Consciously 
short story by Daniel Rindi design by Bruno Di Marco, published in the New Territory 06/07/2009
Consciously disabled "To exist is an inclination not to my despair," and yet everything began with this sentence. A book, EMCioran, has completely changed my life. I just turned my sixty-third birthday, when I found myself sitting on the bed of that hospital room, on the first floor of a major clinic in Milan. Legs dangling, his eyes fixed on the doctor, as always tanned, I was recommended to move my wife at home.
He had no hope, cancer of the peritoneum had come to the lungs. Medical team, for a fee, would follow the terminally ill at the home until the last breath. Gobble up the thread of saliva I had left in his mouth and started to cry. In that cry there was liberating the pain of one month's vigil, passed by the bedside, including disbelief, hope and the absurd. There was anger against a God that I have never believed and still do not believe. My hate relationship with him made me the atheist a believer in the world. There were my children, my grandchildren, who had removed a part of life and there was my heart. Torn. I had removed everything.
I had just retired and I started to make plans with her, finally could devote to us, our retirement, our time together. I conscientiously put money aside, with obstinate presence of my wife on the subject ... she was concerned, our future, he wanted to spend quiet ... I had put in a position to book travel. First he wanted to go to Ischia, then see America ... How all this turns out to be useless now bitterly. As I would not have been right as never before. You are so naive, so wonderfully on earth, only now I realize its greatness.
A month of illness, where you cling to any illusion, one month old. With her smile, until he could afford it, with the power to soothe my despair. We went together, but I left that hospital alone, with a small suitcase in hand, all that remained to me of her. I had no particular thoughts, even thoughts I had. All had passed on me in a flash, a life was over, my. I loved, enjoyed, suffered, rejoiced, but that day had taken it all away.
One thought was really, who fidgeted nervously in his head ... what I would write on the tombstone. You're never prepared for the worst. I always hated cemeteries, funerals, tombs erected to the memory of one who is gone and now I found myself to make the bills. How can you write the end of a life in a few lines? I went down memory lane, trying to remember the little things, until I landed a silver bracelet I had given him on his return from a tour. On it was written a few verses of a poem by Bertold Brecht:
A day in the month of September
serene blue shade of a young plum
kept the quiet, pale
my love in my arms like a sweet dream ... I did not go straight home, I did not hurry, there was no one waiting for me worried. I cried again. The sense of emptiness I was in my heart crushed. How could I survive without her, without her voice, her head, her body? Life is really all there is? An illusion of happiness that is dissolved in death? I found myself walking through Brera, around the many stalls, antiques ... you liked so much, rummaging among the old things in search of the Philosopher's Stone ... I laughed at every time, annoyed, as I thought it was important that morning, made of nothing!
I went to the stall of used books and started reading titles at random. In the hands happened to me "The temptation to exist," read the opening words: - For almost all of our discovery we owe to our violence, exacerbation of our imbalance. Even God, what is curious, do not we see deep within ourselves, but to the outer limit of our fever, the exact point where our anger facing her, the result is a collision, a ruinous battle for him not less than for us. - The book, after many years is still on my bedside table for me is you, is my life. I've never read.
