Happy birthday Eugenio: 18 years of joy, where there is always joy.

Popular tradition and some famous writings depict angels with wings, as divine beings endowed with the power to fly, to soar in the air, like thoughts, like grace, like the Holy Spirit, like freedom.

But everyone, including the Gospels, attributes to angels the white garments, luminous, sparkling, full of candor and light.

And that’s how you’ve often been dreamed.

And that’s how we think of you.

Even today, when you turn 18.

The age of maturity, adulthood, the age when one becomes a man or a woman.

In these last few months we have seen your best friends and your closest friends take this leap forward, in the pilgrimage of life, of that life of which you have only taken a few bites.

It was difficult, at times impossible, to meet the gaze of your peers as they struggled through their childhood photos, and there you were; for them, as for us, it was a punch in the stomach, almost as if they were rebelling against a sad, ominous, cruel destiny that selects certain flowers over others. What a cruel selection: but who makes these choices, who nominates that woman or that man to leave this earth? Is He a merciful God, or is He a mocking, ironic figure who plays on our emotions?

This is the question we parents of little, young angels ask ourselves every day: why choose my child, as unnatural as he is, instead of me, an old, boring parent, who has already spent at least half of his life? 

Why her, why him, with their whole life ahead of them?

The best answer I’ve ever found is the coach’s: doesn’t a team coach choose the best, youngest, and strongest players for his winning team?

That’s what I always told Francesca, too, who nodded sadly with an incredulous and astonished look.

Every morning I light the flame of the glass vial in front of your photograph, hoping that you too will light the flame of my life, now faded by my existence rich in strong experiences, so strong that they have bent me.

But not broken: I’m still standing on my shoulders, which must remain firm to support the weight of your sister’s growth, still a teenager, who can’t wait to take flight towards a new life, made of memories yes, but of new experiences, forgetting hospitals, medical treatments, chemotherapy and needles in your arms, too young and defenseless to accept everything you had to endure.

Your mother and I, the seemingly strong mother and wife that the four of us are proud of, are struggling to emerge from the dark, opaque tunnel that has gripped us for these four years.

But it is not easy to shake off melancholy, that apparent death that many dress up in to escape real life, a force too raw and sad to be lived.

It’s not easy at all to get out of bed in the morning, knowing full well that you’re leaving the safety of the night, the darkness, the silence, the dreams, towards a real life made of uncertainties, cruelties, some tiny and insignificant signs of affection, sometimes fabricated, but which don’t last over time.

It’s not at all easy to face a life without your life, which was entrusted to us as a gift from the Lord: we don’t understand the meaning of it, if death has a meaning at all.

And so everything in faith is inevitable, it’s necessary, it’s diving into the meaning of things, to understand, to comprehend. Faith opens a door for you, through which you can see why light illuminates your path, why darkness is no better than light, and why silence hurts when words of love fill the heart.

And you understand why God is love: this is the solution to the riddle. Love. Just looking at the crucifix and understanding the strange reason why that man of about 33 gave his life for his friends and for all humanity, can open your mind to something greater, incredibly crazy, and wonderfully sublime: love.

Do everything with love, do everything for love.

And so we get up in the morning, for the love of Lussy, our beagle who silently understands our state of mind, does her job as a dog, sniffs, wags her tail and lifts her paw to pee, but she understands, she understands. 

And then in the morning he sometimes barks, almost as if to say: ” wake up, the night is over, the light has conquered the darkness .”

And then I get up, offer her her breakfast of kibble, and with a look of gratitude and affection, she reluctantly pushes me down into the garden to do her business, which is perhaps more my thing than going out into the open air.

The freshness of the morning air gives my veins that much-needed thrill of life, and I breathe deeply as if it were that last breath of life I need.

And I feel life flowing through me, while the dog reminds me that today is another day, with its challenges and its gifts. 

Nature is like this: it stands there, waiting for us, just to remind us that life never dies.