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With Adalberto I shared in Italy the preparation for volunteering (learning the Spanish language and some of the history and problems of Latin America) and, now in Bolivia - the country that we both chose to carry out our civil service on behalf of the Italian government -, we lived together in El High, for two years. For a while we shared the bunk bed in the austere Ciudad Satélite home and had long night conversations about Bolivian society in its facets best known to us: that of the periphery of the metropolis (El Alto was still a neighborhood of La Paz) and of youth (we were both part-time university teachers at the time).
After finishing volunteering and already married to a distinguished Bolivian lady, Adalberto entered the diplomatic service of Italy as an “Italian reader” at several universities in South America. Then I lost contact until he showed up at my mother's funeral, 25 years ago, to resume a friendship made of memories and realities, some joyful (like the three children we each fathered) and others sad (family mourning and their deteriorated marital situation).
About three years ago he called his middle son, Piero, to ask me for help. His father had entered the irreversible spiral of Alzheimer's and, in that fog that was beginning to permeate his mind, he still reacted positively to my name. We were able to talk for a few minutes on the phone, then exchange a couple of photos of “those times in El Alto” and we decided to keep up to date. We did it, although discontinuously. Thus I knew, and confirmed, that the disease was advancing, slowly but inexorably.
At the beginning of the month, Piero contacted me again to let me know that he had arrived in La Paz with his father for a family visit (his grandmother is still alive), hoping to awaken memories in Adalberto that could stop or delay the advance of the disease. However, at the family lunch we had a few days later I was able to see the deterioration of his mental state and the discrepancy he felt, with great suffering, between what he wanted to express and the disjointed words that came out of his mouth. When we said goodbye, we embraced each other in a long hug, while he kept repeating to me, through tears: “I love you very much,” more than compensating for the frustrated attempts at conversation during the reunion.
As I write, Piero is taking his father back to Venice, where they reside, with few emotions recovered from returning to Bolivia. Adalberto will return to his routine: in the nursing home during the day, and at night, under the care of a nurse, he will pray the rosary, while Piero will try to recover, thanks to a job that "fell from the sky", his life. work, combined with filial, loving and patient service.
That's why I say: thank you, Piero!, for reminding me of the deep meaning of the biblical commandment to “honor parents”; which is not only taking care of them, not only not abandoning them in their old age, but honoring them, making them worthy of the joyful dedication of our time and our lives, although they do not appreciate it with their minds, but with their hearts.
Literature and cinema have described, with different approaches (even to justify euthanasia - the intentional erasure of all memory -), the ordeal that it means for people who enter that spiral of progressive loss of memories until they live without a past. , as if behind one there was only a dark night. It seems like dying without having died yet. It is, as far as I understand, a suffering without knowing why, or perhaps knowing it, but without being able to express it; a life without carrying the evil sown, but neither with the good given and received.
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