suffer with whom suffers, according to the Pauline's motto, is not an easy task; the sharing have to go in, have to produce the same pain, have to make live the same torment, the same dark, the same fear. But it's really true, I wondered when I was leaving the house in silence, if I'm capable of that, or either I'm victim of the fear of suffering, of always thinking that it's not my suffering, if those tears do not belong to me... and so on.

If I can not succeed in letting real tears arrive in my eyes, real fear in the heart, dark in my mind I can not say to share, to participate ... Simona succeed and had given herself!

don Tonio Tagliaferri, NuovOrientamenti, November 12^th, 1989