Berni’s energeia

This is the intimate account of a woman who, during her 20-year-old son’s illness, rediscovered faith. Then, after he passed away, learned to touch with her own heart what her hands could no longer reach and her eyes could no longer see. Bernardo died on a June day in 2024, at dusk. He had the symbol of his extraordinary vitality tattooed on his chest.

by Elena Martelli*

“Why do you go to church every day now?” My son Bernardo asked me this at a certain point. It was February, the year of his final high school exams, and Ewing’s sarcoma had entered his beautiful eighteen-year-old life. “I have everything, I just lack health”, Berni often said, managing to sum up reality in just a few words. Even while being aware of having an armed tank inside him, as one doctor had described his sarcoma, Berni resisted and, with disarming naturalness, underwent his very long chemotherapy sessions in Oncology. When the session was over, he would return to school, and then went dancing. The nurses at the Campus Bio-Medico of Rome who had known him during the nearly three years of illness wrote to me, saying “He was like a hurricane that filled the ward walking like a model from one hallway to another, and leaving a long trail of joy and lightness behind him. A raging river, an explosion of vitality, a storm of beautiful things”. I can’t find better words to describe him, because in their letters, without rhetoric, I unexpectedly found him alive. Even with them, he had managed to do what he wanted. More than a rebellious soul, he was a gentle tamer of souls, and that’s why we all fell in love with him.

What I didn’t know was that in the nurses’ words I would also find the answer to the question of this article: all the traits that form the backbone of Hope, for example the humble and strong virtue that requires tenacity, especially in accepting pain, were used to describe Berni to me from the point of view of the patient. This was a Berni who not only held on but “continued to love his life”, who “still put his happiness before everything, without being overwhelmed by events, and spoke of the future, told us about his trips, his fashion shows, his life in Amsterdam and his plans”.

It was his faith in life that made him keep going, beyond all expectations. It wasn’t optimism, it was courage to live. Was it absolute faith in “energeia”? One of the most important words in Greek philosophy, which he had tattooed on his chest.

Returning to my faith, and his question, “I’m not asking for a miracle”, I told him. While I poured Lourdes water over his hip, on the site of the sarcoma, which was a gesture he barely tolerated. And yet, it was the truth, because I know that the real miracle is what the Word can stir in a heart that was annihilated like mine. The real miracle happens in the heart, and the marvel is believing that God loves me immensely. If I seek Him, It is hoping for His embrace. Saint Augustine says that faith is touching with the heart. Today, now as I write, do I understand why, instinctively, I returned to church three years ago, in search of the Father. To Berni I had answered that praying gives me strength, which is true. It gives me an inexplicable strength. Now I know why I converted because I needed to go to the source of that strength, I needed the infinite, the unlimited, the absolute Love, beyond the boundaries of Space and Time. The Love of ‘I Am Who I Am’.

Therefore, I returned to church because I wanted to Hope beyond the apocalypse, which had been a likely horizon from the start, since his rare tumor was an armed tank. I wanted God so very much because only in that way, by opening myself to boundless Love, would I not lose Bernardo; only in that way could I touch him forever. I know no greater Hope than prayer. This silent and inner revolution that pierces us, which transcends us, and takes us by the hand. It is a gift, and not just our own doing.

During the last days he was in hospital. Even while wearing an oxygen mask, his body weak and depleted, Berni smiled through it all. When he could no longer dance, or return to Amsterdam, he swallowed his energy in an ineffable smile that made his pain calm, angelic, and sacred.

He waited in silence. We looked at each other. In his eyes I saw the abundance of someone led to the gallows under a sky filled with morning light. That abundance of energeia flowed gently, even that afternoon with the friends who had brought him ice cream. I remember asking myself that day where he still found the strength to laugh, to tell stories, to live. I can’t explain it other than by turning to poetry, to the valiant bramble of Emily Dickinson, “The Black Berry—wears a Thorn in his side—But no Man heard Him cry—He offers His Berry, just the same To Partridge—and to Boy— He sometimes holds upon the Fence—Or struggles to a Tree—Or clasps a Rock, with both His Hands—But not for Sympathy—We—tell a Hurt—to cool it—This Mourner—to the Sky A little further reaches—instead— Brave Black Berry”. Like the black berry, he did not complain, and continued to offer what he could. Is that now what Job did? Loving his life and his God despite the sores? I have everything, I just lack health. Isn’t the core of hope to live by taking the good and accepting the bad without succumbing to it? To love, as Jesus did, until the end? “He loved them to the end”.

He left the next day, June 13, last year. It seemed like a sunny morning like any other.

We were in the hospital, I had brought him coffee; and he had complained that I was late. “It’s getting cold”, he had texted me. At sunset, he reached Heaven. The next day, his friends were supposed to come back with more ice cream. Instead, he said, “I can’t breathe anymore, I’m dying”. His last words were a factual observation, delivered with the same authority and the same beautiful voice with which he would say, “I’m stepping out to get cigarettes”. Death found him alive. That part of me which remained dead on the ground can now write only because it believes that he continues to live elsewhere. “Death is nothing at all. It does not count. I have only slipped away into the next room”.

For us Christians, death is a passage, not the end. It is the core of our faith. With that terrible composure, hadn’t Berni told us more or less the same thing, acknowledging in his own way this passage? Is that what he wanted to tell me? Is it to make the heartbreak of separation here on earth bearable that I pray to Mary? “Have mercy on those who love and have been separated, have mercy on the loneliness of the heart, have mercy on the objects of our tenderness”. Hope is not solid but a road full of holes. Pope Francis said that on this path, it was important not to remain fallen. I pray constantly not to remain on the ground, not to give in to oblivion, to continue touching his energeia with my heart.

*Journalist and TV writer