What Matters Is That He's Healthy

A review of Alessandra Nobile's book.
What Matters Is That He's Healthy
Cover "The Important Thing Is That He/She Is Healthy"

A small, delicate book bound in pale blue… with a title that, without need of a question mark, contains multitudes of them. But what if it weren't so? What if the health we think we know required altogether different measures?

Alessandra Nobile writes to her son, Gabriele, and invites us into the vigil of expectation, the weight of his arrival, and the discovery of Down syndrome. She grieves for the child she had imagined… and marvels at the creature in her arms. In a handful of pages, she asks her son's forgiveness for not having received his birth with unmixed joy. But how could she have? We are all drawn, inevitably, to what is absent, what is different. Down syndrome is hardly a prize, as another father observes in these pages.

To see the child who is there—beyond the syndrome itself—that is the true prize, and the daily wager of any parent or stranger who passes by. This mother, despite everything, seems to have begun well.

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Cristina Tersigni

Cristina Tersigni

Born in 1969, in 2003 Mariangela Bertolini asked Cristina to collaborate on the special issue about Faith and Light: Cristina was on the National Council of the association and was a useful liaison…

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