It is April 28, 2009.
I am driving my car alone, with my parents’ car in front of me. My father is driving, with my mother and my 94-year-old aunt. We are heading back home to Abruzzo after getting the green light from the civil protection agency. After the terrible earthquake of the night of April 6th, my parents had sought refuge with me in Veneto, while my sister stayed in one of the hotels on the coast for six long months.
I still remember that night. The phone rings—it is 3:35 am. I get up, already aware that the sound carries bad news. Every step that brings me closer to the phone increases my concern. I answer. My father on the other end: “Nancy, did you feel the earthquake? Everything shook here; I can’t find your sister. Please help me!“
“Calm down, Dad. I didn’t feel anything. Don’t worry—I’ll try to call her. Leave the house now. Don’t stay there. Take Mom and Aunt with you. I’ll call you on your cellphone as soon as I know something.”
I turned on the television. The first reports were already broadcasting. As I began to understand what had happened, I prayed in my heart that my sister was alive. The news reported an earthquake at 3:32 am, lasting thirty-two seconds, measuring 5.9 in magnitude, with a prospect of deaths and injuries that made me shudder. Half an hour passed before I managed to contact her. All the lines were down. Time passed slowly and heavily on my heart.
At 04:13:46 on April 6, 2009, her first text message from L’Aquila: “We’re out of the house.”
At 04:21:02, the second: “It’s a mess, but we’re fine.”
I cried. Tears of relief. But at that moment, something inside me crumbled like the walls in the pictures. I died and was reborn for the second time. All in thirty-two seconds, a phone call, and two text messages. From that moment on, my life changed.
I told my father that I had managed to contact my sister and that they were alive, sheltered in their shaky car in the parking lot. I spent the rest of the night in front of the television, and at that point my crying resumed — for those people who had not been as lucky as me, whose loved ones were not safe, and for my people.
That night shook my roots. My foundations trembled. I was with them, fallen to the ground, stunned.
In the days that followed, my family joined me in Veneto. My sister went to the coast, to one of the hotels made available for earthquake victims.
It was a new beginning for me. A reversal, a quantum leap.
Now I was the parent. I was the one taking care of them. I would never have imagined that my 94-year-old aunt would one day see my house — too complicated a journey to undertake under normal conditions. But it was happening.
I spent my time entirely in the present. Nancy watches them arrive from the window. Nancy is happy because they are alive. Nancy is now baking a cake. Nancy is now calling the doctor to have them checked. Nancy is now giving her aunt a shower. Nancy is putting her son to bed. Nancy is talking to her mother and father. Nancy gives them a goodnight kiss, as she always has.
I had a strong desire to hug my sister, she was the only one missing.
It was April 28, 2009, and I was driving to Abruzzo to bring my family back home.
Now I am in my sister’s hotel room, waiting for her to return from work. I am looking for a blanket — I want to lie down and rest a bit before she arrives. I feel restless. I open the double door of the wardrobe to get the blanket, but it is not there.
So I open the single door on the right. Instead of clothes, I find my niece’s juices, her biscuits, her bottles, her cheeses. At that moment, I burst into tears. I realised that my sister no longer has her home.
Those things I had seen in the pantry of her kitchen at Christmas were now there, in that hotel room that represented her entire world at that moment. As I cried, I said to myself: “What are you doing? Do you want to be found like this? You came all this way to be found in tears?”
You know when there are two parts of you trying to negotiate something that doesn’t seem negotiable at all? That was happening.
An hour later, I recognised my niece’s playful screams in the hallway, announcing that the door was about to open. And then they were there, in front of me. I reset myself. I am reborn.
My niece put her arms around my neck, then looked into my eyes and said, with her big green eyes, “Do you know, auntie, that the earthquake broke my bed?“
The next day, we celebrated my brother-in-law’s birthday.
I have thought about that many times since. The way life insists on continuing. The way a birthday arrives on schedule regardless of what the ground has done. The way my niece could tell me, matter-of-factly, that the earthquake broke her bed—and mean it as information, not tragedy, because she was four years old and the world was still, for her, primarily a place of curiosity rather than loss.
I learned something in those weeks that I have carried ever since, and that no coaching framework has ever improved upon: the human capacity to absorb devastation and still bake a cake, still give a goodnight kiss, still show up at a hotel room door with your arms open—that capacity is not resilience in the way the self-help books mean it. It is something older and quieter and less heroic than resilience. It is simply love, continuing to move through a body that has been shaken to its foundations, because it does not know how to stop.
Thirty-two seconds changed everything. And the everything it changed was already there before the earthquake. The love was already there. The family was already there. The capacity to hold each other was already there.
The earthquake just made it impossible to take any of it for granted.
If you have ever stood in the rubble of something you thought was solid—a home, a relationship, a version of yourself you had grown comfortable inside—you know what I am talking about. The ground moves. The walls fall. And then the phone rings, and there is a voice on the other end, and it is enough. It is, in that moment, everything.
