I’ve spent 27 years working in the morg at Santa Maria Demiser Recordia Hospital in Rome.

27 years touching cold bodies.

27 years witnessing the most intimate and least romantic moment of death.

My name is Marco Richi.

I’m 52 years old.

And if there’s one thing this job has taught me, it’s that death is democratic, technical, and absolutely predictable.

Or at least that’s what I thought until that spring morning in April 2006.

I’m about to share something I’ve kept to myself for almost two decades now.

Something that fundamentally changed how I view life, death, and everything that might exist in between.

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When I entered the preparation room that morning, the air had that peculiar density that only those of us who work with death know intimately.

It’s not exactly a smell, although smell is certainly present.

It’s more like an atmosphere, an absence of life that you can feel on your skin.

I had received the notification the previous evening.

A young man of 15, fulminant leukemia, passed away in the early hours.

Cases like this are always difficult for families, but for me, after so much time, they had become part of the routine.

Young, elderly, men, women.

In the end, they’re all bodies that need to be prepared with dignity and professionalism.

I put on my uniform with the automatic movements that come with habit.

Latex gloves, disposable gown, mask.

I check the instruments on the metal tray.

Scissors, forceps, cotton, formaldahhide, suture needles, everything in its place as always.

I opened the refrigeration chamber door and verified the number on the tag.

Chamber 5.

There was the body covered with a standard white hospital sheet.

I pushed the gurnie toward the preparation room.

The wheels squeaked slightly against the white tiled floor, a sound I had heard thousands of times, as familiar as my own breathing.

I positioned the gurnie under the h hallogen lights, adjusted the height to my working measure and took a deep breath.

Another day, another procedure.

That was all.

Before removing the sheet, I reviewed the file.

Carlo Acutis, 15 years old, born in London, resident in Milan.

Acute promis leukemia, type M3.

Late diagnosis, rapid progression.

Death at 4:25 in the morning.

Cause of death, cerebral hemorrhage resulting from leukemia.

clinical data, cold, precise.

The story summarized in medical terms that I had read hundreds of times in different files.

What caught my attention was a handwritten note in the margin by the attending physician.

Family request special care in preparation.

The young man was deeply devout, possible visit from ecclesiastical authorities.

It wasn’t common, but neither was it extraordinary.

Some religious families asked for special considerations.

We always respected them.

Our work was technical but also human.

I set the file aside and finally, as I had done thousands of times before, removed the sheet.

The first thing I noticed was his face.

There’s something in the faces of the dead that makes them immediately recognizable as such.

An absence, a lack of muscle tension, a void.

But this face was different.

I cannot explain it with technical precision because there was nothing technically different.

His eyes were closed, his mouth relaxed, his skin pale as is appropriate after death.

And yet there was something, a serenity that went beyond simple post-mortem relaxation.

He seemed asleep, yes, but not in that heavy definitive way of the dead.

He seemed to be resting.

I shook my head.

Sentimentality, I told myself.

After so many years, one would think I’d be immune to these subjective impressions, but cases involving young people always stirred something, no matter how professional I tried to be.

I continued with my visual inspection.

The body was dressed in a hospital gown.

I would need to remove it to begin the preparation process, I mentally noted.

Thin build, approximate height of one.

75 m.

Visible signs of the illness in the extreme palar, but curiously without the emaciated appearance typical of patients with advanced leukemia.

I placed my hands on the edges of the gurnie, mentally preparing myself to begin.

This was always the moment, the moment of first contact.

After so many years, I had developed a sort of mental protocol, reminding myself that it was a body, a biological vehicle that had stopped functioning, that my job was to treat it with dignity and professionalism, that it was no different from any other technical procedure I performed.

I extended my right hand toward his shoulder.

I needed to slightly raise the body to remove the hospital gown.

It’s a standard movement, something I had done countless times.

My hand, covered by the latex glove, approached his right shoulder, and then I touched him.

I don’t know how to describe what I felt in that moment without sounding completely irrational.

I’ve touched thousands of bodies.

Thousands.

I know exactly what to expect.

Coldness, rigidity in various degrees depending on the time elapsed.

The particular texture of skin without blood circulation.

That unmistakable sensation of inert matter is something you recognize instantly.

information that your hands send to your brain without needing to think about it.

This is dead.

But when my fingers rested on Carlo Acutis’ shoulder, my brain received contradictory information.

The temperature was, as expected, cold.

The body had been refrigerated for hours.

That was fine.

It was correct.

But there was something more, something I couldn’t categorize with my professional experience.

It wasn’t physical warmth.

Definitely not.

It was something else.

A kind of presence, density.

I can’t find the right word.

It was as if the body was cold, but not empty.

As if there was still something there, something that shouldn’t be there.

I withdrew my hand instinctively, as if I had been burned.

I stared at my own gloved hand, confused.

What the hell had that been? I breathed deeply.

Come on, Marco, I told myself.

It’s 5 in the morning.

You’ve barely slept 4 hours.

It’s a young boy and that always affects you more than you want to admit.

Focus.

I extended my hand again, this time with more determination.

I placed it again on his shoulder and maintained contact.

I counted to 10, breathing slowly, expecting the initial sensation to dissipate and be replaced by the familiar objective sensations I knew.

But it didn’t dissipate.

If anything, it intensified.

There was a stillness in that body that wasn’t the stillness of death.

Death has its own quality, its own sensory signature.

After 27 years, I recognize it immediately.

Its absence, its emptiness.

It’s the end.

But this was different.

This was peace.

Active peace, if that makes any sense.

As if the body was resting, not absent.

As if there was someone sleeping deeply.

not someone who had ceased to exist.

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I slid my hand from his shoulder down his arm, feeling through the glove the texture of his skin, smooth, soft, without the typical spots of post-mortem blood accumulation in the declining areas.

That was technically notable.

Cadaavveric lividity should have been more evident.

I continued toward his hand.

I took it between mine, a gesture I had performed thousands of times to verify rigidity and prepare the extremities.

His fingers were long, the nails well-kept, hands of a boy who had been loved, cared for, and then holding it between my hands, I felt something that made me close my eyes.

It was impossible, irrational, contrary to all my training and experience.

But I felt it with a clarity I cannot deny even now, so many years later.

I felt as if that cold, immobile hand was holding me back.

Not physically, of course.

The hand didn’t move.

There was no pressure, no objective change that could be measured or documented.

But something in me, something deeper than my physical perception, registered a response, a presence, a connection.

I opened my eyes abruptly and released the hand as if I had received an electric shock.

My heart was beating strongly.

I could hear it in my ears.

This was absurd.

Completely absurd.

I am a man of science, a technician, someone who works with objective facts and standardized procedures.

I don’t believe in ghosts.

I don’t believe in spiritual presences.

I don’t believe in anything that cannot be measured, weighed, and verified.

And yet, there I was in the middle of my preparation room with my hands trembling slightly, looking at the body of a 15-year-old boy who had made me feel something that had no name in my professional vocabulary.

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I walked away from the gurnie and went to the sink.

I removed my gloves with abrupt movements and turned on the faucet.

The cold water ran over my hands.

I watched it for a long moment, seeing how it fell and swirled before disappearing down the drain.

I breathed deeply several times, trying to recover my professional composure.

This was ridiculous.

I had just had an emotional reaction, nothing more.

Stress, fatigue, the early hour.

the fact that he was a teenager.

All of that together had created a subjective experience that my mind had misinterpreted.

I dried my hands, took a new pair of gloves, and returned to the gurnie with renewed determination.

I had a job to do, and I would do it.

Without any more nonsense, I began with the standard procedure of undressing the body.

I unbuttoned the hospital gown with efficient professional movements.

And as I did so, as my hands touched different parts of his body in the normal course of work, I couldn’t help but continue to notice that inexplicable quality.

Every time my skin, even through the latex, came into contact with his, there was that something, that presence, that peace.

I completely removed the gown and folded it to one side.

The body was now fully exposed under the white cold lights of the room.

I proceeded with the detailed visual inspection that was a standard part of my work.

I needed to document any marks, wounds, or particularities before beginning the actual preparation.

What I saw surprised me again.

For a patient who had died of leukemia with hemorrhagic complications, the body was remarkably well preserved.

There weren’t the extensive discolorations, the echimosis, the marks one would expect.

The skin, although pale, had a quality almost, I don’t want to say, healthy, because obviously it wasn’t, but there was an integrity to it that was unusual in these circumstances.

I began the ritual washing of the body.

I took the sponge, moistened it with warm water and antiseptic soap, and began at his forehead.

circular movements, gentle, respectful, from the forehead to the temples, down the cheeks, his face under my hands, and with each pass of the sponge.

With each contact, that sensation remained.

It didn’t diminish.

It didn’t become familiar.

It remained disconcerting.

It remained inexplicable.

I cleaned his neck, his shoulders, his chest.

My hands moved with the practice of thousands of previous procedures, but my mind was in completely uncharted territory.

I found myself working with more care than usual, with more delicacy.

It’s not that I was normally careless.

I never was.

But there was a difference between standard professional care and this.

This was almost reverential.

When I washed his arms, when I cleaned each of his fingers individually, when I passed the sponge over his torso and his legs, I couldn’t help but think that this wasn’t simply a body, or rather, it was a body, technically speaking, objectively speaking, but it was a body that had contained something extraordinary, and in some impossible to explain way, something of that still remained.

I dried the body with clean towels.

The next step was partial imbalming, a procedure we performed when the body was expected to be seen by many people or when the burial would be delayed.

I prepared the formaldahhide solution.

I checked the needles and tubes.

This was the most technical, most intrusive moment of the process, the moment when my work became unequivocally invasive, when I had to treat the body as the biological object it technically was.

I located the corroted artery.

I had made this incision thousands of times.

I knew exactly where to cut, how much pressure to apply, how to insert the canula.

My hands didn’t tremble.

They never trembled during this procedure.

But before making the incision, I paused.

My hands were on his neck, palpating to locate the exact position.

And in that moment, holding them there, I felt something that made me close my eyes again.

It wasn’t physical.

It wasn’t something I could explain to a colleague or document in a report.

But it was as real as the weight of the scalpel in my hand.

It was as if the body, despite being objectively dead, was communicating something.

Not words, not clear messages, just a sensation of being all right, of being at peace, of being exactly where it needed to be.

I opened my eyes and found tears clouding my vision.

I wiped them away roughly with my forearm.

What the hell was happening to me? In 27 years, I had never cried in the preparation room, not even with small children, not even with particularly tragic cases.

I had learned to maintain that emotional separation necessary to do my job.

And now here I was, with tears in my eyes, holding a scalpel over the body of a teenager I didn’t know, feeling things I couldn’t name.

I made the incision.

My hands moved with the automatic precision of experience.

I inserted the canula, connected the tube, started the flow of imbalming fluid, watched as the formaldahhide began to circulate, displacing the remaining blood, infiltrating the tissues.

It was a chemical mechanical process completely explainable by medical science.

And yet, as I worked, as my hands touched his skin to massage and facilitate the distribution of the fluid, I kept feeling that that presence, that peace, as if the young man wasn’t bothered by what I was doing to his body, as if he understood it was necessary, as if he was in some impossible way still there being a patient witness to my work.

I finished the embalming process and sutured the incision with small, neat stitches.

The next step was to dress him.

According to the notes in the file, the family had brought specific clothing.

Jeans, a white shirt, athletic shoes, normal clothes, teenage clothes, clothes he had probably worn hundreds of times in life.

Dressing a body is always a technical challenge.

The rigidity, the inert weight, the lack of natural cooperation that a living person would have, but I did it carefully.

Taking my time, I slid his legs into the jeans, fastened the button, pulled up the zipper, passed his arms through the shirt sleeves, buttoning it from bottom to top.

I tied his shoes with double bows, as he probably would have done himself.

And throughout that process, every time my fingers brushed his skin, every time I moved him, turned him, adjusted him, that sensation remained.

It didn’t diminish.

It didn’t become normal.

It remained extraordinary.

When I finished dressing him, I stepped back a few paces to evaluate my work.

He looked good, natural, like a young person asleep, not like a prepared cadaavver.

There was something in his expression in the way he lay there that radiated tranquility.

And looking at him, I finally allowed the question I had been avoiding all morning to reach my conscious mind.

Who was this boy? I returned to the file, and this time read it more carefully.

Beyond the medical data, there were notes from the hospital chaplain.

Young man of deep faith, extremely devoted to the Eucharist, spent hours in prayer, used technology to evangelize, offered his sufferings for the Pope and the church, accepted his death with serenity and joy.

I set down the paper and looked again at the body, at Carlo.

He was no longer simply the 5:00 a.m. case.

He was Carlo, a boy who had lived 15 years with an intensity that I, at 52, could barely imagine.

A boy who had apparently faced his death with more peace than most adults find in their entire lives.

And suddenly everything made sense.

Not a rational sense, not a sense I could defend in a scientific debate, but a deep personal sense.

What I had felt when touching him wasn’t a hallucination, wasn’t stress or fatigue.

It was real.

It was the echo of a life lived with such fullness, with such purpose, with such connection to something greater that even death couldn’t completely erase it.

It was as if his body, that biological vehicle that had technically ceased to function, still held the impression of what it had contained, like a room that still smells of flowers that were there, like a cup that still holds the warmth of coffee that has been drunk.

I sat on the stool next to the gurnie, something I never did during a procedure.

I looked at his hands, now crossed over his chest, in the position the family would probably want.

I thought about how many bodies I had touched in 27 years.

Hundreds, thousands, bodies of all ages, all conditions, all stories.

And not once had I felt what I felt that morning.

I’m not a religious man.

I don’t go to mass.

I don’t pray.

I don’t think much about God or the soul or life after death.

For me, it had always been simple.

We live, we die, our bodies decompose, and that’s it.

There’s nothing romantic or spiritual about it.

Its biology, its chemistry, its physics.

But there I was in my preparation room with all my material certainties, suddenly less solid than they had been hours before.

It wasn’t that I suddenly believed in ghosts or souls floating above bodies.

It wasn’t anything so dramatic.

It was more subtle.

It was simply the certainty, inexplicable but absolute, that there was something more, that human life couldn’t be completely reduced to biological functions, that there was a dimension that my technical work, no matter how professional, couldn’t touch or measure or document.

I combed his hair carefully.

He had a rebellious cowick at the crown that made some lock stand up in a curious way.

I smoothed it with gel, but then I stopped.

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