I took my nephew with cancer to Carlo Acutis’ tomb — and he said “I’m not afraid anymore”
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%.
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.
The lines around his eyes, which had appeared over the course of the illness, and which made him look in some moments startlingly old, had smoothed out.
He looked in those 15 minutes like a sleeping child.
He looked the way he had looked before February, before the diagnosis, before any of this.
The Mateo of the Saturday mornings when he would come to my apartment and we would make breakfast together and he would tell me about the websites he was building and I would pretend to understand more about coding than I actually did.
At the 14-minute mark, something in his face changed.
It is difficult to describe precisely.
The relaxation that had been in his face deepened into something else, something I can only call recognition.
The specific expression of someone who has just understood something they were trying to understand.
His eyes, which had been open and fixed on Carlo’s face, widened slightly.
Then he rose.
He rose slowly, using the edge of the glass case to help himself upright.
I moved to assist him and he waved me gently off and turned to face us and his face was different.
The transformation was not dramatic or theatrical.
It was quiet and complete the way real transformations are.
The anxiety that had underllay his composure for months.
The managed, controlled anxiety of a brave child who would not inflict his fear on the people he loved was gone.
Not suppressed.
Gone.
What had replaced it was the thing I had seen in his face in the final minutes at the glass.
Recognition.
And beneath recognition, peace.
I’m not afraid anymore, he said.
Elena’s voice broke.
What are you not afraid of, my love? Of dying, he said simply.
The way you state a fact that has become so established, it no longer requires emphasis.
He looked at us, at his mother, at his father, at me, with a directness and steadiness that stopped the air in my lungs.
Carlos showed me that dying young isn’t punishment.
He said it’s a special mission.
He told me that when you die holy, you don’t stop helping people.
He’s still helping sick children right now.
He told me.
Stephano’s voice was rough when he asked, “Mateo, how did Carlos show you this?” Mateo looked at his father with the clear, patient eyes of a child who has traveled somewhere the adults have not been and is trying to bring back what he found in language they can use.
Papa, during those 15 minutes, I saw Carlo.
He was wearing sneakers and a t-shirt that said toward holiness, just like in the photos.
He talked to me.
He explained things.
He paused and then said the thing that I have thought about every day since.
He told me that dying at 10 isn’t different from dying at 15.
What matters is how many people you help while you’re alive.
He said, “The years don’t matter.
The love matters.
” Stephano made a sound that was not quite speech.
He turned away for a moment, facing the stone wall of the sanctuary, his hand pressed flat against it, his shoulders moving.
When he turned back, his eyes were wet.
For the first time in 8 months, the rage that had been his constant companion was not visible in his face.
What was there instead was something raw and more open.
grief, yes, and love and something else that I recognized after a moment as the beginning of a different relationship with what was happening.
Mateo looked at him and said, “Papa, it’s okay.
I promise it’s okay.
” And Stephano, architect, agnostic, the man who had spent eight months shouting at a god he didn’t believe in, crossed the space between them and held his son against his chest and wept in the silent, shaking way of men who have finally stopped trying not to.
We drove back to Bolognia on October 13th.
Mateo slept for most of the journey, curled in the back seat with his head in Elena’s lap, her hand resting on his hat-covered head in the gesture of such ancient maternal comfort that it looked like a painting.
When he woke somewhere in the hills between Aisi and Florence, he said, “To Roberto, I have an idea for a website.
” Of course he did.
He had spent the journey in whatever dreaming space he had occupied for those hours designing it.
He explained it to me as we drove.
A site for children with cancer and their families, where children who were sick could share what they were learning, where families could find each other, where the experience of childhood illness could be given a shape and a language and a community rather than existing in isolation.
He wanted to call it in the direct way he named everything Mateo Earlo due amichi conia mateo and Carlo two friends with leukemia we both had leukemia he said we both liked computers u building it that afternoon back in his room in Bolognia propped up in bed with his laptop coding with the focused absorption that had been his characteristic mode since he was 6 years old.
Elena sat beside him, quietly reading, available if he needed her, and not crowding him if he didn’t.
Stephano, who has no particular technical aptitude, learned to do whatever Mateo needed done on the site that Mateo couldn’t manage himself.
uploading images, managing settings, tasks that required no coding knowledge, but required someone willing to follow precise instructions from a 10-year-old with a very clear vision.
Over the following 21 days, Mateo built that site.
He built it the way he built everything, methodically, patiently, with enormous care for the person who would eventually encounter it.
He wrote posts addressed directly to children who were sick.
He wrote about what leukemia felt like from the inside with the frank specificity that characterized everything he said.
He wrote about being afraid and about the conversation he’d had at Carlos’s tomb and about what he now understood about the relationship between the time you have and the use you make of it.
He included a page about Carlo Acutis, not written with the formal reverence of a haggio, but with the warmth of someone writing about a friend, someone whose biography he knew well and whose choices he found genuinely admirable.
He also built in those final weeks a small game.
He had started it months earlier in the ward, the game for children during chemotherapy, but he had never finished it.
He finished it now, adding features, refining it, testing it with a rigger that would have been impressive in a professional developer.
When it was done, he sent it to Sar Giovana, the nurse who had first told him about Carlo and asked her to share it with the children in the ward.
He received in the last week of his life a voice message from a seven-year-old named Luca, a leukemia patient in the Santor Solo ward, telling him that the game was his favorite thing about chemotherapy days.
Matteo played this message four times and then sat quietly for a moment before saying, “Good.
He died on November 2nd, the feast of all souls.
” A timing that Elena has told me she does not think was coincidental.
though she said this quietly without insisting on it in the way of someone offering an observation rather than an argument.
He died at home in his room with his parents beside him and his hand in mine.
His laptop was open on the desk.
The site was open on the screen.
His last words, as I have already told you, were, “To Roberto, now I’m going to meet Carlo in person.
I’ll keep helping sick children just from heaven.
I believe him.
I am a civil engineer.
I have spent my professional life in the disciplined application of physical principles to material problems.
I am not by training or temperament a person who reaches easily for supernatural explanations.
I look for structural causes.
I look for load paths and failure modes and the rational account of how things are held together or fall apart.
I cannot give you a rational account of what happened in that sanctuary on October 12th, 2024.
I cannot tell you what Mateo saw during those 15 minutes or what Carlo Audis communicated to a dying child who had traveled 3 hours to kneel at the glass case that holds his body.
I cannot quantify the transformation I witnessed in Mateo’s face when he rose from that kneeling position, or calculate the mechanism by which a 10-year-old boy’s chronic anxiety about dying was replaced in 15 minutes by a piece so complete and so steady that it sustained him through the final 3 weeks of his life without cracking.
What I can tell you is what I measured, what I documented, what I observed with the precision that is my professional habit and my personal character.
I observed that Mateo who had been frightened for months was not frightened after that afternoon.
I observed that the fear did not return in the days that followed.
Not in the hard days, not in the painful days, not in the day when the paliotative care team came to the house and we understood that we were in the final stage.
The fear was gone.
The peace that replaced it was not the peace of resignation or the peace of dissociation or the peace of a child who has stopped engaging with reality.
It was active peace.
The peace of someone who has understood something that makes the situation bearable.
I observed that in the 21 days between his visit to Carlos tomb and his death, Mateo built something that has outlasted him.
The site he created in the final weeks of his life with his energy depleted and his body failing has been visited by families from 17 countries.
The messages that arrive through the contact form come from parents of children with cancer.
From children who are sick themselves, from oncology nurses and paliotative care workers, and hospice chaplain who have found in his words a language for things that are difficult to say.
More than 50 families have written to say that Mateo’s story changed the way they face their own illness or their child’s illness.
The small game he built has been played by children in pediatric oncology wards in Bolognia, Milan, Rome, Madrid, and S.
Paulo.
He was 10 years old.
He had 3 weeks to work with.
And he built something that is still helping people.
This is what Carlo told him in whatever language 15 minutes of silence in a stone sanctuary speaks.
That the years don’t matter.
That the love matters.
that dying young isn’t punishment.
It’s a different kind of mission.
One that doesn’t end when the life ends.
I did not understand this when Mateo was alive.
I could not have understood it.
I was too close, too raw, too occupied with the daily work of loving someone who was dying and trying to make that dying as bearable as possible.
Understanding required distance and the distance required his absence.
and his absence is something I am still learning to carry.
But I understand it now.
I understand it when I open his sight and read his words, direct, honest, free of any sentimentality exactly as he spoke.
And I see the comments from a child in Madrid who says that Mateo’s writing helped her stop being afraid.
Or the message from a father in S.
Paulo, whose son is in treatment and who found in Mateo’s example a way to talk to his child about what they were facing.
I understand it when Stfano sends me links to the messages he receives.
Stfano, who has returned to the faith he had abandoned with a quietness and a depth that I think surprised even him, who now volunteers one evening a week in the pediatric oncology ward where Mateo spent 8 months sitting with children and their families in the way that someone sits who has learned the hard way that presence is what is needed and nothing else.
I understand it when Elena reads to me on the phone in the evenings the message from Sor Giovana about Luca, the seven-year-old who loved Mateo’s game, who is now in remission, whose parents credit the game and Mateo’s words on the site with sustaining him through his most difficult treatment weeks.
Luca’s mother wrote, “My son talks about Mateo like a best friend.
He says Mateo taught him to be brave.
I don’t know how to thank a child who died for what he gave my living child.
This is what Carlo Autis did on October 12th, 2024 when he met my nephew at the glass case in a stone sanctuary in Aisi.
He did not cure Matteo’s leukemia.
He gave Mateo something more specific, more useful, and more lasting than a cure.
He gave him a framework.
He gave him a way of understanding what his short life was.
For that allowed him to live those final weeks fully.
Not in fear, not in grief, not in the understandable but limited project of preparing to die, but in the expansive, creative, purposeful project of continuing to help people.
Carlo had done the same thing.
Born May 3rd, 1991 in London, Carlo Akudis had moved with his family to Milan as an infant and had grown up with the particular modern Italian Catholic formation that produced a boy who went to mass daily, who received the Eucharist with genuine devotion, and who brought to his faith the same systematic intelligence that he brought to his interest in technology.
He had understood that evidence mattered, that the historical record of Eucharistic miracles was an underused resource for people who needed something concrete to hold on to.
And he had built the tool to make that evidence accessible.
He had died of leukemia at 15 on October 12th, 2006 and been beatified in a CC on October 10th, 2020.
He had used what he had.
He had done it with complete intentionality and no apparent resentment of the limitation.
And then apparently he had continued.
My nephew met him on the anniversary of his death.
A 10-year-old with leukemia and a laptop met a 15year-old with leukemia and a website and a beatification and something passed between them.
Call it intercession.
Call it inspiration.
Call it the particular communication that happens when one person who has lived through something recognizes another person who is living through it and says, “Here is what I learned.
Here is what helped.
Here is what I wish I had known.
” Mateo took that knowledge and built with it in 3 weeks what Carlo had built in 15 years.
Not the same thing.
Something fitted to his 10 years and his particular gifts and his particular moment.
But the same impulse, make it organized, make it accessible, make it something people can find when they need it.
The years don’t matter.
The love matters.
I am keeping my promise to my nephew.
I am telling this story because he asked me to and because I believe with all the engineering precision that is my professional character and all the grief and love that is my personal reality that the story is true and that true stories about children who die with courage are among the most valuable things we have.
Mateo is gone.
Carlo is present.
And somewhere right now, a child who is afraid is reading my nephew’s words and becoming incrementally less afraid.
The mission continues.
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