My name is Raria Kanti.

I am 92 years old and I want to tell you something that happened 18 years ago that I have never told anyone outside my family.

Not because I was ashamed, not because I doubted what happened, but because I am a very private woman and I have always believed that the most sacred things belong first to the people they happen to.

and only later when the time is right to anyone else.

The time is right now.

I am 92 years old.

I do not have unlimited time to wait for the right moment.

So, let me tell you about the afternoon of October 7th, 2006.

Let me tell you about the rain and the church I had not entered in 40 years and the boy who sat down beside me in the back pew and said my daughter’s name.

My name is Rosaria Ki and I grew up in Milan in the 1930s and 1940s which is to say I grew up in a world where the church was as much a part of daily life as bread and weather.

My mother said the rosary every evening after dinner.

My father served as a lay reader at our parish for 30 years.

My grandmother, God rest her, died with her fingers wrapped around a crucifix and a smile on her face that I have thought about many times in the decades since.

I was baptized, confirmed, married in the church.

I raised my children in the church.

For the first 54 years of my life, I never questioned any of it.

And then my daughter Elena died.

She was 31 years old.

It was 1966.

She had a brain aneurysm.

Here one day, gone the next.

No warning, no illness, no preparation.

She kissed me goodbye on a Tuesday morning, and by Wednesday evening, she was gone.

Elena was my first born.

She had her father’s laugh in my mother’s hands and a way of entering a room that made the whole room different.

She was married.

She had a son who was four years old.

She had a life.

She was in the middle of living.

And then she was gone.

And I stopped going to church.

Not dramatically, not with a declaration or a confrontation or a moment of formal renunciation.

I simply stopped.

The Sunday after her funeral, I did not get up and go.

My husband Aldo went.

Our other children went.

I stayed home and sat at the kitchen table and looked at the wall.

The Sunday after that, the same.

And the Sunday after that.

And then it was not Sundays anymore.

It was 40 years.

40 years of walking past churches without entering.

40 years of my husband going alone and coming home and saying nothing about it because he understood the way a man who has been married for decades understands that there are things that cannot be argued or reasoned or prayed back into place.

I did not stop believing in God.

That is important to understand.

I did not stop believing in God.

I simply could not speak to him anymore because the last time I had spoken to him with any real urgency the night Elena was in the hospital when I had knelt beside a plastic chair in a fluorescent corridor and said every prayer I knew and invented new ones and promised things I cannot repeat he had not answered or he had answered in the only way I could not accept.

And so I stopped speaking.

40 years of silence.

Aldo died in 1998.

My other children grew old around me.

My grandchildren were born and grew up.

My great-grandchildren arrived.

The world changed in ways I could not have imagined when I was young.

And I carried my silence with me through all of it.

Private, intact, mine.

I want to be clear about what those 40 years look like from the outside because I think people imagine that a woman who stops going to church must look obviously broken or angry or lost.

I did not look any of those things.

I cooked Sunday dinners for my family.

I attended my grandchildren’s school plays.

I volunteered at the local library for 12 years.

I had friends.

I laughed.

I traveled with Eldo to Florence and Sicily and once memorably to New York where we stood at the top of the Empire State Building and he held my hand the way he had held it when we were 20.

I had a full and good life.

The silence was underneath all of it.

Not visible, not announced, just there.

The way an old injury is there, not always painful, but always present.

always informing the way you move.

The thing I missed most was not the church itself.

It was the certainty my grandmother had carried so easily.

The certainty that the darkness was not the last word.

That Elena had not simply stopped.

I missed that certainty every single day for 40 years.

And I had nowhere to go with the missing.

October 7th, 2006.

I was 74 years old.

It was a Saturday afternoon in Milan and it was raining.

Not the gentle autumn rain that makes the city beautiful, but the heavy determined rain that makes you feel the sky is trying to say something and has decided volume is the only way to make itself heard.

I had been to the market on VFO that morning and on the way home the rain caught me without warning.

Two blocks from my apartment, I ducked into the nearest doorway, which happened to be the Church of San Franchesco on Via Kramer.

I stood in the doorway for a moment with my shopping bag and my wet coat, and I looked at the interior of the church and I thought, I will wait here until the rain stops.

That is all.

I am not entering for any other reason.

I am waiting for the rain.

I went inside and sat in the last pew, the back row, as far from the altar as it was possible to be while still being inside.

The church was nearly empty, a few elderly women near the front with their rosaries, a man in a dark coat praying alone in a side chapel, the particular hush of a church on a Saturday afternoon, unhurried, dim, smelling of candle smoke and old stone.

I sat with my shopping bag on my lap and I looked at the ceiling and I listened to the rain on the roof and I thought about nothing in particular.

I had been sitting there for perhaps 10 minutes when I heard the side door open.

Footsteps.

Someone sat down beside me.

I turned to look, the automatic courtesy of someone who has been raised to acknowledge people.

It was a boy, 15 years old perhaps.

dark curly hair slightly damp from the rain.

Plain clothes, a dark jacket, jeans, a backpack he sat on the floor beside him.

He was breathing a little quickly as though he had been walking fast.

He looked at the altar for a moment.

Then he turned to me.

Buenosera Sora, he said.

Good evening, Buenosera.

I said.

He settled back in the pew with the easy comfort of someone who sits in churches the way other people sit in living rooms.

We were quiet together for a few minutes.

The rain continued on the roof.

The women near the front murmured their rosaries.

The man in the side chapel crossed himself and stood.

Then the boy said without turning to look at me, “You haven’t been inside a church in a very long time.

” I turned to look at him.

He was still looking at the altar.

No, I said carefully.

I haven’t 40 years, he said.

I said nothing.

Your daughter’s name was Elena, he said.

The shopping bag slipped from my lap.

I caught it.

My hands were shaking.

The boy turned to look at me then and his eyes.

I want to tell you about his eyes because I am 92 years old and I have looked into many eyes in my life and I have never seen eyes quite like those.

They were calm, completely entirely calm.

The calm of someone who has said a difficult thing and is not afraid of what comes next.

the calm of someone who has been sent to say something and is simply doing the job.

“How do you know that name?” I whispered.

“I pray a lot,” he said simply.

“And sometimes when you’re very still and very quiet in front of the Eucharist, God shows you things, people who are carrying something, things they need to hear.

” He paused.

“You’ve been carrying Elena for 40 years.

The church was very quiet.

I could hear my own breathing.

I could hear the rain.

I could not hear anything else.

Who are you? I managed.

My name is Carlo, he said.

Carlo Audis.

I live near here.

I come to this church sometimes.

I looked at this boy.

Carlo, I said, “What do you want?” He was quiet for a moment, thoughtful, as though he were choosing his words with care.

I want to tell you something, he said.

Something I think you’ve needed to hear for a long time.

Something God asked me to say.

I did not speak.

Elena is fine, he said.

Three words.

Elena is fine.

I have been a widow since 1998.

I have buried friends, siblings, a husband.

I have sat with dying people and stood at gravesides in every season.

I thought I had used up my capacity for the kind of grief that physically moves through your body like a current.

I was wrong.

Those three words moved through me like a current.

She’s been fine since the moment she left,” Carlo continued, his voice quiet and steady.

“She was not alone.

She was never alone.

The prayers you said in that hospital corridor, every one of them was heard.

Every single one.

And Elellena wants you to know.

She has always known you were there.

She has always felt you.

I was weeping.

Not quietly.

Not with any of the dignity I have always prided myself on.

I was weeping the way I had not wept since the fluorescent corridor in 1966.

Carlo did not seem uncomfortable.

He did not look away or offer me a tissue or say anything reassuring in the hollow way people say reassuring things when they do not know what else to do.

He simply sat beside me in the back pew of San Franchesco Church on a rainy Saturday afternoon and let me weep.

After a long time, when I had found something like composure, I asked him, “How can you know this? How can any person know this? He thought about it seriously.

I don’t know everything, he said honestly.

I only know what God shows me.

And he showed me you sitting in this pew and Elena and the 40 years.

He paused.

I think he’s been waiting a long time for you to come back inside.

And today the rain helped.

Despite everything, I almost laughed.

The rain, I said.

The rain, he confirmed with a small smile.

We sat together for another half hour.

He told me about his faith, about the Eucharist, which he spoke of with a precision and a love that I had not heard from anyone since I was a child sitting beside my grandmother with her crucifix.

He told me about his website, about the eukaristic miracles he had cataloged from around the world, about his conviction that if people truly understood what was present in the Eucharist, the churches would never be empty.

He spoke about death with a matter of factness that would have been unsettling from anyone else.

I’m not afraid of it, he said.

I actually I’m looking forward to it.

Not because I don’t love my life, but because I know what’s waiting and it’s so much better than anything here.

I looked at him carefully.

Carlo, I said, “Are you sick?” He met my eyes.

“Yes,” he said simply.

“Uchmia.

” “But it’s all right.

I have things to do first.

People to talk to, then I’ll go.

” The rain had stopped while we were talking.

I had not noticed when.

Carlos stood up.

He picked up his backpack from the floor.

He straightened the pew in front of us, reaching forward to push the himmnil back into its slot.

The automatic tidiness of someone who leaves places the way he found them.

Senor Kanti, he said, come back.

I looked at him.

Come back to church,” he said.

“Not because everything is explained, not because the pain is gone, but because Elena is fine, and because 40 years is long enough.

” He smiled at me.

That smile.

I will not attempt to describe it beyond saying that it was the smile of someone who has seen something wonderful and cannot quite contain the knowledge of it.

And then Carlo Audis walked out of the church into the wet October afternoon and I sat alone in the back pew for a very long time.

I learned of Carlo’s death five days later from a notice in the parish bulletin that my son brought home.

Carlo Audis 15 years old leukemia October 12th 2006.

I held the bulletin for a long time.

He had known he was going to die when he sat beside me.

He had been carrying his own death when he carried my 40 years of silence into that pew and laid it gently down.

He had things to do first.

I was one of the things.

I went back to church the following Sunday.

My son Paulo drove me.

He did not ask questions.

He simply came to my apartment at 8:30 on Sunday morning, the way he had not done since before his father died, and said, “Mama, are you ready?” I was ready.

I sat in the back pew.

My pew now, I suppose, the same one.

The mass began the way masses always begin.

And something happened when the priest raised the host at the consecration.

Not a vision, not a voice, not anything dramatic, just a recognition.

The same recognition I had felt as a child sitting beside my grandmother before life became complicated and grief became a reason to go silent.

The recognition that something was present, something that had been present through all 40 years of my silence, something that had been patient.

I am 92 years old now.

I have been back in church every Sunday since October 2006.

Carlo Audis was beatified on October 10th, 2020.

I watched the ceremony on the television in my living room with my son Paulo and his wife and two of my grandchildren.

When it ended, my granddaughter asked me if I knew who he was.

I told her yes.

I told her I had met him once in the rain in the back pew of San Franchesco Church on Via Kramer.

She asked me what he was like.

I thought about the calm eyes, the three words, the smile that could not quite contain the knowledge of something wonderful.

He was very young, I said, and he was not afraid of anything.

And he told me something I had needed to hear for 40 years.

She waited.

He told me my daughter was fine, I said.

And that is the whole story.

Elena is fine.

She has always been fine.

and 40 years.