Hope

A Life that Generates Another Life

by Alberto Savorana

“It is impossible that God, as a father, could want to harm us; therefore, even if this illness might seem like a punishment, it’s not like that because I have been lucky enough to understand that hidden in everything, good or bad, is God’s plan. The thing that moves me more than anything else in all of this is being able to rediscover life within this pain and this is something that makes me think a lot about Christ’s Death and Resurrection, as if this moment were my own Easter.” Andrea was 17 when he wrote this letter. He was going to high school in Syracuse (Sicily) and had contracted a type of leukemia that left little room for hope. How is it possible for him to talk like this?
In September 2004, Andrea attended the GS Equipe (CL High School Vacation). “I was struck right away by his will to live,” recounts Fr. Giorgio, who had been visiting him in the hospital in Pavia, where Andrea had been for the last few months. “He was impressed by the certainty of the kids he had met and returned home enthusiastic. He began living in a different way, even with his illness.”
Andrea spoke very little, but observed a lot. Everyone who went to visit him remembers that penetrating gaze that dug deep down. One day, after a long silence, he asked Fr. Giorgio: “Of all people, why did this happen to me?” “I don’t know,” he answered, “but I am absolutely sure of one thing and that is that everything that happens is for God and for our own good.”
Soon the hospital staff started to notice that this boy was different; he was singled out as an example. The suffering was visible, but his face showed no anger. After a year, the illness progressed and Andrea was confined to his bed for 40 days. “He really wanted to go home… Syracuse, the sea,” Fr. Giorgio remembers. “‘See,’ I said to him one day when we were alone, ‘We must ask for healing, and through that healing, happiness, Heaven. Even the sea has an end, and we want that shore for the access it gives us.’ His only response was, ‘Yes,’ said with some difficulty, but the signs of suffering on his face seemed to lessen.”
On the same day that he died, a letter, that provided the inspiration for this article, arrived at the hospital: five prisoners at Brucoli, in Sicily, had learned about Andrea from a professor who came to the prison to teach them; he had asked them to pray for Andrea and they had written a letter that seemed more like it had come from a convent than a jail cell. “A friend read it to him,” Fr. Giorgio recounts, “and after her I read to Andrea again. I told him, ‘See, hope is the fulfillment of this struggle; just like those men, in prison, are happy and have hope, so are we, in our prison, which is the body, illness.’ This seemed to calm him. He died a few hours later. In that moment I understood what it means to visit the Blessed Sacrament: to be in front of that boy was like standing in front of Christ.”
Throughout his hospital stay, Andrea was a presence, almost always silent, but real. Fr. Giorgio also recalls: “Every time I went to the hospital, someone would approach me–one day, a doctor; another day, a nurse; then, a patient: ‘Excuse me, are you Fr. Giorgio, Andrea’s friend?’ I was stopped once by a 19-year-old boy, his name was Andrea too, and he was in the room across the hall from my young friend. He approached me and said, ‘I’d like to talk with you sometime. You see, I am just starting the same journey that Andrea is on.’ And I said, ‘Learn from him.’ ‘You know, I need to take my final exams for graduation.’ I answered, ‘The final exams of your life.’ He said, ‘Don’t start talking to me about God; I’m not interested.’ On the day Andrea died, that boy came to find me: ‘Listen, would you be willing to come and talk with me? You know, about that God stuff….’ When these people stopped me to ask questions, the presence wasn’t me, the presence was Andrea, and only their interest in him made them seek me out.” Fr. Giorgio remembers something he had heard from Fr. Giussani: “If you belong, all you have to do is breathe and there is a presence.”
Andrea left us at the age of 18, Tuesday, May 24th. Everyone was there that day, in that room, in the presence of that boy who loved soccer and the Sicilian sea. “His parents amazed the hospital staff, because they were the ones–the very people who would seem to be most in need of comforting–who were consoling everyone else. ‘They don’t seem like parents whose son has just died,’ they all commented.”
After the funeral, in Syracuse, all of Andrea’s classmates came up to Fr. Giorgio to say hello: “Please come back again, because this wasn’t a funeral, but a celebration.” “We are ‘virtually’ embracing you and we think of you as our brother… C’mon Andrea, fight together with us,” the five prisoners at Brucoli wrote to Andrea. Is there anything more amazing than a life that does not end and that, in death, creates another life, another desire for life, even within the walls of a prison?