THE RENEGADE CONTESSA For Donatella Colonna Almost 10 years ago, my friend Donatella phoned me from Italy to ask if I would help her die. She was nearing 80, was weary of what had been a hard life and wished to move on. I listened closely and made suggestions, promised to send a few books and told her what she had meant to me in the years we had known each other, both in Italy and in the US. We laughed some, cried some and said a fond farewell. The silence for the next years told me she had succeeded, so I burned a candle for her at my altar and bowed deeply to one of the most indomitable women I had ever known. Then this morning, to my shock, she called! I knew her voice immediately, but my head spun with the impossibility of it. She laughed and said, “I’m still here. Ninety-two now. But this time I really mean it - and I’ve still got all my marbles!” Donatella, whether she wishes to be or not, is a survivor, having lived through wars, imprisonment, starvation, family disasters, crippling illness, disappointment and desperate fear. When I first met her she was 70, all 6 feet of her handsomely elegant with creamy skin and piercing blue eyes above her aristocratic Roman nose. I was smitten at first sight. My first glimpse of her was when we arrived that first night, backlit in the doorway of her 15th century villa, Montecerno, which sits on a forested hilltop inland from the Adriatic Sea near Ancona, surrounded by the farms and vineyards that were once part of the family estate. Her brother lost the holdings one by one to pay off gambling debts, but died in time for her to save the villa itself, which she was now committed to turning into a center for sound healing. That was why I was there, along with 4 other healers, to spend several weeks practicing our techniques with her and discussing how she might create the center. She told us the villa sat on a power spot, a site that had been sacred to the Romans, to the Etruscans before them, and to the Picheny before them, and held strong healing energies. I certainly felt something right away, but the energies were heavy and sorrowful, as if restless ghosts were walking the grounds and inhabiting the turrets. That first night I was almost too spooked to sleep. One afternoon during our stay, Donatella and I were shelling peas on the loggia after a session in the chapel where I had sung beneath the resonant cupola before placing my hands on her, using the vibrations that continued to pulse in and around us. The chapel was built of old stone and newer stone, and she told me it had been bombed during the war and restored later by her father. Then she spoke of the war when the villa had been occupied by the Germans, and her whole family placed under house arrest, right there in the chapel. The salon below and the library had been turned into living quarters for high officers and a hospital for their soldiers. The family had been “huddled like dogs” near the vestry during the bombing of the chapel, but all survived, she told me. She spoke of the young wounded German soldiers brought to the house, “just babies!” she whispered with tears brimming her eyes. “Many are still here, buried in the garden,” she told me. “I still hear them - they walk in the night. They keep me company during the long winters when nobody comes up here to visit.” “But Italy,” she said sadly on the phone this morning, “it has lost its soul. It is a sorry place – you don’t want to come back here. The culture is dying, the countryside is destroyed, the economy cannot last. I just sit here in the old walls, crumbling away with them.” Then she laughed, and we cried. This Contessa has lived through nightmares unimaginable, and survived. She has had her body and her soul wounded many times over, losing lovers and children, parents and friends in unspeakable ways, but she is still all here. Hurt, but not broken, the last vestige of an aristocratic family whose response to her ideas and her interests, her politics and her preferences, was, “We are not amused…” But I am amused, and heartened by her feisty spirit and laughter, her wild ideas and willingness to buck a system that gave her privilege and power she chose instead to use unselfishly for healing and compassion. This is for you, Donatella, for your ageless beauty both inside and out, for your intelligence and courage and grace. I am grateful to have known you in this life, and hope we meet again wherever you are going. My love goes with you, and our last laugh, mixed with my tears. Can you hear me? For now farewell, my friend.
Posted on: Sun, 25 Aug 2013 23:28:42 +0000
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