I can't quite remember whether my friendship with Andrea and Silvia's family began before or after I got engaged to my husband. But it was about ten years ago when he met their neighbor and decided to bring me into their lives as well.
It would be foolish to try separating my friendship with Silvia and Andrea—siblings, both with severe handicaps, and Andrea has since passed—from my friendship with their parents. Their mother was truly the bridge that brought me to them; through her, the friendship took on a character entirely different from what it might have been otherwise. In this family, more than most, the concrete necessity emerged of being almost a single body: Silvia and Andrea could not live independently.
Our visits had no particular structure or occasion. One of us would call and ask if we could come. The answer was almost always yes. We would spend an afternoon together with good tea and biscuits. What stays with me is the image of gathering around the warmth of a hearth, always near Silvia and Andrea in their welcoming room.
What struck me was the humble restraint with which Nadia and Giulio bore this suffering, without surrendering to the easier path of victimhood. I was moved by Nadia's attentiveness—the delicious meals she prepared for her children, the beautiful things surrounding them, the care with which she dressed them. This stood in sharp contrast to an institution where I had worked for three months. There, for various reasons, contact with people affected by severe handicaps rarely passed through these channels—gestures that may have seemed an "unnecessary" flourish for children with cerebral palsy.
The pleasure of being with this family was reason enough for our steadfast presence during that period—a constancy that eventually gave Nadia and Giulio the courage to entrust their children to us for a couple of short summer vacations. I say courage because they knew they would find no one as devoted as themselves. I understood this deeply, and never more than then did I feel the weight of responsibility for two people so fragile placed in my care.
This step was also a moment of "emancipation" for Silvia and Andrea, who as adolescents were away from their mother for an extended period—one they felt keenly, and suffered for—and for their parents, who could think for a few days about themselves. I had the privilege of being near them, trying to fill Nadia's role as best I could in their daily needs, feeling almost like an older sister, involving them in activities they wouldn't normally do at home. And the privilege of witnessing when Nadia and Giulio came to collect them, seeing that single family body reunite and restore itself.
But Andrea's health declined, and longer outings became impossible. One summer day, the year I married and moved to another city, Andrea went to the Lord, leaving a great emptiness in our hearth.
Our paths have since diverged—families, work, moves, new lives we weren't living at twenty—but Silvia, Andrea, and their parents, Nadia and Giulio, showed me through their very being the love that binds husband and wife, parents and children. Yet it's hard to capture in words the importance and beauty of those afternoons, of friends who have become cornerstones in my heart.
Cristina, 2002