By Natalia Sousa

Gino passed away.

Gino belonged to a group of people who should never die, you know? He was the kind of person we could seat to talk for five minutes and we talked about Brazil, music, History, entertainment, movies and politics. We got to know so much about life. And the capacity of a meeting, because every time we got to meet him, we would, certainly, feel much better. Questioning, perceptive, he experienced the world with his eyes. Researching, observing and analyzing and then trying to understand and finally sharing. But there was Always the question: How does he know so much? my sister asked me curious. I didn’t know. I was sure of one thing, that he carried a lot about the world inside him. And I loved to see things from his perspective. I thought he was amazing.

Not only for this but especially because he was that kind of people who mixes sensitivity and intelligence. I remember when we were waiting to board to Guarapari. It was Friday afternoon and the flow of people was intense. Gino was talking to his dado n the phone and I looked at a white hair old lady who ate an apple. Lady. Something about her enchanted me, maybe the careful way she took the fruit. A lot of people around. Gatherings, farewells, children running. I could be distracted with something.  But once off the phone, he pulled me into a hug and said, ” ok…you’re already trying to make friends with the old lady, right, honey?” Of course it was this. He knew. He saw my naked soul.

It was filled with that enchantment that I introduced him as a boyfriend. With the joy of having discovered that love is a big house where we fit entirely. A place where we go with our attempts to find an extended arm, a strategy and a path. A fresh wind for muffled heart days. Gino was like this, someone who loved me exactly the way I was. And seeing myself through his eyes, I learned to love myself as well. Our life was made of this eternal and renewable gratitude. It was made of the certainty of having found a place in the world. The serenity of knowing that on the best and worst roads along life, we would be hand in hand.

For all this I wanted him to be eternal but he wasn’t

Gino passed away

Gino was victim of a silent and rare kind of cancer at the age of 32.

Too soon.

I was still alive. Much smaller than his death. I kept breathing. Overwhelmed by the magnitude he represented. Lost between what he had been or could have been and what he would never be. I was desperate and tried to find a door that wasn’t there anymore and wouldn’t open again; in spite of all my attempts to promise God and tell myself absurd lies. Gino would never return.

I started to write about this despair. I wrote to find the way. I wrote because his death was greater than my own life. I wrote in order not to die too. I wrote because I felt pain; fear, because I missed him. I felt empty and a t the same time, drowning. I became ink. I poured the immensity of being loved by someone who could see me entirely and never stepped back; in each letter. I grieved because I needed desperately to find space to remember how it was to be my size in someone’s heart. Without having to belittle or stretch myself out.

I wrote as if I was drawing the steps I needed to take the next day, as if I was learning the way again. And by doing this, I wanted to present Gino to the whole world. I wanted my words to be the year and the time he didn’t have in order to be admired. I thought they could be the life he missed. I wrote.

Nowadays I publish. And I share it as if I was taking this way again. As if coming back was like walking a little more. As if looking at the pieces I left behind, I could reconstruct myself, reborn and remember: I would go through grieving once again to experience life by his side. I would do it. As many times as I could. And only thinking about this impossibility, my heart feels happy. And I would do it because if pain is immeasurable, love … love, my friends, is even more.

Will you give me some good news?

In September it will be a year of his death and this month that would be painful, I decided, even before it came, that the gratitude for Gino’s life came first. And it was moved by this that I created the blog and scattered letters by the city – Sao Paulo.

In these letters, I ask people to share with me one good thing that has happened in recent times. It can be discovering a new flavor of ice cream, a wedding invitation, a job promotion, and a nice experience. The idea is only fulfilled collectively, but it has a very personal meaning: having reasons to thank during these thirty days. So, it is like this from gratitude to gratitude, I’m sure a new spring will bloom in my heart.

If you did not find a colorful envelope, but you are here, this is my invitation to you: write on your Facebook and Instagram good news with the hash tags: #tuavidaemmim #umanoticiaboa and it will come to me.

I learned a few things in recent years. Two of them I would like to share and finish this post: the first is that people can always give a new meaning to pain. And the second is that God is very good all the time. I’m sure about that, because Gino lived. And that was – undeniably – wonderful.

Natália is a journalist from São Paulo.

“At the age of 29, after losing my mother and my fiancé I understood: Nothing in life is only bad. Pain can make us reach some strengths that no joy is capable of.”

She writes the blog Tua vida em mim  and the  Facebook Fanpage with the same name.

Go give her some good news