“Surviving the death of a child is unnatural. Anyone who says that pain passes or decreases is a liar, it is renewed every day, indeed, it exacerbates ».
Alberto Deiana's mind goes back exactly nineteen years. To that February 29, 2004, when the life of his daughter Elisa is interrupted after returning from a party spent with friends. It's Sunday night, it's raining. The car skids on the slippery asphalt of via Torricelli. A spin, the impact on the light pole, the tailgate opens and the body of his little girl flies out of the car.
It's seven o'clock when he and his wife Paola notice that empty bed. No call informing them of what happened. They rush to the Brotzu, Elisa is under the knife. The prayers and the two operations to which she is subjected are not enough: the hoped-for miracle does not take place on the fifth floor of the hospital in via Peretti. Elisa, who dreamed of becoming a notary, died five days later, before having taken the private law exam she had already prepared.
That endless Sunday there is someone else who prays and invokes a new possibility. They don't need to think about it, dad Alberto and mom Paola, they give their consent to organ harvesting. Heart, kidneys, liver.
"Knowing that Elisa's death was not totally useless because she saved four other people is life that goes beyond life." Elisa had decided it, just under a week before, when on the way from home to the university they spoke on the radio about the Cessna tragedy.
"We came to talk about donations and wondered why people were indifferent," recalls Alberto. You can save other lives, he told me. I interrupted her, I realized it was absurd, she was leaving me a will», observes Alberto. On August 1, 2004, her parents turned into reality one of those dreams that Elisa didn't have time to realize.
«I have everything, but I want to have a house where I can host people who don't have a home, because I think I'm doing little for them. I don't want a large swimming pool, but I would always like to help people», he said in May 1992. On August 1, 2004, his twenty-first birthday, father Alberto and mother Paola legally founded the Elisa Deiana association.
On 16 June 2018 they inaugurate Casa di Elisa, in Soleminis, a reception house, which since its opening has hosted over four thousand transplants and accompanying family members free of charge. The last great work of a girl who dreamed of becoming a notary and was always thinking of others.