We were invited to a party at our aunts' house—my brother Giovanni, my little sister, and I—and we were excited to go. When the afternoon ended and the party was over, our aunt told us simply: "So your mother can rest for a while, you'll stay here with us this week." We were sad not to go home that evening, but since we were with aunts, uncles, and cousins we loved dearly, we accepted it easily enough.
Eight days later, our aunt took us to see our mother in the hospital for the first time. It was unsettling.
She spoke with difficulty and seemed saddened by her suffering—saddened for us. I couldn't understand: it was my mother and yet it was someone else. When we left her room, I was twelve years old then, I couldn't stop crying. My aunt explained that it was the medicine causing it, but that it was necessary because it would help her recover.
Of the deep wounds from that time, I remember three moments.
The day we were seized with fear because our mother hadn't come home. Someone rang the doorbell: two police officers bringing her back. She had only been able to tell them her maiden name.
Another time, walking down the street with our mother, newly discharged from the hospital for the day, we ran into a friend of mine. I felt ashamed. Perhaps she didn't know this was my mother, but I was afraid of her look.
And then the day our mother, who loved the sea, took a train to go swimming at Dieppe and came back without a ticket. We were called to the police station to pay a fine. This was too much: it was impossible not to break down in sobs.
We were too young to bear such a trial after losing our father just a few years before. But Father continued to watch over us, and so we were surrounded and cared for by our grandmother, our aunts and uncles, with infinite tenderness. For our mother it was the stripping away of memory, of competence; it was the impossibility of participating in the normal life of every day. And yet...
How can I describe the extraordinary light that came from her, that infinite sweetness, that detachment from herself that made it possible for us to confide everything to her; that constant concern for everyone she knew; those questions of hers that reached the heart; that certainty that, sitting near her, we were closer to Jesus.
The hospital chaplain told us one day: "Near her, I discovered it is possible to become poor. I never left her room the same way I entered it." And he added:
"Her presence changed the whole atmosphere of the ward."
Yes, our mother knew the suffering that destroys, the suffering of anguish, the suffering of fear "about oneself" and she made us understand that all this has meaning after Gethsemane; that when one is alone, irredeemably alone, Jesus, after the Garden of Olives, came to reach him.
We understood that there is no anguish on earth that does not have meaning if we accept our own poverty, our own beggary; this is what our mother did throughout all these years of offering. If we accept ourselves as beggars for a Presence, then the door of the Gospel is open.
Our mother is a witness to the immense offering of all the poor of the earth, all those who one day entrusted everything to Jesus in a moment of anguish. And this saves the universe.
As for me, two encounters held me up.
That of Martha Robin at Châteauneuf-de-Galaure, where for the first time I understood that linked to suffering was a weight of infinite love.
That of Faith and Light: there suffering was transformed by love, and joy was present. I had a kind of light deep in my heart, but before these encounters I had never known people who drew the strength for their lives from this light.
Friendship with the Little Sisters of Jesus taught us much.
During our stays in Aix (our mother spent her last years of life in that city's hospital), the sisters let us sleep at their house, let us eat with them. Even when we could no longer speak, this mattered not at all.
They were the ones who told us stories, who made us smile. They spoke to us with love about the people of the neighborhood; there was in them a true compassion and a concrete concern to help.
During a family pilgrimage to Paray-le-Monial, they lent our mother their most beautiful cushion, the only one embroidered.
Phone calls from friends too were each time a small light.
"I wish I were a little bird to fly to you and gaze at you with my whole sight," our mother wrote to me in one of her last letters. I thought of a song composed by Carmel for children:
"I wish to love you, Jesus... I wish to fly toward you, I am only a little bird. On your wings you will take me and I will soar much higher."
- C.D., 1988, from Ombres et Lumière no. 79