Fra la guerra e la pandemia / Between War and Pandemic

I am in North Carolina. My mother is in Milan, where she is stuck in her house since the beginning of the Covid19 crisis. She, at 86, is living alone as she has since my father passed away three years ago. In this uncertain time, I recall that my mother belongs to a generation that, as children, faced war, and now, in their final years, they must to cope with a pandemic.

During the war, she saw her beloved city emptied and distressed, not unlike the way it appears now, because of the epidemic. When she was a child, she had the experience of being startled awake by an alarm in the middle of the night and rushing to take shelter in an underground bunker or cave with others to avoid the bombing. When she was 10, she fled the city with her mother to escape the destruction. They found refuge in the countryside, where she was happy and free to play in the fields with other children, but she sometime saw her mother cry silently at night, in the same bed, in the one room dwelling.

 Now she is not only alone, but at times lonely. My sister and I try to keep in contact with her by video calls, but we both are far away. Once a week my brother visits her. He brings her groceries and helps her with some little emergencies. Her daily life starts at seven in the morning. She listens to the Pope’s mass on TV. During the day she plays the piano, she cooks, and she cleans the house. She brings some of her homemade dishes to neighbors who live upstairs, leaving the package on their mat. They are teenagers, left alone by their parents who are working as doctors in the intense care unit at the hospital. Sometimes she hears about an acquaintance her age who contracted the fever, started to have difficulties breathing, then called an ambulance, and entered the hospital. After a while a call announces another death. Nothing follows: no funeral, no burial. On TV she sees a long procession of trucks carrying the dead to be cremated.

So, today in our conversation to show her that I’m proud of her, to cheer her up, I opened up and said:

Mummy, you are SPECIAL! You are so BRAVE!

Think, when you were little girl you faced the war and now, as a grandmother, you are coping with a pandemic!

She stayed quite for a bit, then she told me:

Sì, hai ragione. Però, fra la guerra e la pandemia, ho avuto una lunga vita felice, più o meno mi è andato tutto bene…e speriamo anche di superare questo, dai!

[Yes, you’re right. However, between the war and the pandemic I’ve had a long happy life: it’s all been OK more or less… and let’s hope to overcome this as well!”]

The silver lining in the darkness: life and happiness. What else?