It's Christmas Eve, a little before lunch. I check my phone to see the time, and notice the WhatsApp icon shows an enormous number of unread messages. Yet I never felt it buzz. I look closer and realize the culprit is the (muted) group chat for my Fede e Luce community. A boy's mother is in the hospital in critical condition. The alert goes out: who can take him in? Who can look after him on the 24th and 25th, until the caregiver can get back to work?
Many of us offer money right away, but the caregiver won't skip Christmas with his own family. Many of us blame the boy's other relatives for being absent, for not knowing or pretending not to know. Many of us find reasons to excuse ourselves: we-have-young-children; we're-hosting-relatives; our-own-families-are-struggling-and-we're-doing-our-best. Some of us could spare a few hours... But the truth is, our community can't solve this boy's problem—and we hadn't even noticed how desperate his mother's situation had become.
But this isn't a story about personal or collective guilt. This is a true story that teaches us how to become better people.
Because after a few frantic hours of scrambling, the message came through. The Pescosolido family—Stefano, Monika, and their two sons, Filippo and Domenico (they don't even belong to our Fede e Luce community, for what it's worth)—would take the boy in through Christmas afternoon. Christmas Eve evening... the vigil supper... the night of gifts... Christmas dinner...
The relief was enormous, knowing "our" boy was warm, welcomed, and loved. But my gratitude as a parent was something else entirely: now I could tell my son that when his mother had failed to open our door to someone knocking in the night, the Pescosolido family had opened theirs. His mother had fallen short, but the Pescosolido family had shown us all that we really can be better people.