Everything I Did I Did for Happiness

Marco Bardazzi

Description

In May 1999, seven thousand people crowded the basilica in Bologna, Italy to offer a farewell to Enzo Piccinini, a surgeon who died tragically at the age of forty-eight. Who was this doctor who had left an indelible mark on so many lives?

Formed in an era of political activism and violence, the young Enzo made a surprising decision-to pursue a life of faith and healing-thanks in part to his encounter with Father Luigi Giussani and his commitment to the movement of Communion and Liberation (CL).

At the center of his vocation as a doctor was the belief that patients needed to be cared for in all their humanity, including their relationships, and to be helped to face pain and the fear of death-an approach still known as the "Enzo Method."

While maintaining a hectic schedule as a surgeon and teacher, Enzo found time to travel all over Italy, visiting CL communities and moving people with the eloquence of his Christian witness. Designated "Servant of God" by the Church, the diocesan phase of the cause for his canonization has been opened.

Everything I Did I Did for Happiness is an engrossing story that teaches us, as Enzo said, "to put your heart into what you do."

1: Putting [1] Your Heart in[2] to Things

 

2: Sant'Orsola

 

3: The Apartment and the Crypt

 

4: Three Turning Points

 

5: A Fever for Life

 

6: Mass General

 

7: The "Enzo Method"

 

8: Father Giussani

 

9: Patients and Persons

 

10: The Secret Weapon[MOU3] [CP4] : Research

 

11: After Enzo

 

12: "What I Learned"

 

Endnotes

 

Author's Note

 

Publisher's Note

Sujets

• Caregiving
• Religious
• Medical
• Médecine
• Caregiver

Informations

• Publié par: Slant Books
• Date de parution: 15 février 2023
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781639821341
• Langue: English

Extrait

Everything I Did I Did for Happiness
Everything I Did I Did for Happiness
The Life of Enzo Piccinini
Marco Bardazzi
Translated by Matthew Henry
Everything I Did I Did for Happiness
The Life of Enzo Piccinini
Copyright © 2023 Marco Bardazzi. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Slant Books P.O. Box 60295 , Seattle, WA 98160 .
Slant Books
P.O. Box 60295
Seattle, WA 98160
www.slantbooks.org
Cataloguing-in-Publication data:
Names: Bardazzi, Marco.
Title: Everything i did i did for happiness / Marco Bardazzi.
Description: Seattle, WA: Slant Books, 2023
Identifiers: isbn 978-1-63982-133-4 ( hardcover ) |isbn 978-1-63982-132-7 ( paperback ) | isbn 978-1-63982-134-1 ( ebook )
Subjects: LCSH: Medicine­—Religious aspects—Catholic Church | Pastoral medicine—Catholic Church | Surgeons—Biography | Catholics—Italy—Biography
When reality is recognized as event, as originating in the Mystery, this produces an incomparable intensity in your own life.
—Julián Carrón, The Radiance in Your Eyes
1
Putting Your Heart into Things
HIS RIGHT HAND CAME OFF the table, slowly rising. The thumb out, the palm turned up—the gesture of an orchestra conductor. The other hand remained still, close to the microphone, the glass, the bottle of water. It was poised to unite itself to the ascending movement, to underline the fundamental, decisive, indispensable point.
The voice went up along with the hand. He had been speaking for a half hour, and there was no more trace of the tiredness with which he started. In the seats, not a murmur, not a movement among the 150 doctors, nurses, and other medical professionals who filled the conference room at the Cesena Savings Bank. Gone as well was the irritation at the long delay to begin the conference. Many already knew him, others were hearing him for the first time, but everyone understood after five minutes that this was not the usual speech from a representative of the healthcare world. They had been attracted by the title of the meeting: “The Patient. A Person before a Sickness.” Many of them, above all those who had not met him, imagined that they would be listening to a technical analysis followed by some ethical considerations.
If anything, they thought that the speaker might take up and develop the concept that Enzo Biagi had written about that morning on the front page of Corriere della Sera , dedicated to the “absurd struggle between lawyers and doctors,” an editorial titled: “And the Patient Remains in the Middle.” That Friday, March 12 , 1999 , just like every day in Italy for the last few years, everything was reduced to legal battles and ethical considerations. This time the doctors were caught up in it through one of the many investigations of that period. “I do not think that medicine, and journalism, are ‘missions,’” wrote Biagi, “but surely they are careers that are founded on an ethic. Not to lie, to respect facts, and to remember the ‘Hippocratic Oath’ which teaches: to observe the body, to explain the diagnosis, to determine a treatment. And, I add, taking a liberty, to release tax returns.”
Words that incarnated the spirit of the times: Hippocrates and receipts. Just reflections, correct reflections. But for the speaker that evening, there on the stage, these reflections were not enough to understand his work and his life. The right hand had now come up to his eyes, as if he wanted to hold in the air the weight of what he was saying. The left hand was preparing to reinforce the right, bringing the hands together, resembling a gesture of offering. In the course of the day, before arriving at the conference hall, those hands had entered three human bodies. They had worked with the scalpel and the tools of the trade to search the nooks of the digestive system, to inspect, explore, repair. Those hands were guided by almost thirty years of study and experience, by masters from whom he had learned, by travels overseas for training, by techniques developed with colleagues.
That morning, he had operated in his ward at Sant’Orsola Hospital in Bologna, and in the early afternoon, he had performed a second surgery, nothing particularly complex. “Soon after he did a third surgery, a patient that I had directed to him with a cystic lesion on the left lobe of the liver,” recalls his friend Raffaele Bisulli, director at San Lorenzino Clinic in Cesena, remembering that Friday more than twenty years ago. The operation had been prolonged because of the decision to do a surgery that was more radical than they had foreseen. “The surgery went perfectly, three and a half hours of work. In the meantime, it was getting late for the meeting that I had organized at the Cesena Savings Bank. As soon as he finished, we left for Cesena.”
Now he was there to speak about the things that were most important to him, and he could not let tiredness stop him. He had never let tiredness be an obstacle; he did not allow it to impose limits on his need to live reality, all of reality, intensely. The three surgical interventions of that day had been, as always, only a part of the thousand things he had to do. In the morning, he had probably read the editorial by Biagi, just as he had read and analyzed all the other stories of the world that he followed with maniacal attention. He had been updated on the war in Kosovo, which had turned for the worse and seemed now headed toward an open conflict between NATO and Slobodan Milošević. He had discussed this with some friends, as he discussed everything, lighting and waving a Tuscan cigar in the air. And for the whole rest of the day, between one abdominal operation and another, he had called a dozen people, discussing the problems and joys of many for whom he was a point of reference. He had called Fiorisa at home in Modena to know how she and the kids were doing. He had harassed the doctors of his team at Sant’Orsola in order to have updated details on every single patient. He had prepared his notes for a talk he would give the next day in Lecce, on Saturday.
A normal day, like so many others. Everything moving according to this rhythm.
And now, gesturing with his surgeon’s hands, raising his voice, nervously pushing up the sleeves of his shirt, unhooking the leather band of his watch from his left wrist to put it on the table, Enzo Piccinini wanted to say to everyone, one more time, why he lived like this: “The problem is the unity of my life. How can my life remain unified between home and hospital, with my wife, with the people who love me, and with those who hate me? How can all this be unified with the mornings when I go to work and find an environment so tense that it makes me sick just to see it? Or with certain injustices that you can experience from the institution and from your colleagues? How does my life remain unified? This is the most important point for each of us, in times of sickness and in times of health. How can life remain unified; how can it all be one?”
His hands now framed the point he wanted to underline. His voice rose. There was no longer any shadow of tiredness; even the usual furrow in his forehead, between his eyes, was lifted by his passion and by the need to underline the importance of those words that trembled to come out of him: “The unity of life is the most important thing in the world. We cannot be divided. We cannot be fractured. Life is not a mosaic of situations. But how is it possible for life to be united with its irrepressible desire for happiness? Here is the phrase that I will always use, that I will never stop using: life is unified if we put our heart into what we do.”
There, he had said it: “Life is unified if we put our heart into what we do”—a phrase that explained everything he had said before, from when he sat down in the conference hall almost an hour late because he had put his heart into an operation, rather than just doing his job. Moreover, he could say it only in light of the experience he had lived. It could not be a theory. There were behind this phrase innumerable days like that day, lived without wasting a moment. There was the work he had done on himself, without excuses and without ever pulling back. There was the whole road he had traveled, an untiring search that began long before, from his family’s Catholic education, which he left for Marx and the extreme left, and which he then found again. It was a path of life that could have ended in a violent existence in the shadows, as had happened to some of those with whom he had crossed paths. Instead: anything but shadows! He had become a witness in the full light of the sun, armed only with words. There was a whole life behind that phrase. There were the faces of thousands of friends. There were forty-eight years lived without ever letting that heart of which he spoke rest.
There was also the promise and expectation of what would come later. Only one thing Enzo did not know that evening: he only had seventy-five days left to live. Days that were full and intense, like the one that was now ending in Cesena.
If he had known about his end, he would have insisted on the same fundamental points he had spoken about for years and that, in the last months, were charged with an urgency that maybe he did not know how to explain. They were in large part the things about which he had spoken three months earlier at Rimini, to some thousand university students connected to the experience of Communion and Liberation (CL), in a talk that—even this he could not have known—ten, twenty years later would continue to travel the world on YouTube, with subtitles in multiple languages. Now he was speaking about these things to adults in his professional environment. Because what was true—he was convinced of this—is true always, at any age. And in the following anecdote, it clearly