October 15, 2018
Until last year, I worked with a team of colleagues facilitating the management of family businesses — harmonising the business and family visions, building leadership, fostering the growth of the people inside. Then I felt compelled to return to Abruzzo, to be closer to my family. It was a difficult decision that required multiple changes. And now, at the start of 2018, life has presented me with something that is both a crisis and a voyage of deep awareness — through the same themes I have spent years working with professionally, except that this time it also involves my family, with total emotional participation.
There is no distance between the sociologist and the daughter. Not anymore.
February 7, 2018
I get off the bus in L’Aquila on my way back from Rome. It is 11:40 pm and my sister is waiting for me in her car. The plan is to go to Vittorito together; the next morning she will take me to catch the bus back to work in Rome. I had been commuting for over four months.
I was pleased to see her. And uneasy — something I could not name, a weight that had arrived before any words had.
Once in the car, we drove toward home through the cool, starry night. Then came the moment I had somehow already been dreading. My sister said it plainly: “Nancy, Dad has bone cancer.”
From Family Business to Family Care, I am an informal caregiver for the love of my family system
I was 49 years old. Divorced—a separation that had been consensual but painful, as the end of a love story always is, especially when two people are also parenting. We managed to achieve joint custody of Davide, at a time when joint custody in Italy was still experimental, not yet law. It would only become official practice in February 2006, with the entry into force of Law No. 54. We had chosen it before it had a name, because it was the right thing for our son. That choice had cost something. Everything worth choosing costs something.
In the years since, I had built my own resilience through a decade of economic transition—never stopping, never giving up, using every skill I had, and acquiring new ones as needed. I had made a life, on my own terms, one careful decision at a time.
And now this.
My father had bone cancer. Pain was not an interruption to his days — it was the ground he lived on. Which meant that every moment of joy, every moment of clarity, every conversation was a conquest. I understood this from the beginning. I also understood that someone needed to be there, and that someone was me.
I modified the family house so that my parents could be together as a couple and a wheelchair could pass through every doorway. I left my job in Rome—no longer viable at that distance.
My father needed help 24/7. I became, without any certificate or training program, an informal caregiver. A mason, a painter, an electrician, and an interior decorator—to prepare the house. A nurse—to manage the routine of prescriptions, injections, and care. An administrator—to handle the bureaucratic labyrinth of home care agencies, hospital appointments, chemotherapy schedules, ambulance bookings, and disability aids. A companion—for the hours that had no category.
I never knew how the day or night would turn out. My father’s condition changed constantly, and each change required me to learn something new, quickly, without the luxury of error.
I don’t have permission to be unwell. That sentence lived inside me every day of those years—unspoken, non-negotiable, simply true. I was grateful for my awareness of family dynamics, for the coaching tools I could bring to the situation, and for the capacity to find moments of recharge in the middle of the storm. But I thought constantly of the people facing all of this without those tools—the caregivers who arrive at their parents’ bedsides without any professional framework for understanding what is happening to the family system, who absorb everything alone, who pay a cost that is never counted in any health budget anywhere.
To fight this battle—and it was a battle, laden with moments both tragic and absurdly comic—I shaved my head like a Marine. And I trained as a Laughter Yoga teacher, a discipline that claims the ability to laugh without cause. That was a perfect fit for my situation. Laughter, I had always known, was a travel companion. What I learned then was that it could also be a lifeline.
“It Depends”
There is a phrase I learned from Luca Marcolin, a colleague from my Family Business years — a person I hold with great affection. His answer to almost any complex question is “It depends.”
Not as evasion. As wisdom. As the recognition that the same event, the same diagnosis, the same loss, can be the beginning of something or the end of something—depending on what you bring to it, what you are willing to see, and what you refuse to let it take from you.
So: my father’s illness. Was it the start or the end?
It depends.
As I sit in my meditation room—eyes closed, heart full of something I can only call gratitude, even now, even for this—I see all the gifts of awareness that this passage brought me, alongside the tiredness and the anguish and the dread of walking a tightrope suspended over the unknown. The incense surrounds me. The quiet holds me.
My father chose, through bone cancer pain, to laugh when he could. Every moment of joy was a conquest. He taught me that—not in words, but in the daily act of choosing to be present despite everything that was trying to pull him away.
I carry that with me. Into every room I enter. Into every person I try to support who is standing where I stood—alone in a house that has been reorganised around illness, learning to give injections, not having permission to be unwell.
If that is you, right now—I see you. What you are doing has no official title and no adequate compensation and very little recognition. And it is one of the most profound acts of love a human being can perform.
It is not the end. It depends.
