Italian
I’m driving home, listening to the radio. Between songs, advertisements, and news about Trump, the war, the right and the left, a brief uncommented news item slips in: an 86-year-old man kills his elderly and sick wife and then takes his own life. Two gunshots that alarmed the neighbors.
Not a crime of passion or for any specific reason. Not an event that really interests the news, on which to activate talk shows. No opinions or comments requested from psychologists and psychiatrists, known or not. It is one of those events that have already happened many times, that are easily forgotten and that are almost preferred to be silenced.
A old song by Herbert Pagani from 1969 came to my mind, titled “Hourly Hotel”. It tells the story of the suicide of two lovers, which took place in a small hotel in Paris. “Clean, polite, they seemed fake… they looked like two painted saints.” “They had left in perfect silence, leaving only two bodies in the bed. No flowers, no people, just a van, but where they are, they will be just fine. I know I have nothing to do with it, but it’s not fair…”.
Yes, it is not fair. Illness, loneliness, feeling useless and abandoned while facing the ordinary complications of life is not fair.
We live in a world divided in half: on one side, young and poor, on the other, old and wealthy, all sharing a lack of hope and a rage that leaves no escape.
Living through senescence is not an easy condition. What one should expect is an endless array of problems that, even when one has sufficient financial resources, are not enough to alleviate the fear of becoming dependent on others, of not being able to face even the most ordinary tasks with the same energy and will.
Everything expands and becomes insoluble. There is no need to remember the help you gave to others: to them, you are now a burden, a cost to their health and your sustenance.
The need for security, the almost obsessive attachment to friends and loved ones, can even make you unbearable, as if it were a sign of weakness or an illness to be treated.
There is an anecdotal phrase that we often use to encourage ourselves: “He who stops is lost.” And so we must keep fighting, always, even when we lack strength, like a marble in a pinball machine being tossed back and forth.
I would like to transform this sentence into another: “Who stops has arrived.”
You get off one vehicle to board another. You embark on a new journey, with a new destination.
Medicine, which is always also psychological, even when it is not aware of it, should be able to help people who have stopped to restart, showing them a possible path, helping them choose, among many, a possible way.
