Amedeo Minghi
1950

To My Father
It's been forty years since my father died. I was fifteen, and my family and I lived through the agony of a terminal cancer patient until the very last day. My mother and I took care of him; I was already tall and strong and had no trouble lifting him when we cleaned him. He weighed less and less. I who held my father in my arms, I remember the tenderness and resignation of those moments.

Apart from the objectivity of the dramatic situation, I remember my father's eyes, which at times, so lucid, communicated his anguish and pain of having to part with us definitively. He was aware that he would die soon. Now that I am a father too, I understand his despair.

I had gone in the early afternoon to a checkup for my back, accompanied by my aunt, and it was she who informed me of the inevitable end that Wednesday with a heavy heart, after I insisted on going to my daily volleyball practice. Stunned, I didn't say a word, and we returned home silently. In the following days, including the funeral, I remained detached, where I didn't feel that conventional grief, but there was a deep void that accompanied me for a long time.

My father was an ordinary person, and apart from the shouting, punishments, the (deserved) spankings in some cases, he never blamed you or attacked you with negativity from the family tree. After work, he would return home, directly put on his pajamas, lay on the bed, and read his science fiction books from Urania and anything else he came across. His "acceptance" was his best lesson for me.

He was the type who, if there were three chocolates and four people, would leave the treat for others, was accommodating, and never stubborn. I remember him on vacation, with his mask, snorkel, and fins, diving near the rocks to collect mussels. I was terrified of those submerged rocks. And then the rowing trips in the dinghy where we would go offshore to swim in the sea. A simple life with just one salary, renting, and the last four, five days of the month, when we only ate pasta because the money had run out.

The disease had violently manifested itself years before, and I have glimpses of memories of visiting him in the hospital, then the illness, according to the doctors, inexplicably stopped. Then a year before the end, they put the apartment up for sale, and we were offered to buy it, but we didn't have a cent, and someone else bought it, and this someone else evicted us shortly after.

I think it was this stress that made the mysteriously frozen illness reappear in my father. In May, the first signs, analyses, sentences, chemo, the ordeal that was resolved forever in five months.

For obvious reasons, we didn't go on vacation, we always spent two months in our grandparents' house in the Marche, and my father managed the holidays by going back and forth. That year everything was scorching, like mid-August in the city. My mother went to great lengths to disguise the difficult situation in front of us, especially for my twelve-year-old sister, who was very attached to dad. My mother... I don't know how she didn't collapse.

I remember months earlier, one of the few moments where I didn't see my father as a father, but as a person with an inner life, with feelings, with joys. Specifically, the moment was when the song "1950" by Amedeo Minghi played on the radio, and my father spoke such beautiful words about how this evocative and melancholic piece moved him, and for the first time, I saw before me the human being that was my father speaking to me from the heart.

I always vividly remember when, as a child, he took me with him to the office where he worked. On some recorded cassettes, there's still his voice; on the atlas we often leafed through together, there are writings in his handwriting. I remember I could mimic his signature pretty well when I reproduced it on the excuse note after skipping school. In the first year of high school, in the first term, I got a five in geography, and my father's calm note was merely that "if you get a failing grade in geography (where there is nothing to understand), it means you didn't study it"...

Besides drawing, he enjoyed making small wooden objects; I remember a 1930s car he built that I never found again. However, I have a small box shaped like a treasure chest that shines with him.

A little while ago, I dreamt of him. It was a solemn encounter where there was no pain. I know he protected me all these years. I told him about his grandchildren and how happy he would have been to play with them. He was well, we said goodbye, and I was happy.

"The radio will broadcast
The song I have thought for you
And maybe it will cross
The ocean far from us".
I miss him...