In the Same Boat: When Intellectual Disability Enters the Family
Various authors — Edizioni Ancora, 2002, p. 153
I read "In the Same Boat" straight through without stopping. I should say upfront that I had not known the vast, years-long work of "Ombre e Luci" from which this book was drawn with evident care and discernment in its selection of pieces.
The text consists of brief biographical sketches, written in clear, compelling prose by authors who offer their lived experience with gentleness, lightness, and at the same time a conscious depth.
Various figures emerge: young people with disabilities, parents, brothers and sisters, grandparents, friends and companions, each present with their stories caught in moments of surprising intensity.
This is a book about human relationships as such. It concerns all of us. It forces us to look inward.
It tells us what it is like to live "inside" a relationship, despite all the temptations to flee; it communicates the experience of encountering our own incompleteness and that of others.
It conveys the melancholy awareness of stalemates and the possibility of growth in our bonds. It speaks of trust in our capacities — and of hope.
The discovery of real, genuine hope arrives to the reader as a reviving message, wherever we may find ourselves in our own life experience.
Is this perhaps the "beauty" Jean Vanier speaks of in his prologue?
We are drawn into these accounts, often told with a narrative momentum that brings us close to the tensions of daily life, to the truth of gestures that, to an attentive heart, appear as a discovery, a novelty from which change is born.
They tell us that change is always possible: an invitation to each of us. And so the invitation becomes a path we walk together — and we can finally even be happy. We can be moved watching Viviana dance, or seeing that boy finally "there in the middle" among the others, after such loneliness.
This is not a book written by experts, and that is one of its great strengths, because it shows us how to make our presence in relationship into an "experience." That experience can be sustenance in the work of Fede e Luce whenever we feel the need to clarify the foundation of our friendship and its possible future. It is a vital wish for all of us.
- Antonella Bulgheroni, 2002
