A fanciful bestiary. "You cannot imagine what God is able to make from the ruins of your soul if you entrust them to Him." With these words from Pascal, *The Room of the Bear and the Bee* opens—a book written jointly by Michela Franco Celani and Patrizia Miotto. The two women, one a journalist and the other a nurse, met through what they describe as "one of those moments in life that is hard to call mere chance," and together they have told "the most devastating of human experiences."
The heart of the story belongs to Patrizia, one of the authors, and her daughter Amy, a girl struck by cancer at two and a half and lost at five. Their struggle against time is relived here without a shred of self-pity, told through the clear-eyed gaze of someone who has seen hell and perhaps has found light again. As Amy's small body becomes "a battlefield," the young mother who brought her into the world learns to fight on the many fronts opened by illness.
For Patrizia, the first front is her daughter's heart. Protecting Amy from the truth demands a sophisticated effort of imagination and lightness. It requires inventing a cheerful world that makes sense of IV lines, feeding tubes, restrictions, and doctors. So the pediatric oncology ward, where only two rooms are single—the bear room and the bee room—fills with "a fanciful bestiary." Amy learns that a frog "has decided to live in your belly, but it's not the right place for it" and that her hair falls out because it's being replaced as she grows, like her baby teeth.
The second front, for Patrizia, is "myself"—the many moments of weakness when going on seems impossible and her nerves are raw. Then there are the financial struggles, the indifference of prominent doctors, the support of people that allows her to treat her daughter but sometimes cuts with casual cruelty.
The only true companions in the trenches turn out to be the other parents, with whom she "exchanges experiences, worries, and above all hopes between hospital stays." Hope, when you look at it clearly, becomes a powerful lifeline for Patrizia—a woman who harbors no illusions but never surrenders. When Amy asks her anxiously whether the Angels carrying her to heaven might let her fall, Patrizia finds the strength to reassure her. Perhaps remembering what another warrior mother had told her not long before: "When you see them suffer like this, you can't make sense of it, but when they leave you, they give you their strength so that you can survive."
Silvia Gusmano, 2007