For the past three years I have cared for an eighty-seven-year-old veteran who eventually became my best friend. He and I lived alone in his old house, whose cracked walls echoed and projected voices and family scenes of a long-gone past when he, his wife and four boys lived together. He was not a well-schooled man, nor was he adroit at expressing his innermost emotions and ideas. But he had goodness and genuineness in his heart. When his wife died seven years ago, life lost some of its appeal to the hopelessly romantic Italian man with a patriarchal mentality and deeply ingrained paternal instincts. She became the central theme of his daily remembrances of the war and of the days when he, alone and by his own will, carried the heavy burden of sustaining a large family. He passed away recently, my first close contact with death. The night before his transition, we talked for a while and he even made jokes and faces. But it didn't take much for the old man to feel tired and sleepy. When I was about to leave his room to get some sleep, his coarse and shaky hand grabbed mine and he confessed that he had loved me as if I were his own son, promising that he would keep an eye on me in his next life. Being an avid reader, he mentioned how deeply touched he was when he read a poem that I once wrote and inadvertently left on the kitchen table. He said he knew his to time to meet his wife had come. I asked if he was afraid of anything. He answered that he was looking forward to his dream, a real one that would never end. I once asked what paradise looked like in his visions. He pictured himself living with his woman in a sheep farm, enjoying life away from the stress and demands of the so-called civilized society. He held my hand tighter, pressed it against his chest, and said goodbye. I said there would be no goodbyes between us. He fell asleep and didn't wake up again. The next day his breathing was loud and hesitant. Stubbornness, humor, anger, and love no longer animated those lips and muscles. Fading vital signs were the only traces left of what was once named Pasquali, a blue-collar worker whose raging voice would shake the house's foundations whenever I saw fit not to comply. But the insubordination he was not used to won his heart in the end, elevating me to a position superior to that of his four blood-related submissive sons. As a child I pictured death as a ghastly entity, but in his final moments, while I held him close to me, I saw death drawing on a sleeping face peaceful lines. In my imagination she caressed and nestled against her bosom the soul of a moribund in his impending release from a worn-out body as she prepared him to be taken away to his rightful place among the just. I not only believe that we are immortals; I know that only the physical body degenerates and disappears; our conscience is eternal. I am glad that I had the opportunity to prepare him for the crucial moment with the numerous conversations we had about this phenomenon called death, which he faced with the braveness of a soldier and the serenity of those who have faith in the unfailing Providence.
The walls of the crumbling house would no longer resonate with shouts of a sleeping veteran running for protection from a crossfire, nor with weeping clamors invoking the missing companion. I wondered what his first sight was when he regained conscience on the other side. Most likely someone who from a great distance looked familiar, tending sheep in a verdant field... He received two medals during his military service. The third one awaited him in his next life. In the form of a woman. The only one he ever loved and touched.
