On the day when we remember those who are no longer with us, I return to a little handwritten booklet by Stefania. Its first page is dated March 31, 2014, and addresses Gianluca, Gabriele and Eleonora. The last is dated May 11, 2019, her fifty-eighth birthday. I found it later, when I would have given anything to ask her once more what she thought.
Finding a voice in handwriting
A booklet cannot bring a person back. It cannot return her voice to the room or restore the gestures that filled our days. And yet, when you recognize someone's handwriting, you know her hand rested on that very page. Stefania could not have known what these pages would come to mean to us. She wrote about the family she came from, the life we built together, her faith, her worries and the joy of an ordinary happy day. Now we can read them knowing that they passed through her mind, her heart and her hand.
I scanned the manuscript and used ChatGPT's help to turn it into a booklet for our children. That help in preparing it does not change the origin of the memories: they belong to Stefania. This reflection, by contrast, is my way of accompanying them, without claiming to speak in her place.
Three children, three beloved people
Her pages do not express a vague love addressed to three names taken together. Stefania pauses over each child's character, recognizes gifts and difficulties, and worries about the future. She saw our children as distinct people, each with an irreplaceable place in her heart. A mother cannot know in advance which path her children will take. But, while there is time, she can let them know that she truly saw them.
Above all, I hope our children find this in the booklet: not an obligation to become what she imagined, but the certainty that they were known and loved for who they were.
The truth of a woman, not a perfect portrait
Stefania does not hide what weighs on her, either. She asks forgiveness for the times when she feels she did not manage to protect the children from other people's cruelty. Those words are painful to read, because they show how deeply she carried even the hurts inflicted on others. I do not read them as the confession of a mother who loved too little. I read them as the honesty of a woman who loved enough to question her own limitations.
When we remember someone, we may be tempted to remove every uncertainty from her portrait. But her humanity is precisely what we miss: her sensitivity, her questions, the moments when she did not know what to do. I do not want to give our children a mother turned into an unreachable figure. I want them to find their mother, whole.
A faith that makes room for questions
Faith runs through her memories. Stefania drew on it as she entrusted our children's future to God and sought meaning in the family's trials. Yet she did not have an easy answer for everything: some wrongs suffered by her parents remained hard for her to understand. On those pages, trust does not erase questions. It lives alongside them.
That seems to me a precious legacy even for those whose faith is different. We can hope without pretending that pain is simple; we can search for meaning without declaring that what still hurts has been resolved.
Happiness looked like home
Stefania feared losing her memory, as had happened to her own mother Ambrogia, our children's grandmother, and wanted to preserve the memory of a happy day. She did not choose an extraordinary event. Her words hold a breakfast, a phone call, a table shared with children and friends, time with her mother, a Mass. Things that can seem small while they happen, and become immense when we can no longer live them together.
She also devotes a few lines from that day to me. She calls me “my love”; smiles at my fondness for mathematics books and the Blek comics of my youth; remembers that films about children can move me to tears. She recounts how frightened I had been when I could not find her and her mother, my “loves,” and how I had cooked and helped Ambrogia with her breakfast and medicines. Then she asks herself: “How did I find such a treasure of a man?” I repeat her words not to praise myself, but because I recognize her way of seeing things in them: she treasured gestures that I considered simply part of our life together.
I read those lines and wish I could tell her she never had to thank me for loving her. The gift was being able to go through life with her. I wanted us to reach this slower season together; on May 30, 2026, Stefania left us before that wish could come true.
What I would like to leave my children
My dear children, I am not giving you these pages so that you will feel indebted to your mother, or because I expect you to find comfort at once. Grief follows its own time, and each of you will live through it in your own way. I am giving them to you so that, whenever you want, you can encounter her way of seeing you once more.
Read her hesitations as well as her loveliest sentences. Remember the woman who could rejoice in a day together and who was brave enough to apologize. And if, one day, you feel you can no longer recall her voice clearly, open the booklet: those words are not all of your mother, but they are hers. They can help you recognize her even in the simple things she taught you to love.
There is so much more I wish I could have said to Stefania. Today I will say one thing to her in front of you: thank you for leaving us this way to feel close to you. We miss you every day. We will love you, too, through the pages you wrote for us.
Papy