"We are not alone because One has come to keep us company, to accompany us in living," Fr. Julián Carrón.
I am beginning my fourth week of illness: bilateral pneumonia from Covid-19 defined by doctors as "very serious". This tenacious and vile virus strikes and whips you from all sides. In addition to pain, fatigue and physical exhaustion due to a lack of breath, the other most serious consequence is isolation from your loved ones, forced as you are to live sealed in a hospital room, where, if you are lucky (as I am), you find an elderly roommate who as soon as you greet him stops you and tells you he is praying!

From this trivial encounter a beautiful friendship was born, sustained by the fact that we both believe in Jesus and help each other in the conditions that reality imposes upon us. This situation, this new reality, does not dominate, it does not prevail, it is not master of everything , because in addition to this new and unexpected friendship that makes me happy, what amazes me most, in an exceptional way, is receiving (continuously during these 22/23 days in hospital) messages and phone calls from my family members, from my friends in my Fraternity group and from all the other friends in the community, who do not leave me alone for even a moment during the day, who constantly accompany me with that benevolent gaze that they have upon me, and who hold my destiny dear. The beautiful thing is that I was not the only one who noticed, even my “roommate” was astonished and asked who I was and who all these friends were "who give me no respite" comforting me and inquiring about my health. It is like being in a centrifuge, or like when I was a kid, when I used to skip school with my friends to go to the merry-go-round at an amusement park, where you are constantly thrown high up to feel the dizziness of flying in the void, but then you always come back down to your friends.

Read also – “The same things I live for”

Even now that I am a little older, I am continually launched, re-launched and picked up by messages, or Zoom connections to pray the Angelus or Rosary together, or for School of Community. It is amazing that my hospital room is now my new dwelling place, where the affection of my family, friends and those closest to me is also shared by my roommate.

Asking here in the hospital "with humble certainty that the beginning of every day is a yes to the Lord who embraces us and makes fruitful the soil of our heart”, has a different value, a different weight, a conscious gratitude that is different from before, I dare say more motivated.

Nando, Gerenzano, Italy