by Anna Capraro
(Lulu.com publisher, on sale on Amazon for € 5.73 - authors' rights will be donated to APIC)
from the INTRODUCTION
Silvana Forte, born on 10 October 1952, was a woman who left a mark on everyone's heart.
It was my mom ... and it is this tense of the verb 'to be' that hurts the most: "was". Not being able to talk to and about her anymore, in the Present.
Here is the reason for this book. Telling who Silvana was, a mother, a woman, a sister, a grandmother, an aunt, a friend ... omnipresent, even through her silences that characterized her.
She is still alive, and she is still among us. This is why we are writing you these letters addressed to Paradise: the place where she went to stay now, among the Angels who were waiting so long to welcome her.
Before starting with the letters, I would like to briefly tell a little about her ... not her whole life because a book would not be enough but only a short story of the last journey together with her loved ones ... with many ups and downs, as you can imagine.
I was in Riccione with my brother, my husband and my very little Alessandra: September 2015. Alessandra was one and a half years old. We were walking around Riccione, I called her on the phone and asked her how she was. He said to me: "Stong nguaiata Anna". And I: 11Why do you say that "? I always worried about her health, she had always been precarious, with various problems ... of course, never as big as that last disease that took her away from us forever.
That summer, she had come with my father to Bologna, after the August holidays, to be with my husband and Alessandra during my business trip to Sweden. Upon returning to Aquino, he fell ill at the station in Rome ... and shortly thereafter our Odyssey began. That illness was the alarm bell.
Mom, in her heart, perhaps already knew what would await her ... from her tone of voice, I understood how much concern she had within her.
He did the CT scan. That wasn't promising either.
When he got back from the CT scan, he was near his sink in the kitchen, and I was near the balcony window. I looked at her and said: "Mom, why are you worried? It's nothing. Everything is resolved, whatever it will be, we will face it and we will solve it. It is nothing". She looked at me and said, "I'm not asking for anything, but at least to live another ten years. I'd like to see my grandchildren grow up."
My heart exploded, my eyes filled with tears ... I could not hide it unfortunately. That sentence broke my heart.
We began to take refuge in faith, to hope for miracles ...
On October 10th we celebrated his birthday, but we weren't the same anymore. Our faces, our looks, the trembling words, all of us and around us reflected our many thoughts, anxieties, sadness.
My brother Sandro and I began the marathon of telephone calls in search of illustrious doctors who could cure her of that disease, unknown to us before then, but now a predominant part of our life.
Then the result of the biopsy: a rare, albeit rapidly expanding disease. Another blow, a punch in the stomach, dry and violent.
Since then, so many unanswered questions: rare? Why her? Does rare mean that there is no cure? Where could we take it? But above all WHY ALL THIS?
As children, when asked "what do you put in first place: Love, Health or Family", the answer was almost always "Love ... you think about sa Jute when you are old". But no !!!
I often find myself talking about how absurd all this is: you believe that these things can only happen to others, but then all of a sudden life opens up another chapter in your story and it seems like saying: "now it's your turn".
You are absolutely not ready, you feel disarmed, you hope that with each awakening all this can be just a bad nightmare, you look in the mirror and you begin to see wrinkles that mark the suffering of the days, now full only of thoughts that you would like to transform in solutions to solve everything and give your beloved mother back the years she asked you to have for herself and her family.
A fleeting glimpse into the past, many scenes that quickly cross our minds, many memories ... together with the parents, the mother, many phrases said ... we would pay gold to relive them ... but now everything seems so far away, almost how they belonged to another life ... a lifetime ago, when we thought about playing, running, going out ... but there was little time we dedicated to thinking about tomorrow.
Tomorrow without a mom! They should invent a user manual: "how does the path of our life change without a mother, how to do without".
It was beautiful when every day you heard his voice, ate his delicacies, which even if simple by now it was as if it were gold that you would have wanted to put in a safe to be able to keep it forever ... because inside you you knew that sooner or later it would be only the memory remained ... the gnocchi, the 'sagna' as she called it, the potatoes in sauce with cod, the pasta 'massed' with her hands with only water and flour, the meatballs with sauce, the anchovies with breadcrumbs stuffed peppers with stale bread, olives, anchovies and salami, soup with 'pane sotto', polenta 'cu' gli 'fasur', tomato sauce with parmesan crust, crushed meatballs made with bread stale, the pasta with pesto made by her, the donut that she called 'panettone' which she made me find every time I returned to Aquino, the biscuits with corn flakes she made on the occasion of weddings, communions or confirmations of relatives,. .. and so much more. All of this is missing today and will be missing forever. In the freezer we jealously keep the lasagna made with his hands and that we should have eaten together during the holidays. Now we only have those 1asagna and it's like savoring the scent of her hands, of her face ... we would like to keep them stored in the freezer forever so that that scent can stay with us forever ....