The summer before my senior year of high school, Pete, a classmate of mine, was killed in a car accident. We were not friends—in fact, I don’t think he and I exchanged more than a few words in three years. But he was in my homeroom, and high school always seemed like a mandatory prison sentence for me, so I felt like he and I were in a chain gang. Misery will always choose company. His death hit me hard for reasons I still can’t explain.
It was my first experience in facing the death of a fellow young person. I remember the first day back in the fall looking at his unoccupied desk at the back of the classroom. It seemed huge to me—like the emptiness had weight. Pete was only 17 when he died, and he will forever stay at that age for those of us who walked with him for a time: no longer a child, not quite an adult. It’s hard for me to think about any youth who dies young without considering their unrealized potential: children they will never have, discoveries that will never be made. It always feels like a song that ended too early.
When Carlo Acutis first came onto our radars, my first impression was not jubilation that millennials finally would have a saint to call their own. I wasn’t even that impressed with what he accomplished online. I was struck by how young he was.
At 15, we know so little of the world at large—only our immediate one of school, friends, and budding adulthood. He never had the chance to enjoy it. I think of Antonia, Carlo’s mother, who carried, birthed, raised, and buried this remarkable young man who has won the hearts of Catholics worldwide. The Church would gain a saint, but his mother lost a child. My first reaction is to acknowledge her grief, to pray for a wound that will never heal.
And while I remember Carlo Acutis in my prayers, I always try and remember his mother, Antonia, who infused in her son a lifetime of love in a brief time. I think of parents of children who die young and the siblings they leave behind. I pray any lingering emptiness be filled with light and with grace. And I say a prayer for those of us with aged bodies who still have the prayer lives of little children. They have so much to teach us.
