“My son, the love I didn't have time to tell him”: Marco Termenana talks about Giuseppe, who died as a hikikomori

There are pains that don’t make a sound, yet they scream every day. They are the ones that live in empty rooms, in gestures that are no longer made, in words that were not able to be said in time. Marco Termenana knows them well. He is the father of Giuseppe , the son that the world was unable to listen to, who felt trapped in a body that did not belong to him, in a society deaf to his cry. One night in March 2014, Giuseppe – or perhaps Noemi – opened the window of his room and let everything go. Life, dreams, the wait to finally be seen for what he was.

His story now also arrives in Cusano Milanino, on Wednesday 21 May in the Council Chamber “Walter Tobagi”. But it will not only be a book presentation, it will be a collective moment of awareness, a pause in the din of life to listen — really — to what it means not to be accepted for who you are. The meeting is being promoted by the Municipal Administration, which has chosen to commemorate the International Day against Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia by hosting Marco Termenana and his testimony.

"The book was brought to my attention by a citizen, and after reading it I understood that it wasn't just a story: it was an open wound. And it was our duty to welcome it - explains Councilor Francesca Agosti -. There are too many Giuseppes around us. Too many kids who shut themselves away in silence out of fear, out of shame, because the world still struggles to accept what is different. But different from what, then? From the idea of ​​normality of those who don't want to see?" Councilor Lidia Arduino also strongly wanted this event: "Culture is not just theater and literature. It is also empathy, it is putting emotions, words, uncomfortable truths into circulation. This event is a political act in the highest sense: an invitation to break down the walls of prejudice" . On stage, together with Termenana, there will be journalist Fabio Benati, who has been at his side for years in presentations. But the voice that will resonate the loudest will be that of Giuseppe. Through the pages of the book “My son. The love I didn’t have time to tell him” , the author recounts the tragedy he experienced, the failed metamorphosis, the raw and living pain of someone who questions himself every day about what he could have done, said, understood. “They often tell me I’m brave – Termenana said – but I only wrote to survive. To look for my son in the darkness of my pain. Writing has become my way of staying alive. If my story can be useful to someone, then this absurd death will have had at least some meaning”. In the book, but above all in the face of a father who does not stop trying to contact his lost son, there is the portrait of a society still unprepared to welcome the complexity of identity. A society that too often ignores, postpones, denies. And so Giuseppe became a hikikomori, one of those boys who choose invisibility as their only form of defense. But Marco's voice breaks that silence, with a disarming force, telling of a love that was unable to become words in time, but that today is urgent. Even more, a battle.

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