May was ending, the issue nearly complete. All that remained was her editorial. She had never failed to write one, and a few days earlier, when she could still speak, she had said she wanted to dedicate it to Jean Vanier, for the fiftieth anniversary of L'Arche. But then Mariangela no longer had the strength.
On May 29, Ascension Day, she left us to join the Father's house.
We said goodbye on the feast of Mary's Visitation to Elizabeth, and the day's Gospel was the Magnificat. She had told us so many times about that canticle, about how singing it at Lourdes so many years ago had marked a turning point in her life after a very difficult period. That memory had shaped everything that came after.
From then on, she never stopped trying to reach as many parents and young people as possible who faced the same struggles she had endured.
Doing whatever she could to ensure they would not face them alone. Even the mother in the most remote village—at least reaching her through this magazine, if a Faith and Light community could not.
And for thirty years she gave herself to Ombre e Luci and Faith and Light.
As the trailblazer she was, she created the Faith and Light summer camps; she worked first for Il Chicco-Arca and more recently for Il Carro, to give concrete answers to the needs of non-independent disabled young people and their families.
We will try to learn from what she taught us. Above all, the care she always took in protecting the dignity of young people—the incredible attention she paid to the photographs that represented them and the words that described them.
Her dear friend Nicole, who worked alongside her for years, said that Mariangela had only to dip her pen in her heart to reach the hearts of those who would read her words. And she truly did this: sharing the shadows that inhabited her own heart while letting us fully see the lights that illuminated it.
Mariangela's editorial always arrived in the final stages of layout. We had to understand the spirit of the issue first, so the right welcome to readers could be written, and she was exacting about this. We waited for it anxiously, yet we were certain it would come.
And then she would pull out her handwritten pages and read them to us, on the defensive, as if under examination. Every time she began by belittling her own work, saying "No, look, this one is really bad," and every time we answered with a smile. We knew that once again she would surprise us with an image, a memory, a protest, a cry, or a confession.
We knew we could trust those pages to close thirty-two pages in the best way possible. And it was always so.
Now we know we will not see that manuscript pulled from her bag again. We know we must settle for what has already been taught to us, and we will share it in the most "Mariangela-like" way we can, in every editorial to come.
And now here we are, deciding through tears, yet with her smile before our eyes. How do we speak? How do we say that Mariangela has left us?
We are all too stunned, as if struck by an explosion that has left an enormous void, even though we are convinced she is still with us, and can sustain us now more than ever, and we are certain she is with the Lord, at peace in her passage and finally at rest—but the "flesh" (as she used to say) that covers our soul and spirit suffers from not being able to see her and hear her, and weeps. We miss her presence, her phone calls when she could not come to the office, we miss not even being able to say: we need to know what Mariangela thinks.
Then we begin to look into this great void and discover that gradually it fills with her presence, with all the beautiful things she left us. We hear her words again, we see her in her lovely family, in Faith and Light, in our office. Then we recognize her great legacy—not only in her precious words, her teaching, her writing, but in her example and in all the concrete things she accomplished or helped bring to life. Today we are still drying our eyes, but between a prayer and a mountain song, we want to smile again with all of you, remembering and telling the story of Mariangela even to those who never knew her—through stories, testimonies, and photographs. In a coming issue dedicated to her, we will describe and share all those things that will forever fill the great void.
In this way we can thank God for the gift of having placed her on our path, for allowing us to walk with her a stretch of the way, and we can hold that the pain of her departure is as deep as the joy of having known her.
Cristina, Matteo, and Rita, 2014