I met Susi, sister of Maurizio, who died three years ago. Her brother was everything to her, even though she built a family of her own. She gave everything she could, without reservation. Then he was gone, leaving a vast emptiness. Not long after his death, she told me something that happened. Someone said to her, with little tenderness: "Now you're free. What will you do?"
Now you're free. I haven't spoken much with Susi over the years, though we've known each other always, but I never had the sense she was a prisoner to her brother Maurizio. That phrase struck me. I turned it on myself, wondering if I feel imprisoned by being the sister of Giorgio and Cristina. But then I had to ask: What is freedom? What makes us free? Did the person who said that to Susi actually know what she was talking about? Had she truly understood? Or was she simply projecting her own feeling—that she herself would find it burdensome to live alongside someone with a disability? I don't know. It's not my place to judge what was right or wrong in what she said, or what she truly felt.
So I ask myself: What is freedom? Do I feel free? Was Susi freer when Maurizio was alive, or now that he's gone? Do we siblings of people with disabilities feel free, or imprisoned by disability?
Looking at my own life, I can say there are moments when I feel tired from the work of caring for my siblings. I know discouragement, helplessness, sacrifice, responsibility, anxiety, loneliness, struggle. And yet I feel free. Love is what makes us free. Real love doesn't bind us in chains. As siblings, as Susi, as me, as countless others—we can say we are not prisoners. We are wholly free because we have chosen to love despite everything, chosen to love our brother or sister.
To love means to be willing to give all, because we have learned—maybe only after living through a long struggle of our own—that the person beside us is precious. They are the most like home we have ever known. Love makes us free. Love pushes us beyond disability. Love moves our lives, our care for the other, our longing for their good and our own. Love is what gives us strength to fight battles with society, with the systems that serve us, with sickness itself. Love keeps no accounts of time spent, of things surrendered, of what we might gain. The relationship that grows day after day, in calm and in storm, is a relationship of love—and therefore free.
Around me I see people who are far more imprisoned than I am—bound by work, by money, by some notion of status, by the system itself. They are prisoners and don't know it, always hungry for more. I, even with the daily, constant work of caring for two people, am free because I love them. Otherwise I couldn't do it; none of us could, not even Susi. Our relationship is free because it is love. It is not dependence.
"Now that you're free, what will you do?" I am free, so I love my brother and sister. When they are no longer here, I will not be free. I will be lost.