Memories of grandparents
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Young and old, one people
Saturday 14 March 2020: the first Saturday without the care home. A reflection against the throwaway culture.
Today is Saturday 14 March 2020. Normally, on Saturdays, I go to the care home to volunteer, as I have done for twenty years. Sadly the coronavirus orders prevent me, and so I am here writing.
At first, when the decision was taken to bar volunteers from entering the care home, I did not understand the reason. I would say: “after all, man does not live by bread alone”, and our grandparents need not only care, but also affection, attention and love.
Later the rational, scientific side of my character took over, and I understood that the choice had been made to protect the elderly from this illness, since they are more fragile than we are.
Unable to go in, I tried to telephone Mrs Carla, a resident of Villa Teruzzi, but I never managed to reach her. In today’s globalised world a virus can travel thousands of kilometres in a few months, crossing oceans and mountains, while it proves harder to reach a person who lives less than a kilometre from my home…
As I write, almost all of Italy is locked down. I find myself spending a lot of time in front of the news and hearing young people say: “it’s only a virus that hits the old anyway”. Or even: “it will be inevitable to treat only those with the best chance of survival”, which is like saying we should let the elderly and the most fragile die. But they went even further: an important foreign head of state said “we will not change our way of life” and “start to accept that you will lose your loved ones before their time”. In other words, a kind of selection, in which the most fragile elderly, the most costly to society, will be left to die.
Young and old, one people
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To all this I say NO!!!
We are one people, one humanity, guests of this world.
If we have come to say and think all this, our society is in a deep crisis: not economic or medical, but anthropological. We can no longer grasp the values of life or understand a simple idea: any work made by human hands can be built and rebuilt with toil and sweat, but when a human life is lost, it is lost forever.
On this point, for the more forgetful, it would be well to remember that at the end of the Second World War this country was a heap of rubble, and it is thanks to the sweat and toil of the generation we now want to leave behind that we can bask in our present prosperity.
I do not know when I will resume volunteering and, sadly, I do not know whether, when I return, I will still find all my grandparents; what saddens me most is that, should they pass away, I will not even be able to say goodbye to them, to come close, or to attend their funeral.
It is important to fight this mentality of exclusion, and it is equally important to say that we are one people, one humanity, guests of this world. A humanity that will have a future in solidarity and sharing, and not in selfishness.
Collected by Riccardo Beretta · AVO Concorezzo volunteer