I wondered if he would have liked it that way or preferred that slightly disheveled youthful appearance.

I decided to leave it a bit more natural.

I wanted him to look as he had been, not like an artificial too perfect version.

I applied a light layer of tinted cream on his face to give him some color.

Not much, just enough so he wouldn’t look so pale.

His cheeks, his forehead, his chin.

And as I worked on his face, as my fingers carefully touched his skin to spread the product evenly, I spoke to him.

Not out loud, just in my mind.

But I spoke to him all the same.

I don’t know what you were in life, Carlo, I thought.

But whatever it was, you left a mark.

Even on someone like me who only knows you as a body on a gurnie, you left a mark.

I finished with his face and stepped back.

He looked good.

He seemed asleep, at peace, serene.

It was good work.

Objectively speaking, any colleague would have approved, but I knew it wasn’t just good technical work.

It was something more.

I had put into that preparation a care and attention, a respect that went beyond my usual professionalism.

I covered his body with a clean sheet, leaving only his face visible.

This was how his family members would see him when they arrived.

This was how they would want to say goodbye.

I cleaned my instruments, disinfected the surfaces, threw the disposable materials into the appropriate containers, completed my documentation.

Start time of procedure, end time, techniques used, state of the body, relevant observations.

In the observation section, I hesitated about what I could write.

Body presented an unusual quality to the touch.

Technician experienced anomalous sensations during preparation.

It sounded absurd.

Finally, I wrote, “Body well preserved, preparation completed, no complications.

Family may proceed with the viewing.

” But I kept everything else to myself.

What I had felt, what I had experienced, what had changed in me during those hours.

These weren’t things that could be documented on a medical form.

I left the room and removed my protective equipment.

It was almost 9:00 in the morning.

My shift had ended.

Normally after a procedure, I would simply go home, shower, and try to sleep a few hours before returning at night.

But that day, I didn’t.

That day, I walked to the hospital chapel.

I had never entered there before, not once in 27 years of working at that hospital.

I passed in front of it every day, but I had never had a reason to enter.

But that morning, I did.

I pushed the wooden door and entered the small, silent space.

There were some benches, a simple altar, a crucifix on the wall.

Nothing elaborate, but clean and quiet.

I sat on the last bench and simply stayed there, looking ahead, not really knowing what to do or why I was there.

I thought about all the times I had felt secure in my materialist understanding of life and death.

All the times I had heard family members talk about feeling the presence of their deceased loved ones and had thought with barely disguised condescension that it was just psychological coping mechanisms all the times I had seen priests bless bodies in my room and had thought it was an empty ritual with no real meaning beyond psychological comfort for believers.

And now I was sitting there in a chapel at 9:00 in the morning after having touched a body that had made me question everything I thought I knew about the nature of life and death.

I didn’t experience any sudden conversion.

Didn’t see heavenly lights.

Didn’t hear voices.

I didn’t leave that chapel converted into a devout believer.

But something had changed.

A door that had been firmly closed in my mind had cracked open.

just a bit, just enough to let in a current of fresh air, a possibility I had previously completely rejected.

I stayed there maybe 20 minutes, maybe more.

Then I got up and left.

I went home, showered but couldn’t sleep.

I stayed awake staring at the ceiling, reliving every moment of that morning.

The first touch, the sensation of presence, the peace emanating from that body, the inexplicable certainty that I had touched something sacred.

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I returned to the hospital that night for my next shift.

I passed in front of the viewing room and saw that Carlo’s family had already arrived.

There were flowers, candles, people praying.

I stayed a moment in the hallway, observing from a distance.

I saw a woman, probably his mother, leaning over the coffin.

I saw a man, probably his father, with a hand on her shoulder.

I saw young people his age, friends I suppose, crying and hugging each other.

And I thought they knew, they knew what I had only touched.

They had lived with that light that I had only felt as an echo.

And somehow that consoled me, knowing that what I had experienced wasn’t an illusion, wasn’t an anomaly, but a true reflection of who that boy had been.

The following days were strange.

I continued with my work normally, preparing other bodies, performing the same technical procedures, but it was no longer the same.

Every body I touched, I found myself wondering, “Who were you? What did you love? What did you care about?” They weren’t just cases anymore.

They were people.

They had been people.

And although I didn’t feel with any of them what I had felt with Carlo, I had developed a new sensitivity, a new way of relating to my work.

I began to investigate about him.

I read articles online.

I discovered his complete story.

His devotion to the Eucharist, his project of documenting Eucharistic miracles, his use of technology to evangelize, his love for his family and friends, his acceptance of illness and death, and everything I read resonated with what I had felt that morning in the preparation room.

It all fit together.

Years later, when the beatatification processes began, when Carlo Acutis became international news, when his body was exumed and found incorrupt, it didn’t surprise me at all because I already knew.

I had been the first to touch that body after his death, and even then I had known it was different.

I didn’t have the theological language to express it at that time.

I didn’t have the conceptual framework to understand it completely, but I had known.

There’s something I’ve never told anyone until now.

Something that happened just before taking his body out of the preparation room so that the family could view it.

I had approached one last time.

I had adjusted the sheet.

I had verified that everything was perfect, and then impulsively I had done something I had never before done in my professional career.

I had placed my hand on his forehead as a father would with a sleeping child and had whispered, “Thank you.

” I don’t know exactly why I was thanking him.

Thank you for what exactly? Maybe for having shown me that there is more in this world than my science could explain.

Maybe for having given me in his death a gift that many don’t receive in their entire lives, a glimpse of the transcendent.

Maybe simply for having been who he was, for having lived with such authenticity that even his lifeless body radiated something of that light.

And in that moment, with my hand on his cold forehead, I had felt one last time that presence, that peace, and for an instant, just an instant, I had had the crazy certainty that he had heard me, that somehow from wherever he was, he had received my gratitude and had accepted it with that same jovial serenity with which he had apparently lived his life.

Today, so many years later, I still work in the same room at Santa Maria Demiser Reicordia Hospital.

I’m still a morg technician.

I still touch cold bodies.

I still perform the same procedures I’ve performed for decades.

But I’m no longer the same man I was before that spring morning in April 2006.

Now, every time I begin a procedure, I take a moment, just a moment before the first touch, and I think of Carlo.

And I remember that everybody on my journey was a person.

They lived, loved, suffered, hoped, and deserved to be treated not just with technical professionalism, but with reverence.

Because if I learned anything that morning, it’s that we are more than flesh and bones much more.

Sometimes on quiet nights when the hospital is almost empty and I’m alone in my room with a body waiting to be prepared, I find myself talking to them silently.

I’m not crazy.

I know they don’t hear me, but I do it anyway.

I tell them I’ll do my best work, that I’ll treat them with dignity, that their families will see them beautiful and at peace.

It’s my way of honoring what Carlo taught me without words, just with his presence.

I never became particularly religious.

I don’t go to mass regularly, don’t pray the rosary.

I didn’t become what would be considered a devout Catholic, but I do enter the hospital chapel from time to time.

I sit on that same last bench and simply remain there in the silence open to that dimension of reality that I once literally touched with my hands and that forever changed my way of understanding my work and my life.

Blessed Carlo Acutis spent only a few hours under my care.

I spent 27 years preparing bodies before meeting him and many years more after.

But those few hours were the most important of my career.

They were the moment when the technician touched the sacred and the sacred in its silent and powerful way touched the technician back.

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