Simon Smiled and I Chose to Live
“Silence and darkness cannot smother a gentle breeze that keeps stirring across my heart: this illness has to mean something.”
Antonella Fontana - Then a young man in a Zoom tile smiled at me — and I stayed.
An ALS diagnosis pulled her away from God. A Mass with the Quadratini gave her back hope — and showed her that, even inside illness, a person can become an instrument of peace.
I prayed, Lord. I asked You for a miracle. I begged Mary. I asked Your Son to wrap His cloak around my sister. I dared more than the woman with the hemorrhage, who only reached out to touch Him.
On April 27, 2025, I sat beside her as she twisted in pain on an emergency-room bed. Suddenly she waved at me, and I asked her, smiling, why she was waving. Twenty-four hours later my sister — my beloved sister — died. Darkness. Silence. A heart turned to stone.
On June 25, 2025, I am in the waiting room of the sub-intensive neurology ward. A week of hospitalization has gone by, meant to track down the strange symptoms I have had for a few months. The neurologist tells me in a clinical voice, with no pathos and no pietas: motor neuron disease, ALS (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis). There is no cure.
I drop into a deep, dark well — darker than dark, more silent than silence itself. A few months later a friend tells me about the Quadratini. “Thanks for letting me know, but I’ve put my faith on hold. I don’t want to know anything. I’m not interested. I’m living one day at a time.”
I decide on a living will, and the Coscioni Association sends me the form. I accept the disease and its daily surprises without asking for anything, without praying to that distant God. Meanwhile the Zoom invitations keep arriving, day after day — Mass celebrated by Fr. Eugenio Nembrini with the Quadratini. I ignore them. But silence and darkness cannot smother a gentle wind, a breeze moving across my heart: the illness has to mean something. There has to be a reason for all this suffering, a destination it points toward. Otherwise nothing would be worth the living or the suffering — and pain with no purpose would be impossible to accept.
One evening I accept the Zoom invitation. Father Eugenio is in a hurry, and my skepticism claims its victory. But the breeze keeps blowing softly, and I log back in.
At the end of Mass I notice a small square: a young man, maybe twenty, in a hospital bed, his head shaved, his face pale — and two stars shining where his eyes should be. He is calm. He is smiling. He is waving.
Simone has a terrible diagnosis, but his face tells another story: an unconditional love for Jesus.
I watch him. Every day I watch him and ask myself, “How does he do it? How?” And yet he does. His presence alone is a simple prayer — “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace” — and now I understand what “your peace” means: the beating heart of Jesus meeting Simone’s loving heart, a living witness to peace.
I have started to accept the illness, and to offer my suffering for Simone. I have started to find its meaning. I watch my marriage come back into bloom. I watch Giacomo, our son, hold a real, building conversation with his father for the first time — two grown men carrying each other through the hard part. And I watch myself: I never once cried over the illness, and I am no longer accepting it the passive way I used to. Through this encounter — with the Quadratini family, with Fr. Eugenio and his certainty in God, with Rosa’s joy in a faith nothing can shake, and with Simone, my instrument — I can take it up as a path toward my own conversion, and, I hope, toward Giacomo’s as well.
A new chapter began on March 3, when I decided to check myself into a nursing home. Writing this now, I realize my arrival was a little like our Margherita’s entry into the cloister. Both of us far from anything comfortable. Both of us asked to live by rules that had no place in our old lives. Both of us asked to share our days with strangers. Margherita listened to her heart and made the leap to the far side of the river — and I am trying to make that same leap.
I hand it all over to Simone, who rests now in the Father’s embrace, and to St. Francis, and to St. Carlo Acutis. Out of that dark and silent well, a glimmer of Light appears. It comforts me. It shows me the way.
— Antonella Fontan
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