Alfie Evans died before his second birthday. ("My gladiator has laid down his shield and flown away at 2:30 a.m.," his young father wrote on Facebook on April 28, 2018.) Yet even now, with the controversy faded—at least until the next painful episode surfaces—it is worth returning to this case, which divided international opinion. And we do so by revisiting the letter that forty-nine mothers wrote on April 21 to the director of Alder Hey Children's Hospital in Liverpool, where Alfie was hospitalized, at the moment when the decision to withdraw his care had become final (which would happen two days later).
"Our children are not suffering; they are simply living," wrote the mothers of children in the pediatrics, intensive care, and neurorehabilitation wards of Rome's Bambino Gesù Hospital, each caring for a child with severe diagnoses—in many cases similar to Alfie's. "We wish to express our closeness to his parents, with whom we feel profoundly united in the shared sorrow of our children's illness. We are grateful to the doctors for their tireless care of all your patients, including little Alfie. And we are equally grateful to our Bambino Gesù Hospital, which allows us to keep our children alive, even in the most serious conditions, while keeping alive a small flame of hope. Because caring does not mean only curing. And in caring for our children, you doctors are caring for our families too, allowing us to stay by their side and to feel useful. Every moment of life spent together is beyond price for us parents. Our children are not suffering; they are simply living. And today they could feel the beauty and warmth of the sun on their faces and the tenderness of our touch. We ask you not to take from little Alfie and his parents the joy of these caresses."
A brief, powerful letter that simply testifies—from those who live it every day—that a person exists beyond illness and disability. Because the children of Palidoro are children, nothing more. Children in great difficulty, yes, but able to "feel the beauty and warmth of the sun on their faces" and the tenderness of their mothers' touch.
A letter that Alfie leaves to us as a legacy, with all the force of the question it holds: Is there anything else we need to call a life worthy of living?
Giulia Galeotti, 2018