The hard and the mature
Critics say that it is too easy to talk about our own experiences in the first person. However this time I will make an exception to comment on some experience that has made me think honestly and naked, in case someone can serve as "notice to navigators".
It is not the first time that I look for the Christmas holidays to spend a week in a hospital. The cold, so frequent at this time, often prey on my damaged lungs, to trigger a pneumonia with the natural accompaniment of antibiotics and cortisones. When the first remedies are administered, it is not a disease that causes severe pain, although the dislocation and looseness are felt throughout the body. So far everything normal, because in my same plant several colleagues suffered the same ailments.
What an anecdote to gloss a fact so vulgar? I will explain. I have the immense luck of having an old doctor friend, already retired, with a well-earned reputation and prestige, who chose the specialty of oncology. More than once I have heard him comment on his magic formula for treating the sick: for opioid physical pain, to strengthen the mood, love.
I have had the immense fortune to feel very surrounded by the whole family: woman and children have rivaled to offer me all their affection. In spite of their long shifts of accompaniment, I have spent many hours looking at the ceiling of my room and making my considerations run in all directions.
What has been the fundamental object of my reflections? The broken families. What would have happened to me without the coat of so much disinterested love? My fantasy led me to go through many situations as I have around me, that one day, when they were full of faculties "sold the birthright for a plate of lentils." How do you comfort your helplessness now? Who now offers them the crumbs of a formal visit - if it comes at all! - in which they only try to cover the appearances of saving a social convention?
How is it possible to make determinations in boom situations, without contemplating that a day will come when the family is the only true refuge where we can strengthen ourselves? It is not about extraordinary situations. In life there are more sorrows than joys, and it is a lack of realism not to count on it.
Selfishness? On the contrary, in that room of the hospital, he had the immense fortune to expect that he would pick up what he had sown.
In this world in which we spend some years of our existence, nothing is free. You have to be hard and mature * that also arrive. It is a task that lasts a lifetime, in which although the marriage is not a "Persian market", everyone has to put something on their part, and train to spend good and bad times together.
I insist, I have seen everything in these days, but I have been particularly struck by the way in which the loneliest patients covered the absences of their family. Everyone found an apology for their loved ones. They still loved him, and there was his consolation.
My conclusions? You can not make hasty decisions, because what today seems like a liberation, tomorrow can be a slab that crushes us. Family, family, family, there is the solution of all the ills of society, but in a special way the remedy of our shortcomings that, sooner or later, reach us all.
