Last week, I saw something we normally cannot see.
And suddenly, everything made sense.

18/09/26 
(First draft dated March 26, 2026)

Valentina Monari

My great-aunt passed away last week.

Someone dear, kind and loving, whom I have always remembered with affection, ever since we used to spend time with her as children, together with my grandmother.

At the funeral, her three children — my mother’s cousins — remembered her as the creator of a rock-solid home.

A pillar in their lives. A working mother, and a safe harbor for her children.
Especially after her husband passed away prematurely, when the eldest of the three was only 16.

But they also remembered her as the creator of an elastic home — a home capable of stretching to welcome every relative, friend or acquaintance who showed up at her door, with a meal that somehow was always enough for everyone.

My mother used to tell me that, just to make room for all them little cousins, she would put two children to sleep in the same bed: one with their head at one end, the other at the opposite end.

Cramped, but happy to be together.

Then, during the funeral, the priest said something that stopped me in my tracks:

“You can take many actions, walk many paths… but the good you do lasts forever.”

Suddenly, I had direct evidence.

It was all there, right in front of my eyes.

Not only in her three children.
In her grandchildren, her cousins, my children — her great-grandchildren.

And in that entire crowd of friends, acquaintances and former students (she had been a teacher) gathered to celebrate her life.

Suddenly, I could see little flames of love flickering inside every person in that church.

I carried one too.
Memories of the love I had received from her as a child: sharing a snack on the sofa under a checked blanket, playing in the garden among the fruit trees. Memories, after all, are nothing more than the accessible image of an emotion that continues to live inside us.

It was all so evident in front of me.

That whole group of people now looked like a garden in bloom — cornflowers, poppies, buttercups, daisies… — that had grown, many years earlier, from a single seed.

A seed she had planted in someone, perhaps without even realizing it.

That person had carried it with them.

And one day, somewhere else, with someone else, that seed became another act of kindness, another open door, another child welcomed in, another person loved.

One becoming many. Many, many more.

A domino effect.
Rippling outward.

I looked around: the seed had gone on.
From one person to another.
From one generation to another.

And suddenly, I closed the circle on a thought that had been inside me for some time:

“Is it really worth giving so much goodness, so much love, when sometimes we see subtlety, inflated egos and arrogance winning?”

Now, from above, I had seen another story.

Up close, it can seem as though evil — that state of scarcity of inner resources — prevails.
Sometimes, it even seems to produce results faster.
And that unsettles us, creating uncertainty.

The hardest part, the problem with giving, is that you can rarely predict how far it will go.
Almost never can you pre-see what will happen next.

But in that moment, it became clear to me: sometimes we think evil has won simply because we are looking too soon, before its time. We are not looking at the end of the story.

The love you give enters people. It nourishes them and continues to expand through them, reaching people you may never meet. It creates a different reality.
Long after you have made an act of love, someone may still be there, gathering its fruits.

That day in the church, looking at all those people, I had the feeling that I was seeing something completed that we normally cannot see:

The love you give always comes back. And above all, it goes on — beyond you.

“The good you do lasts forever.”

Some things sound like sayings until they become unmistakably evident.