There are questions that children ask that adults are not equipped to answer.

Not because we lack intelligence or education or life experience.

Not because we haven’t thought carefully enough or read the right books.

We are not equipped to answer them because they come from a place in a child’s heart that adults have without realizing it.

Sealed shut a place of radical undefended honesty about things we have spent decades learning to avoid.

My nephew Mateo asked me one of those questions on a Tuesday evening in September of last year.

He was 10 years old.

He was lying in a hospital bed in the pediatric oncology ward at Santorola in Bolognia.

His head was bald from chemotherapy.

There were bruises on his arms from the IV lines.

and he looked at me, not with the eyes of a frightened child, but with the clear, direct eyes of someone who has already traveled far past the point where pretending is useful.

And he said, “To Roberto, how do you stop being afraid of dying?” I did not have an answer.

I am 43 years old.

I have a degree in civil engineering from the University of Bolognia.

I have managed construction projects worth tens of millions of euros.

I am by professional disposition and personal temperament.

A man who solves problems, who looks at complex structures, identifies the points of stress and finds the interventions that will hold everything together.

I did not have an answer, but Mateo did.

He had already thought about this.

He had in the particular way of children who face things that adults cannot face on their behalf already identified the person he believed could teach him what he needed to know.

Tio, he said, I want to go to Carlo Audis.

And so I took him.

What happened on October 12th, 2024, the 18th anniversary of Carlo’s death in a stone sanctuary in Aisi in front of a glass case that held the body of a 15year-old boy who had died of leukemia 18 years before my nephew was born changed my family in

ways that I am still two months later struggling to articulate.

It did not save Mateo’s life.

I want to be clear about this from the beginning because the story I am about to tell you is not a story about a miraculous physical healing.

Mateo died on November 2nd, 21 days after his visit to Carlos’s tomb.

He died peacefully in his own bed with his parents beside him and his hand in mine.

But something happened in that sanctuary that I cannot explain by any ordinary measure.

Something passed between a 10-year-old boy dying of cancer and a beatified young man who had died of the same disease 18 years earlier.

Something changed in Mateo, not in his body, but in him, in the place where Mateo actually lived.

And that change radiated outward through the final three weeks of his life in ways that are still 2 months after his death, touching hundreds of families around the world.

This is the story of what happened.

I am telling it because Mateo asked me to.

In the last week of his life when I sat beside his bed and held his hand, he said, “To Roberto, when I’m gone, will you tell our story so other children who are afraid can hear it?” I promised him I would.

This is me keeping my promise.

My sister Elena has always been the kind of person who makes a house feel inhabited.

She has a gift for it.

The particular warmth that certain people carry into every space they enter.

The ability to make a meal feel like a celebration and a Tuesday afternoon feel like something worth remembering.

When she met Stfano Benedeti at a university event in 2001, he was studying architecture.

She was finishing a degree in literature.

Everyone who knew them could see within weeks that this was permanent.

They married in 2004 and began almost immediately trying to have children.

For 12 years they tried.

I watched my sister move through those 12 years with a courage that I could not have matched.

There were the early miscarriages, the fertility treatments, the IVF cycles that worked and then didn’t, the moments of hope, and the longer moments of grief.

Elena never stopped believing.

She would tell me in the evenings when she called just to talk that she knew her child was coming, that some children take longer to arrive because the world is not quite ready for them yet.

Mateo was born on April 8th, 2014.

He arrived, as Elena had always believed he would, in his own time and on his own terms, nearly 3 weeks past his due date, apparently determined to make clear from the beginning that he would not be rushed.

He weighed 4 kg at birth and had dark eyes that even in those first hours seemed to be taking careful note of everything around him.

From the beginning, Mateo was extraordinary in the quiet way that true things are extraordinary.

Not dramatic, not spectacular, but irreducibly real.

He was a child who noticed everything.

who asked questions that required you to stop what you were doing and think.

Who developed by the age of six a passion for computers that went beyond the typical childhood fascination with screens into something more genuine and more focused.

A real curiosity about how systems worked, how information could be organized, how the digital world was constructed.

By 8, he was building simple websites.

By nine, he had taught himself basic coding from YouTube tutorials and was creating small games.

Nothing complex, nothing polished, but functional, thoughtful, built with a methodical patience that was remarkable in a child of that age.

Stephano, the architect, joked that Mateo had inherited his systematic mind.

Elena, the literature teacher, said that what Mateo was really doing was writing, just in a different language.

He was also from a young age an unusually tender child.

The kind of child who notices when someone is sad without being told, who will stop playing to sit beside a crying classmate, who brings small offerings, a drawing, a piece of fruit, a toy to people who seem to need comfort.

His teachers mentioned it regularly in parent conferences.

His classmates gravitated toward him, not because he was the loudest or the most energetic or the best at football, though he was passionate about football, a devoted and deeply loyal supporter of Bolognia FC.

But because he was genuinely, consistently kind.

This is the boy who was given the diagnosis in February of 2024.

He had been showing symptoms for perhaps 2 weeks before Elena brought him to the pediatrician.

Fatigue first, the kind of bone deep tiredness that doesn’t respond to sleep, then loss of appetite.

Then one morning while he was getting dressed for school, Elena noticed the bruises, clusters of them on his arms and torso in places where no impact had occurred.

She called the pediatrician that same hour.

By the end of the day they were at Santorola and by the end of the following day they had the results acute lymphoplastic leukemia advanced stage with genetic mutations that the oncology team described with the careful honesty of professionals who have learned that false hope is its own form of cruelty as significantly complicating treatment options.

The standard protocols for all have high success rates in children.

In many cases, over 80%.

With the specific mutation profile in Matteo’s case, the projected survival rate was 15%.

Elena called me from the hospital parking garage where she had gone to cry so that Matteo wouldn’t hear.

Stefano had stayed with him in the ward.

She called me and she said simply, “Roberto, it’s very bad.

I drove to Bolognia that evening and I have essentially not left since.

” The months that followed tested every member of our family in ways I had not imagined possible.

Stephano, quiet, measured, systematic Stephano, who had spent his career calculating loadbearing capacities and stress tolerances in buildings, fell into a rage against God that he could neither articulate nor contain.

He is not and has never been a religious man.

His fury was not the fury of a believer whose faith was shaken, but the fury of a man who felt that the universe had made a categorical moral error and expected him to absorb it silently.

He did not absorb it silently.

There were nights when I heard him in the hospital parking garage, standing alone in the dark, shouting at nothing.

Elena prayed.

She had always prayed, but now she prayed with a desperation that stripped away all the architecture of practiced faith and left only the raw fact of a mother begging for her child.

She went to mass every morning before coming to the hospital.

She lit candles at every shrine she could reach.

She contacted every religious community she knew, Carmealites, Franciscans, Benedictines, and asked for prayers.

She prayed with an intensity that was almost frightening to witness.

The intensity of someone who believes completely and is not receiving an answer.

And Mateo Mateo chemotherapy.

This is the word I keep coming back to when I try to describe what those eight months were like.

Mateo chemotherapied.

He endured it with a matterof factness that was at once deeply admirable and deeply unsettling.

He was sick, viciously, systematically sick in the way that chemotherapy makes you sick.

The nausea and the fatigue and the hair loss and the compromised immunity and the endless blood draws and the IV lines and the bone marrow biopsies.

He endured all of it.

He complained rarely.

When he did complain, it was with a directness that somehow made it easier to bear.

Tio Roberto, this is very bad today.

Not self-pity, just accurate reporting.

Between the bad days, he built things.

He had his laptop in the ward.

The oncology team at Santorola are practical people who understand that children’s psychological well-being is part of their medical treatment, and he spent hours coding.

He built a simple game that other children in the ward could play on their phones during chemotherapy sessions.

He built a website for one of the younger patients, a 5-year-old girl named Sophia, so that Sophia could send updates to her grandparents who lived too far away to visit.

He taught a 12-year-old boy named Jakamo to write his first line of code.

And when Jakamo managed to make a small animation appear on screen, Mateo’s delight was entirely genuine, as though someone else’s accomplishment was as satisfying as his own.

The ward nurses adored him, not because he was easy.

He had strong opinions about things, was particular about the order of his belongings, and could be on bad days quite stubborn about refusing procedures he found particularly unpleasant.

They adored him because he treated them as people.

He remembered their names, asked about their lives, noticed when they seemed tired.

He brought a quality of attention to his relationships with the ward staff that most adults do not manage to bring to their professional interactions.

In September, the oncology team called us in for a consultation.

The language they used was measured and careful, but the content was not.

The treatment had failed.

The leukemia had spread to the central nervous system.

The options remaining were paliotative.

The time remaining was measured in weeks.

Mateo was not in the room when they told us.

He was in his wardrobe with Elena’s mother, watching football on television.

When we returned, he looked at our faces and knew children always know.

That evening, when Stephano and Elena had stepped out into the corridor for a few minutes, they needed air.

They needed to cry without him seeing, Mateo looked at me and asked the question I have already told you about.

Tio Roberto, how do you stop being afraid of dying? And then before I could fail to answer, I want to go to Carlo Autis.

I need to tell you how Mateo knew about Carlo Autis because it matters.

He had not been raised in a particularly religious household.

Stfano’s agnosticism and Elena’s gentle faith had produced in their household the kind of relaxed cultural Catholicism common among Italian families of their background.

Mass at Christmas and Easter, baptism and first communion observed with genuine warmth, if not deep theological engagement, the crucifix above the door and the small icon of Mary on Elena’s nightstand.

Matteo had not been given Carlo Acutis as a devotional figure.

He had found him himself.

Sometime in the early months of his treatment, one of the nurses in the pediatric oncology ward, a woman named Sar Giovana, a religious sister who divided her time between the ward and a contemplative community nearby, had mentioned Carlo in passing.

She had not

made a presentation of it, had not pushed it.

she had simply said one afternoon when she was sitting with Mateo while he waited out a difficult session.

You know, there was a boy who also had leukemia who also loved computers.

His name was Carlo Autis.

He died young too, but he did something extraordinary with the time he had.

Mateo had gone home or to his hospital bed which was home for those months and researched.

What he found absorbed him completely.

He read everything he could find about Carlo Acutis.

The biography, the testimonies, the documentation of his work cataloging Eucharistic miracles.

He was struck immediately and deeply by the parallels.

Not just the leukemia, though that was the initial hook, but the specifics of what Carlo had done with his technological passion.

Carlo had believed that the Eucharist contained a real and documentable miracle.

And he had responded to that belief the way a person with a genuine technical inclination responds to any problem worth solving.

He had built a database.

He had created an exhibition.

He had made the evidence organized, accessible, and sharable.

This was, Mateo explained to me one evening, exactly the kind of thinking he understood.

It’s like when you have a lot of information, he said, and you want people to be able to find it easily, so you have to figure out the best structure.

Carlo did that for miracles.

I understand why he did it that way.

He began talking about Carlo with the ease and familiarity with which he talked about his football teammates or his close friends from school.

As a person he knew, whose decisions he understood, whose priorities made sense to him.

He never spoke about Carlo with the reverent formality of a devotional relationship.

He spoke about him like a peer.

When the September consultation made clear that his time was limited, his request to visit the tomb was therefore not a sudden impulse but the natural conclusion of months of building relationship.

He wanted to go because he had been corresponding in whatever way a living child corresponds with a beatified young man.

and he wanted to be present physically in the place where Carlos’s body rested.

Elena and Stefano’s initial resistance was practical.

Mateo was weak.

The journey from Bolognia to Aisi would be taxing.

They were afraid of spending his remaining weeks in transit rather than in the careful managed environment of the medical team that had been his support for eight months.

Mateo listened to these objections with characteristic patience.

Then he said, “Mama, I know I’m dying.

I want to spend my remaining weeks doing things that matter to me.

Going to Carlo matters to me.

Please, it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to say no to a 10-year-old who knows he is dying and asks you with complete lucidity and no manipulation for the thing that will give him peace.

” We agreed.

We arranged medical support for the journey.

An oncology nurse accompanied us with a kit for any complications.

We booked a hotel in Aisi for two nights to allow Mateo to rest before and after.

We drove down on October 11th and arrived in the late afternoon, giving Mateo time to rest and to walk a little in the town as the evening light turned the stone buildings gold.

That evening, Mateo was more animated than he had been in weeks.

He spoke about Carlo constantly, about the exhibition of Eucharistic miracles that Carlo had created and that is displayed in Aisi, about the things he’d read in Carlo’s biography, about the specific details that had struck him.

He spoke about the fact that Carlo had been beatified on October 10th, 2020, and that tomorrow, October 12th, the day we would visit the sanctuary, was the anniversary of Carlo’s death in 2006.

He died October 12th.

Mateo said he was born May 3rd, 1991 in London.

He died at 15 in 2006 from leukemia like me.

A pause.

I wonder if he was scared.

None of us answered immediately.

Then Stephano.

Stephano, who had spent months shouting at God in parking garages, said quietly, “I think he might have been scared sometimes.

He was 15.

But I also think he found a way to be okay with it.

Mateo nodded slowly as though this confirmed something he had already suspected.

That’s what I want to learn, he said.

How to be okay with it.

We arrived at the Santoario delis Boglation where Carlo’s body is enshrined.

At 3:30 in the afternoon on October 12th, 2024, the sanctuary was crowded with pilgrims.

The anniversary of Carlo’s death draws many visitors, and the atmosphere was one of quiet, focused prayer.

Many languages overlapping in low voices, candles burning in clusters, the smell of stone and wax, and the particular old church smell of incense that has accumulated in walls over centuries.

Mateo was wearing a knitted hat, blue, his color, to cover his baldness.

He was thinner than he had been even a month before.

The weight loss of the final stage visible in the narrowness of his face and the prominence of his cheekbones.

He walked slowly and I stayed close to him, ready to support him if he tired, but he walked with intention.

He was not browsing.

He knew where he was going.

When we reached the glass case that houses Carlo’s body, Carlo is dressed in his school uniform, composed with the serenity that has struck every visitor who has come to this place.

Mateo stopped and looked for a long moment before approaching.

He looked the way he looked when he was studying something carefully, the slightly narrowed eyes and the still face of genuine attention.

Then he knelt.

It was not easy for him to kneel.

His joints achd from the treatment.

Kneeling required effort and produced discomfort.

He knelt anyway, slowly and deliberately, and placed both hands flat on the glass.

For 15 minutes, he was completely still.

Elena held my arm.

I could feel her shaking very slightly, the contained trembling of someone trying not to cry in a public place.

Stephano stood a step behind us, his arms crossed over his chest, his jaws set, watching his son.

The oncology nurse who had traveled with us stood a few feet to the side, professional and quiet, not intruding.

I watched Mateo.

His face, which in those months had often carried the particular tension of someone managing pain and fatigue, and the effort of appearing okay, was completely relaxed.

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