TERMOLI. Composed and deep pain, the one that Professor Marcella Stumpo brought to her face. A month that speaks for itself, the last one spent by the mayoral candidate of the Left Network with the Termoli Bene Comune list, because it is divided between electoral commitments and the presence of her alongside her Eduardo Sassi, with whom she has accompanied herself in the last 44 years old.
The words she spoke last Saturday, at the funeral ceremony of her husband, who ascended to heaven at the age of 84, deeply affected us, we propose them again so that they can be shared by readers, but not before thanking Professor Stumpo once again for having participated in the discussion public of last June 2nd, despite the period of personal suffering; just as we thank you for giving us the text of your speech, shortly after the funeral celebration at the Church of the Sacred Heart.
THE MEMORY
“This is why we love our toga; for this reason we would like that, when the day comes, this black rag was placed on our coffin, which we are fond of because we know that it has served to dry some tears, to lift some unjustly humiliated faces, to repress some abuse; and above all to revive in human hearts the faith in victorious justice, without which life does not deserve to be lived”. Piero Calamandrei.
With this belief in his heart Eduardo honored his profession, always accompanying it with the awareness that one cannot be happy alone, and that any injustice committed against anyone in any part of the world should be felt as one’s own.
He was a lawyer by mission, humanity, love, and in his 52 years of courtrooms he brought an instinctive closeness to pain and human weaknesses. We found and loved each other also for this common and deep-rooted moral adherence to the need to put a stop to social injustices, to the wickedness of a system of production and exploitation of the last against which we reacted in the same way, but he with the serene calm that was own, me with my impetuous impulsiveness often much less effective.
Different yet the same, we have walked together for 44 years; not in an idyll, stumbling and arguing, laughing and bickering, but with one heart and with clasped hands; there was no moment in which I felt alone, until the illness crushed him and I had to become his support and strength: that strength that was slowly disappearing in him and that I had to find to accompany him.
I am proud to have shared my life with him, proud of his moral and material honesty, of his unalterable generosity, of his inability to treat someone badly, to refuse to listen, to close his heart to the needs of the least. What in me is often ineffective anger against injustices in him was the serene awareness of having to do everything he could to help everyone.
He loved and served his city and his region, seeing its problems and weaknesses clearly, but always feeling the duty to participate in building its future.
He lived for his toga, which he felt was a social mission, for his family and for society; our children were joy for him, hope for the future, unshakable love. And the little one who bears his name promises joy and hope that he was unable to fully enjoy.
He accompanied me in all the struggles I threw myself into, ready to console myself for the many defeats, accepting the time I took away from the family as a necessity to make me feel alive.
He suffered a lot without deserving it, and this last month has destroyed him and us who loved him. An ordeal that he saw us helpless, which was hard to go through.
We who were lucky enough to have him with us every day cannot let him go without tears. Dust to dust, ashes to ashes, says the Bible: but nothing will reduce to ashes the perennial monument that every moment of his life built in our hearts. Because Eduardo testified every day that love, in all its forms and for any ideal, does not die. It just transforms.
