...It’s 11 a.m., and my heart has a new sorrow. I confess that, though I had been getting a perception of this new sorrow for days, I cried today. My tears fell while I was eating without making a fuss, for I don’t like to make a fuss of no interest to others.
My uncle.62 He wrote to me through a friend with a last goodbye.... And this relative, too, is dead. He had always been in my heart - so sick, so much in need of everything, and, first of all, of affection, of someone to caress his big wounds and remove that harshness which his excessively numerous and painful misfortunes had introduced into his heart. And I was so good at it! I suffered for him, too, in these months in which it was impossible to communicate with the people in the north. And his letter in June had made me happy. It at once occurred to me to offer him a little gift.... And I then felt it was the last one.... He got it... and it will be the only flower of affection on his funeral cushion.
The tears are falling from my eyes.... Lord... ! And I shall say no more. You know: With this knot of mute pain in my heart I plunge down, to give relief to my body, which does not want to die, whereas I would so like to, and I think of Sister M. Gabriella. I feel she is wishing for a sugar plum.... And she is not convinced that there is more gall than honey in Jesus’ chalice. And as I sense two of her sisters will soon arrive on her behalf to beg for a word, I say to Jesus, “Is there nothing for her? Because she shouldn’t ask me every now and then if there is nothing.” A reply as blunt as a rifle shot: “No.” I am left annihilated under that blunt “no” excluding every reply.... And I turn towards the other side and cry over my uncle while Marta slumbers. And at 4 p.m. the sisters appear: “Is there nothing to say to the Superior?” “To give” should be the reading....
I should have thanked her for Cancogni. But I am crushed by too many matters and also say, “No.” I think of how bad she will feel. And what can I do about it? I’ll write her a suitable little letter as soon as I can. But Jesus’ “no” was so curt that I think that for quite some time Sister G. will receive nothing. And I am sorry, for I feel pity for the souls unable to manage on their own...without moments of sweetness... and reserve them all for eternity. Is this a haughty thought? I examine myself and feel it is not. It is just the truth.
Why, Father, is the veil enwrapping souls and things getting thinner and thinner for me? I would like it not to.... This is the fourth time in a few months that I have said, “I feel he or she is dead,” and then it is true. My doctor,63 Soldarelli, Annalina, my uncle, and so on. I think of them and feel they are alive, and then one day I say, “It is useless to wait any longer or write to them since they are dead.” And in fact they are. You see: in the case of Sister Giovannina I felt she was not away from Rome, was not dead, and was not paralyzed, stupefied, or anything else, and I knew the real name to be given to this silence. I felt the others - though I could and should have thought they were alive - were dead. This is not at all pleasant....
...Jesus takes me back for the Gospel.64
62 Aristide Fioravanzi, her mother’s brother, who died in Bergamo on July 14, 1945.
63 Lamberto Lapi, whose death is mentioned in the entry for November 29 in The Notebooks. 1944.
64 We pass over twenty-two handwritten pages, dated July 21-23, 1945, containing the episode begun on July 21, the episode “In Bethany Mary Calls Martha,” and reference to a vision, all found in The Second Year of the Public Life.