24 hours a day for weeks, ambulances screamed through the valleys and towns of Bergamo with a terrifying soundtrack of death, as mothers, fathers, sisters and brothers were transported to the hospital. Thousands never returned here.
While the world has more than one million patients with COVID-19, the tranquility of everyday life and the hustle and bustle of the industry have returned to Bergamo, which, along with the surrounding lombardy region, was the epicentre of the epidemic in Europe. the reminiscence of the dark winter days and the monumental number of deaths they left behind remained with those who survived only to see the rest of the world fall victim to it as well.
“They never stop,” said Carminati, the parish priest of Bergamo, the city of Seriate, about ambulances. “They went often and one wondered” When will it end?”
Bergamo recorded its first positive case on 23 February, two days after the first case of local transmission detected in Italy. At the end of March, the province of Bergamo recorded an increase of 571% in deaths compared to the average of five years per month. – the largest building in Italy and one of the largest buildings located in the mortality rate in Europe.
Many of these deaths are not even included in the official number of COVID-19 deaths in Italy of 35,851, the highest time in Europe after Britain, as many sick people in Bergamo died in their homes or in nursing homes without being examined. the city of another 25,000 people along the Serio River in Bergamo, was badly affected, wasting another 200 people. Carminati said a part was parishioners he knew personally.
“That’s what made winter more tragic then. There were no leaves in the trees and everything was gray,” recalls this week one of his normal stops in the cemetery to stop at his COVID-murdered herd. forget it as something gray and dark, anything you felt you couldn’t get out of: a tunnel that never ended. “
At the beginning of the epidemic, the first in the West, Carminati opened the doors of one of its churches, St. Joseph, to space coffins that had nowhere to go because local cemeteries and crematoriums were full.
At first, about 80 wooden coffins covered the central corridor of St. Joseph’s Church. Carminati and some other priest recited the rite of the dead, with a psalm and a reading of the scriptures, and gave the coffin a definitive blessing and a blessing with the saint. After a convoy of army trucks took the coffins to incinerate them, another 80 arrived, and then others.
“It had a heartbreaking effect on me, anything that left me with wonderful bitterness,” he said.
In total, says Carminati, some 260 coffins passed through its elegant red brick church in March and April, evidence of the terrible number of victims of the virus in Bergamo that continues today. Last month, Carminati buried his own nephew, Christian Persico, 34, after wasting a five-month war opposed to COVID-19.
“We will have more because the epidemic has not passed,” Carminati lamented a break with his daily regime to rebuild a parish that lost his gardener, his singer at Night Mass, and his friend Pio, who volunteered for the sacristy.
The concept of opening his church to coffins, while the parish was closed in a different way, came here naturally after filling the morgues of hospitals, crematoriums and cemeteries. Carminati said the local government had asked him if his parish could temporarily space the coffins. it was a necessity of space,” he says.
But Carminati also felt a desire to dismiss the dead worthily, as their families had been denied a funeral and a final farewell. In Italy, funerals were necessarily banned and many grieving families were quarantined or prevented from traveling to remote locations. COVID neighborhoods.
On Palm Sunday, Carminati placed an olive slingshot in the coffin; other days, he lit a candle.
Some parishioners contacted Carminati after learning that he took the coffins, wondering if he had noticed what was going on for those who enjoyed it. At the height of the epidemic, some families reported chaotic multi-day efforts to locate their mothers and fathers who died as hospitals suffering from keeping others alive lost track of where the dead ended up.
Carminati sent coffins when he could.
One day, she answered 10 calls from parishioners reporting deaths in the community, a call came in from a nurse to announce that her friend Pio had passed away, and dictated one last message Pio sought from Carminati to convey to his wife.
“He had asked him to tell his wife that he had enjoyed her, and he still enjoyed her very much,” Carminati said with tears in his eyes. “It was the last farewell he wanted to send to his wife. “
As he watches infections and deaths build up and the world surpasses one million deaths, Carminati wonders why more countries have not paid attention to the tragedy in Italy as it spreads so they can be better prepared. it was a typical Italian “exaggeration” and I thought they would be saved in some way.
“At first they wasted a lot of time, then some made absurd decisions like “collective immunity,” he said. For those of us in the middle of this story, listening to those things at the time, we said. “These other people are crazy. They have no idea what to expect. “
While the number of new infections and deaths in Italy today is far from peaking, Carminati knows how temporarily things can change and hopes the world will be informed of the pandemic, giant or small.
“We will have to perceive that we are not immortal, that none of us are immortal,” he said after visiting the cemetery on an excellent and quiet Sunday in autumn. “The virus nevertheless gives us back this dimension, of fragility. “”
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Nicole Winfield back from Rome.
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