We believe these words run deep and true, difficult to say and perhaps harder still to hear. For that reason, we offer them to anyone seeking to learn the language of true "compassion"—of suffering alongside those who need consolation that is respectful and genuine, never hollow.
When you asked me on the phone if the pain would go away, I said no. It won't.
I want to try to explain myself better. The simple answer would be "Yes, don't worry—things will get better, time will heal." That suggests the pain is only for today, and tomorrow you'll start to forget.
Eventually life will go on as if nothing happened.
But that denies the truth. The truth is that what happened to you is absolute, central, irreversible. Luca's presence in your life—and now his absence—was definitive. Not an accident to bear, an inconvenience to accept, a burden to carry courageously. Not a "mystery" of Providence, nor a challenge to "the human condition." These things, yes—but much more than that.
It's quite simple: Luca was—is—Luca, and you love him. Luca was hard to know, hard to understand. But he wasn't hard to love. Perhaps difficult for others, but not for you. Some might have seen something lovable in Luca, yet somehow incomplete. What you saw in him was the absolute and essential person he was and remains—not merely "another living being," but Luca: this particular son, boy, man—utterly himself, special, different, unique, never to be duplicated. With a desire to express himself, to communicate with you and his friends, to celebrate with you the strange mystery of life. He was yours—yes, he belonged first to God, but he belonged to you as well. And that belonging gave him his absolutely singular character. Luca was not simply "a handicapped person": he was a beloved son and brother, a member of a particular family and particular community, surrounded by particular love and particular acts of compassion. Compassion means "suffering with." Most of the time we try to avoid pain. The best way to do that is to avoid involvement in the pain of others. Luca's presence made that impossible. It made it impossible even for those of us who knew Luca only rarely or from a distance; for you it was always impossible. Luca demanded compassion of you. It was an inescapable dimension of your life.
I'm saying that this was an inescapable dimension of your life. It remains so. Luca's life is not a story that has ended, neither in our world nor in God's infinite world, which is so difficult for us to understand.
I cannot begin to understand why God asked you to care for Luca, whose human life seemed (to us) to hold so little significance and caused such suffering. But I will try—carefully and with a deep desire to avoid easy answers.
First, we all need the compassion of those who have suffered. Human society is not made up of people who are content, satisfied, complete, free from anxiety. Thank God, we have moments or periods of great peace and joy. But every individual life, every family, is always vulnerable to unexpected and terrible possibilities of pain. Those we love are so magnificently and irreplaceably precious to us that we are—in a way that cannot be described—profoundly vulnerable to their loss. You, who have lived the strange and complex experience of loving Luca and losing him, have much to offer us. Some of our human sufferings and losses are quite small; others are greater. But all of them hurt, and when we hurt we need consolation.
Second, through Luca—through your closeness to him and your care for him—God gave you an encounter with the magnificent and terrible polarity of human existence. On one hand, the incredible mystery of human life (its unique and special quality, its individuality and splendor) and on the other, the equally incredible reality of death (its vulnerability, its helplessness, its smallness). What a contradiction! Usually the illusions of time, health, and normal human circumstances protect us from this. In Luca, those illusions were not possible. He stood before us—and especially before you—with the truth of life and death laid bare.
Third, God placed at the center of your life his preferred image—Jesus Christ crucified. The heart of our faith is the memory and image of a beloved son destroyed by his encounter with human history. In the image of the crucified Christ we recognize not only Luca, but countless lives whose death can have meaning only when seen as belonging to the kinship of those crucified together with Christ, to whom it was said "today you will be with me in paradise." I had, as you know well, a sister—my only sister—who died at age five. She was a child with Down syndrome, and her life did not afford her experiences we could remember or celebrate. Yet I cannot believe her life was meaningless. She and Luca are part of an innumerable company of individuals, made in the image of God.
In the context of God's infinite glory, there is no need to distinguish between levels of glory. You saw in Luca the image of human imperfection and the image of God, and in your heart you know that the first image was without substance while the second was eternal. This is why the suffering of your separation will not diminish, and why you will never forget what you gained from loving him and from the privilege of being invited by God to care for him.
So you carry your grief, and Luca his peace. The love you gave him was, in this strange and complex world of ours, his preparation for a world we cannot even begin to understand.
Be grateful for what he taught you—you will never regret that, even though the pain remains.
- Dominic Milroy, 1997