While they were dying, their mother could not be  near them".

                                 Lucia Pisapia Apicella

                                          

"O wind from the Tyrrhenian Sea, you who know my name,

kiss my mother, who is far away, in my place".

This is the story of Lucia Pisapia Apicella, from the town of Cava de' Tirreni, not far from Naples in Italy. She was called the "mother of the dead" soldiers, whose bodies she sought out, identified and buried with dignity, or arranged to have returned to their families. Although a mother herself, she found the time and the means to carry out this extraordinary work of mercy. She found and gave a dignified burial to more than 700 bodies of dead soldiers, all with her own bare hands. The hands of a mother who loved unknown sons, mostly of the enemy army, as her own. That is why she was called "Die Mutter der Toten - Mother of the Dead".

Lucia Pisapia Apicella was born in 1887 in Cava de' Tirreni, a town a few kilometres from Salerno. She was the seventh and last child of Maria Carmela Palumbo and Francesco Pisapia, a timber merchant. Two years after her birth her mother died, and her father remarried Maria Carmela's younger sister, with whom he had five more children. Lucia attended primary school only up to the third grade, which at that time was considered a sufficient level of education for poor people - just enough to know how to read and write.

From an early age she showed great love for those in need, going to the hospital in her town to comfort the sick, paying no heed to family members who feared she might catch tuberculosis, which at that time, before the discovery of penicillin, was an incurable disease: because of this disobedience she was nicknamed "the brigand": "Already a fairly grown girl, whenever I wasn't in church I was at the loom, for fifty metres of cloth the merchant would pay five lire. I don't remember, I can't explain how I fell in love with the hospital, I was there once and never had the heart to leave it again. I brought the patients biscuits and oranges, gave injections, helped the dying; it's an ugly thing when a dying person reaches out in vain for someone's hand on the sheets, I swear it; but the family had their objections to all this!"

At the age of 25, in 1912, Lucia married the fruit merchant Carlo Apicella, with whom she had two sons, Vincenzo and Antonio. Carlo took part in the First World War, in which he was seriously wounded. The war was far from Salerno. Fighting took place in the north, in the border regions, but there were many young men who went off to war and never returned home. Lucia felt deep pity for them, and decided to devote herself to the one thing she could do: pray for them. Lucia cut out from the newspapers the names of fallen young men unknown to her, prayed for them and their loved ones in church, and so became, in a sense, a spiritual mother to all those young men who died for their homeland. She turned to God for their souls and their salvation: "Ah, what anguish, and who would have said that twenty years after that hell we would have the very same thing before our eyes, in Salerno, in Cava, on our mountains, on our shores and in our gardens?".

From 1943, in Cava de' Tirreni, Lucia Pisapia Apicella set out alone to search for, gather, identify and bury the bodies of soldiers who had died on both sides of the front. In this way she found and gave a dignified burial to 700 young men, with various documents and identification tags, at the time when the Germans of the "Hermann Göring" division were retreating, leaving death and destruction behind them, while American B-24s bombarded the German columns without let-up.  Lucia Apicella was shocked by the sight of boys playing football with the exhumed skull of an unknown soldier. In mother Lucia's mind the thought of those young men, left by the roadside, was so strong that one night in a dream, while she was praying in the mountains for the souls of the dead soldiers, she saw "eight uprooted crosses on which stood eight names of soldiers killed in the fighting. As I prayed like that, eight soldiers rose up and begged me to return their remains to their mothers, who never had the chance to see them come home from the war. I asked them 'where they were from', and they answered me 'that they were from every nation'. I fell to the ground. Two of them came to me and lifted me up, then they went away. I wanted to speak with them but they went back into the ground beneath the crosses. In the morning I woke up, all in pain and in tears, asking myself what I had to do for so many dead on every side".

Lucia, who became a Franciscan tertiary  on 4 October 1942 at the friary of the Capuchin brothers in Cava de' Tirreni, devoted herself entirely to the work of giving the dead soldiers a dignified burial: "That dream gave me no peace. So I wrote to the Allied Command, saying: 'You have won, the time of hatred has come to an end, and so I write to you as an ordinary mother. Let me bury the dead bodies with dignity'."

The Allied Command's answer, however, was not positive. Responsibility for burying the bodies belonged to the municipality of Cava de' Tirreni. Mama Lucia did not give up; she appealed to the mayor of Cava, and, through him, to the prefect of Salerno, who assigned her two assistants for the burials. But after a few days the two municipal officials refused the task, considering it too dangerous because of mines and the fear of infection.

From that day on, Lucia, often alone and sometimes accompanied by her cousin Carmela Pisapia Matonti, went to every place where the presence of bodies was reported. The exhumed bones, cleaned of scraps of flesh and washed, she placed in galvanised tin boxes, which Lucia commissioned at her own expense from the village blacksmith. Personal items and documents that might help identify the deceased were carefully catalogued and then handed over to the Commissariat. To those who asked her why she went to such trouble over the enemy, Lucia answered in dialect: "They are always someone's children (sons) - a mother's. While they were dying, their mother could not be  near them".

Despite the difficulties, "the mother of the dead" continued her personal, solitary humanitarian work. Lucia also gathered and reassembled the remains of fallen soldiers, mostly Germans, because their bodies had been left lying on the ground and no one wanted to gather and bury them.  They were the defeated enemy, their dead bodies were the bodies of an enemy, which aroused fear and hatred in people. But this brave, bold and devout woman, a committed Catholic, dressed in black and with a gaunt face, hardened her hands to dig them out of the ground, gather the bodies and return the bones of those young men to their families.

In Cava de' Tirreni, mother Lucia was the only one who buried the bodies of dead soldiers. To find the money needed for what had now become her mission, she spent the family's scant finances and did not shrink from stripping the wool from mattresses, the pride and dowry of women in southern Italy, since the poor themselves slept on "great sacks" filled with dry corn husks. The burial boxes were kept in the little church of Santa Maria della Pietà, known as San Giacomo, where Lucia spent a great deal of time praying and weeping for those poor young men who had died so cruelly and so young, and whom she regarded as her adopted children. One of her sons testifies: "Mother would get up early in the morning and walk on foot from place to place, over the mountain, searching mostly alone; for hours and hours she dug with her bare hands in places where she thought she would find the bodies of dead soldiers. She put all her resources into that work, and she herself always lived modestly to the end, never asking much for herself".

Pope Pius XII learned of what was happening in Cava de' Tirreni and awarded mother Lucia a precious silver medal. In September 1951, on the occasion of a meeting with the parents of the German corporal Joseph Wagner, who had fallen on the battlefield and been found on a mountain ledge, mother Lucia was decorated with the Grand Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany. Radio Stuttgart declared that "a people that could give the world mother Lucia deserves all our love, all our gratitude and all the honour we can bestow on anyone". On that occasion she went to the home of Adam and Karoline Wagner, the parents of corporal Josef, to return to them the ring, cigarette case and watch of their son, who had fallen in battle at the age of 22, and so was able to share in the grief of those parents. She met a mother who had lost 4 children in the war: "The two of us, embracing, wept together for those lost lives. That was, for me, the most harrowing experience of my life". That is why she kept repeating: " Never again war! War brings only evil". In 1959 Lucia Apicella received an award from the President of the Italian Republic as a citizen of merit, and the city of Salerno proclaimed her an honorary citizen: "I never wanted any reward for what I did. I simply followed God's will".

Mother Lucia would die at the age of 95, in 1982, but throughout her life she never ceased to teach young people that love knows no boundaries, and that mercy does not stop short at ideologies. On hearing the news of her death, the then President Sandro Pertini wrote to the mayor of Cava de' Tirreni: "The passing of mother Lucia is painfully felt by those who recognise love and solidarity as fundamental values for the building up of humanity". She always wore black, in mourning for her many "own" fallen soldier-sons.

Burying the dead is a duty we owe to the departed, but above all to ourselves, those who remain. It is not merely an act of mercy and ultimate dignity towards that mortal body, it is not merely paying honour to the remains through a "dignified burial" and giving loved ones a gravestone. It is far more than writing the word "end" on a cold marble slab. It is not the past that we bury and try to bury, however painful the loss of a loved one may be and however much emptiness it leaves in our chest, an emptiness we would wish to be rid of as soon as possible . That gravestone is a way of paying homage to everything that remains to us: memories, lessons, smiles, even mistakes. In that ending we read a new possibility, not only for those who believe that we shall rise again from that dust, not only for those who know that death is merely a necessary passage to true life, but also for those who see meaning only in it, in the earthly end itself of a life's story. And then that grave reminds us of love, goodness, joy, quarrels and all that we could not always understand, appreciate, forgive, or know about that person, along this journey of life. In the final and silent act of mercy of this woman there is a universal feeling that, like death, unites us and cannot leave us indifferent.

On a stone that Mama Lucia found on Monte San Liberatore was engraved: "O wind from the Tyrrhenian Sea, you who know my name, kiss my mother, who is far away, in my place".