"The evening you will say goodbye to your husband and wait to find out which Covid hospital he will be taken to, you will connect to School of Community.” If someone had predicted this to me, I would have called them crazy. But that night at the beginning of October, with my phone in one hand and my iPad in front of my face, I was there, connected to School of Community.

It was a completely rational gesture, not at all sentimental, because it was immediately clear that those faces, more or less familiar or nice, were there as the presence of a loving Father who was holding my hands above my head, while all my emotional certainties crumbled within a few hours.

Then I got a fever. Nine days of being ill, standing in order to tend to my nine-year-old daughter with a mask and gloves, keeping as far away as possible. And yet, in a condition of total loneliness, dictated by the rules of this ugly disease, I was never alone, thanks to continuous conversations with a doctor friend, with my older children and with my sister, day after day to understand what to do, if and when to go to the hospital, if to allow one of my children who was already in quarantine for other reasons to come…

Until the day of my hospitalization. My son came home to allow me to go to hospital and took care of the little one. I saw him through a slit in the door of my bedroom, wearing a gown, gloves, mask, sanitizing products. Then I hear him working for hours while he sanitizes the house to allow me to isolate in my bedroom. The emergency services arrived and I was taken into that circle of hell that is the Covid emergency room of the Policlinico di Milano. A corridor full of chairs and stretchers, full of a scared humanity and emptied of the ability to breathe well. I became small and frightened. A nurse gently approached and apologized for not finding my vein. His eyes were sweaty, he had been working in the corridor all night long, within that plastic wrapped around him up to the tip of his hair.

After doing several tests, I fell asleep sitting down. I was cold, but my angel nurse came and he noticed, and covered me with a towel, making sure not to wake me up. This gesture unleashed within me the awareness of being loved, of being wanted, of being watched and made me cry with love and emotion, made me cry tears that I had not cried because of pain and fear.

The verdict: Covid pneumonia. "But we sent her home with cortisone treatment." I was not alone, everyone worked around my isolation so that I had everything I needed. Even the catechists in the parish, with whom I was supposed to begin a course for young people this week, insisted on bringing me food. My son received so many offers of help and was impressed and moved. We look together at the miracle of this companionship that is the Church, we know everyone prays for our recovery.

My colleague also gave me courage: "Come on, for me, your family is a great example, I look at you with admiration.” She used this word: admiration. Admiration for the engine, Christ, that makes God's things happen today, within this tribe, as Azurmendi said during the Beginning of the Year day.

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During the last days of effort, my daughter went into crisis. She could no longer bear to see her mum sick, her father gone... She began to question everything, even the choice of the new school. With calm dialogue and at a distance, I tried to show her all the good things that have happened in these days to our family, and that, for example, her new school has not abandoned her even for a single day. Little by little her desperate cry turned into a smile, she picked up the phone and told her Dad about reality through her mother's eyes.

But her mother had learned to look at reality through the eyes of Jesus. "God’s whisper..." These words had struck me like an arrow at the Beginning of the Year day. From that day on I asked to be able to see God's whisper, I wanted it very much. God’s whisper, disruptive, during Covid.

Signed letter