A father speaks to us—a man who, having reached maturity, looks back on the path he has traveled and realizes that, step by step, it has led him to the serenity and gratitude that now define his life.
He is an elementary school teacher, and the father of Francesco, who lives with severe intellectual disability rooted in cerebral damage and congenital heart disease.
Francesco is thirty-seven, the second of six children. Despite his profound disability, he now enjoys the fruits of his parents' passionate and methodical care—and that of his siblings and friends. He is relatively independent and well integrated into his family and community. But there is more: Francesco has become the center around which everyone moves, not only because he is vulnerable and needs others, but because others need him. They need his presence, his love, his intuitions brimming with kindness and a profound intelligence that flows from within him despite all obstacles.
His brother-in-law says of him that he is "an enormously important person in the lives of many people, myself included." He is important "for anyone curious enough to slow down their own time to sync with his. For anyone who sees in those blue-green eyes another world with completely different rhythms and timing." A world trying to break through, trying to speak to those willing to listen. Those of us close to people with disabilities are utterly convinced of that world's reality and goodness. What is sometimes difficult is finding a way to let it emerge amid so many obstacles that block communication and peace. Some of those obstacles come from us—our limitations, our mistakes, our struggles.
Francesco proves that communication is possible. He has a personality entirely his own, a way of living and participating that is uniquely his. Yet he reminds us of so many others with intellectual disabilities: his fierce attitude, his sometimes stubborn determination to be understood, his hunger for affection and his generosity in giving it, his joy in the presence of peace and his demands for it—even violently—when it is absent.
Francesco's father tells many episodes from their life together with great simplicity. He recalls the terrible doubt at his birth, the diagnosis first uncertain, then increasingly clear—"like a great storm." He speaks of rebellion, his wife's love, the help of a "wonderful Franciscan priest." He remembers how everyone grew—parents and children alike—as Francesco's development and the constant demands of his care forced each of them to rethink their faith and make it real, day after day. It is a story of hardship but also of victories, of struggle but also of peace and gratitude. It is the story of a family and a circle of devoted, present friends.
- N.L., 1995
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