Luca Lapi's "Memoria"

“My life is still spinning inside the dice of my fate that God the Father has not yet cast. It is still spinning up to my desire to continue living, but not to survive, not to suffer it or suffer a life of others. “

I read the book of my dear friend Luca Lapi. Luca is disadvantaged, born with spina bifida and hydrocephalus. “Memories” is his autobiography, simple and direct, without self-pity or whining which, in any case, would be justified. I state that Luca has plenty of courage and that what he talks about in the book is not even a speck of the suffering to which his condition exposes him.

“I don’t walk. Mom has to hold me in her arms or on a stroller, every time I attend Sunday Mass, in the Pieve di San Lorenzo. “

Luca only briefly mentions the pillory of feeling pointed at, not understood, even laughed at by other children when he is little, he does not tell about the discomfort he has to undergo every day, the thousands of daily sufferings, he focuses on psychic pain, on the physical and psychological barriers that his condition creates between him and the others, between him and his desire to communicate, to share, to give and receive friendship. Luca suffers from dependence on elderly parents and loneliness, he feels every minute lived by others away from him as a minute of happiness that is stolen from him, out of selfishness, out of carelessness, out of distrust.

“You have FRIENDSHIP when you are no longer afraid of emotional involvement and you accept to “go into trouble”, to risk with friends whom, at first, you do not trust and are scared, when you decide to tell everything about yourself at 360 °. “

The wheelchair in which he is forced to move is his cage, it divides his life into watertight compartments. He becomes the friend of the library, of work, of the parish, closed and limited in a role that is too narrow, he would like to expand, extend his friendship to other moments, convivial, goliardic, daily.

But in his struggle, Luca is supported by a profound faith.

“My faith leads me to think of a plan from God the Father for my healing from Spina Bifida and Hydrocephalus, although I have not asked him for it for a long time, explicitly in my prayers”

Note the capital letters referring to the two evils that afflict him. Luca usually uses a capital letter for what he attributes high moral value to, such as the Mother or the Friend. Evil also deserves respect because it is the means through which God has chosen him, and not punished. The Lord has given Luca a particular condition, which allows him to see the world from a special angle and with a more acute sensitivity. Disability and hypersensitivity are both sources of suffering but also tools for greater awareness, attention, knowledge. They are riches.

“I praise the Lord, with joy, for the seal of the Holy Spirit who (…) did not seal me in my doubts, in my despair, in my selfishness.”

This autobiography alternates moments of poetic reflection with lists of dates and events, apparently aseptic, in reality characterized by a strong underground emotionality, which can only be stemmed and channeled through obsession. A peculiarity of Luca is the use of punctuation with an obsessive care for the comma.

I finish by saying that my friend Luca is no longer a boy now. He is no longer the child who trudged on crutches, he is a middle-aged man but he does not give up, he still has so much to live, to experience, above all to give.

“God the Father is continuing to write my life and I want to continue (if He pleases) to know and live it.”