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NEMBRO, Italy – Every Monday evening, in the northern Italian city that had perhaps the highest coronavirus death rate in all of Europe, a psychologist specializing in post-traumatic stress disorder leads sessions of group therapy in the local church.
“She cared for survivors of the war,” Pastor Matteo Cella, pastor of the town of Nembro, in the province of Bergamo, said of the psychologist. “She says the dynamics are the same.”
The virus first exploded in Bergamo. Then came the shock of the shells. The province that first gave the West a glimpse of the horrors to come – oxygen starved grandparents, swarming hospitals and coffin convoys rolling through closed streets – now serves as an ominous postcard of post-traumatic sequelae .
In small towns where many know each other, there is apprehension for others, but also guilt, anger from survivors, doubts about fateful decisions and nightmares about unfulfilled wishes to die. There is a pervasive worry that, with the resurgence of the virus, Bergamo’s enormous sacrifice will soon fade into history, that its cities will be forgotten battlefields from the great first wave, that its dead will become names carved on it. another rusty plate.
Most importantly, there is a collective struggle to understand how the virus has changed people. Not just their antibodies, but themselves.
“It shut me down further,” said Monia Cagnoni, 41, who lost her mother to the virus and later developed pneumonia, as she sat separately from her father and sister in the rooms. stairs of their family home. “I want to be more alone.”
His sister Cinzia, 44, who made coffee and cakes in the kitchen, had the opposite impulse.
“I need people more than ever,” she says. “I don’t like to be alone.”
Bergamo, like everywhere, is now facing a second wave of the virus. But his sacrifice left him better prepared than most places, as the widespread infection rate of the first wave gave many immunity, doctors say. And its medical staff, now familiar with the virus’s terrible protocols, are welcoming patients from out of province to ease the burden on overwhelmed hospitals nearby.
But even as contagion still threatens them from the outside, the wounds of the first wave are eating them away from the inside.
Talking about these things isn’t easy for people in the industrial heart of Italy, cluttered with metallurgical and textile factories, paper mills, bloated chimneys and gaping warehouses. They prefer to talk about their work. Almost apologetically, they reveal that they are in pain.
In the town of Osio Sopra, 30-year-old Sara Cagliani can’t get over her failure to make her father’s last wish come true.
A sign on the door of his house reads: “Here lives an Alpine soldier.” When the coronavirus crisis began, her father, Alberto Cagliani, 67, offered to help, telling his daughter: “Remember, I am an Alpine soldier, and we show up in an emergency.”
After retiring as a truck driver, he volunteered for a funeral home, traveling the province, collecting the bodies of men killed in car crashes and dressing them in costumes donated by their families. In February, he volunteered again, but this time the number of bodies was overwhelming.
He became taciturn and stopped coming home to eat. “An endless slaughter,” he told his daughter. On March 13, after treating another victim, he felt pain in his right shoulder that spread to his lower back. Her voice weakens. The sound of the television bothered him. On March 21, his wife saw him touch the towels just to see if he could smell them. His fingers were numb. His legs followed. He died of Covid the next day with water in his lungs.
His last wish was to be buried in his Alpine soldier uniform, and his daughter sought to honor that, sending the green jacket and pants to the funeral home. The firefighters fired them, explaining that the fear of contagion made it impossible to dress the bodies.
“Putting it in a bag is my biggest regret,” Ms. Cagliani said through tears, adding that she had started seeing a psychologist and the tragedy had changed many people in her tight-knit town.
“People are afraid to see each other,” she said. “There is a lack of affection and touch and hold.”
Others are haunted by the horrific choices the virus has forced them to make.
In mid-March, Laura Soliveri started caring for her mother who had developed symptoms of Covid in the town of Brignano Gera d’Adda in Bergamo. Doctors told her that they did not have a mask and that they would not come to see her. Her brother, a pharmacist, warned her not to allow their mother to be taken by ambulance or taken to hospital, as the family would never see her again.
Ms. Soliveri, 58-year-old teacher, scoured the area to find oxygen tanks available to quench her panting mother’s thirst for air. Finally, they found one. Her mother has improved.
Then Ms Soliveri’s husband Gianni Pala also contracted the virus.
She and her family scrambled for more oxygen, this time for him. They couldn’t take her away from her mother. His condition deteriorated and he had to be hospitalized. He died on April 5 at the age of 64. Her mother, 85, survived.
“My mother had oxygen but we couldn’t take it from her to give it,” said Ms. Soliveri, who also started seeing a therapist and taking antidepressants and fiddling with her husband’s wedding ring, which ‘she is now wearing her middle finger. “I would have done it.”
The virus has tested some people’s faith – Ms Soliveri said she lost her ability to pray – and made it stronger in others.
Over the summer, Raffaella Mezzetti, 48, a volunteer for the Catholic charity Caritas, said the church had become a balm for the traumatized. But she said she still had chills when she heard the jingles from the commercials that were on TV at the time. The sirens of the ambulances, which she said might be bringing women to the hospital to give birth, made her nervous. “It stays with you,” she said.
On the Day of the Dead in Nembro, a volunteer put disinfectant on the hands of hundreds of bereaved people entering the cemetery to listen to Father Cella.
Delia Morotti, 57, who contracted the virus herself, left mass early. She said hearing the names of all the dead infuriated her. Both his parents were among them.
“They didn’t deserve this. First, my father died. And then my mother, ”she said. “I’ve been seeing a psychologist for months.”
Others have found more self-defeating ways to cope.
Doctors at Pesenti Fenaroli Hospital, which served as a critical incubator for the contagion, said they had seen an increase in the number of patients with substance abuse problems. Across the province, psychologists have reported increased anxiety and depression.
The nurses who care for these patients and the other sick in the province are no longer subject to overflows of affection.
“It’s not like it used to be,” said Katia Marcassoli, nurse at Pesenti Fenaroli. People had stopped calling nurses to express their solidarity and ask how they were doing. Instead, patients called angrily about their canceled appointments for other procedures. “There is a lot of anger.”
The medical crisis delayed Giovanni Cagnoni to control his stomach pain. When doctors properly examined him, they found he had a rare cancer, liposarcoma, concentrated around his kidneys. By the time he had a surgery date in August, he had metastasized and was no longer operable.
“Hospitals weren’t taking anyone,” he said from his home in Gazzaniga, where he was sitting in front of a fire with his two daughters.
The Cagnoni family had already gone through hell, which the 76-year-old former military police commander had carefully noted in a green notebook entitled “Chronicle of Covid-19”.
On March 8, his wife, Maddalena Peracchi, felt a chill as she walked around. Over the next 11 days, he recorded his fevers (99.32, 97.7, 100.4), then on March 19 his condition collapsed and a team of paramedics in protective suits against materials Dangerous entered her home and took her away.
On March 20, his brother called them to encourage them “and died that night”.
On March 29, Cagnoni noted “daylight saving time” and that doctors had called to tell him that his wife’s time had nearly expired. March 30 was “interminable,” he writes, and he received no news. On March 31, he called the hospital and learned that his wife had died the night before.
“They forgot to call us,” reads the blue script. On April 11, as his daughter Monia was recovering from the virus, Mr Cagnoni’s diary noted his first stomach ache.
So many families had lost loved ones that when Bergamo emerged from confinement for several months in the summer, many people discovered that their friends and neighbors were missing. But there was also a palpable desire to move on.
Father Cella ran a summer camp. Children played in front of the sprinklers at Nembro town hall. And even as fear lurked in the air like poisoned droplets, residents of the capital, Bergamo, tentatively ventured out.
In July, in Piazza Pontida, where “We Are Bergamo” signs hung on buildings, Roberta Pedretti, 52, went out for a drink with other nurses with whom she had grown closer during the trench warfare. of the crisis.
She looked at the people who filled the bars and restaurants.
“Bergamo is trying to come back but it’s full of fear,” she said then. “He saw too many corpses. It can’t be like it used to be.
In the fall, business exploded again, and in November a curfew stifled the sparkles in Bergamo’s social life.
The funicular and the spiral staircase that led to the medieval hilltop town were both deserted. The restaurants were closed. Patrol cars threw a blue siren at the stone walls as they scouted the streets for rallies.
The “We Are Bergamo” signs had become dilapidated and torn.
Emma Bubola has contributed reporting from Bergamo and Rome.
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