Women's Portraits

Antonella Deriu

She turned her pain into resource for the benefit of her neighbour

Antonella Deriu was born in 1936 in Bosa, a small town in central Sardinia, but she spends most of her life in a village not far from Macomer. Although widow, she is able to react positively to adversity. Antonella lives alone in a big house full of memories and objects coming from her humanitarian travels in far-off countries. She enjoys good health and satisfying economic and social conditions, but she often suffers from loneliness and melancholy.

The Years Of Youth

Although in the period of World War II, Antonella spends serenely her childhood in a close-knit family of five people: parents and three children. As a child she has no idea of what growing up  means. She likes studying, but she is forced to interrupt her studies at the 2nd year of high school, because they need her at home. However, she can devote herself to some activities like embroidering and attending Catholic Action, which owes her human and religious personal training. In her life, it has always been a great help. At the age of 23, she meets and marries her ideal man: a man who makes her happy and satisfied. After one year Luisa, her first and only daughter, was born. She makes her very beautiful things: fine crochet, knitted and filet works, a valuable trousseau, thinking of her daughter’s future as a wife and mother. She feels that her life is really full, though, for about 15 years, she must leave Bosa and settle in other small towns in Sardinia for the sake of her husband's work.

Her Maturity

Her daughter grows up, studies and takes a degree in medicine. Luisa becomes a pediatrician, dividing her commitments between work and volunteering in the Italian Red Cross, which is the regional inspector and on behalf of which she also goes to war zones to treat children. In 2004, four days after a sudden return from Iraq on a military plane, Luisa suddenly dies.
Antonella, widow only three years earlier, is totally dejected. 

Her Most Difficult Moment

The most difficult moments in Antonella’s life are definitely those subsequent her seventy-four husband’s death, first, and her dearest daughter, later.

As a matter of fact, after her husband’s death, it is her daughter Luisa, exceptional woman, who helps Antonella to get out of apathy, feeling close all Luisa’s affection. It is she who encourages her mother, giving her the right spurs to move forward.

Where can a woman find the strength to face the ordeal of losing her young and only child? Once again, Antonella finds just in her dead daughter the purpose of her existence. The knowledge that Luisa would not have seen her mother living in isolation and despair pushes Antonella to continue the work of voluntary service and social engagement in which she lavished all her energy, in order to alleviate the sufferings of children in the Third World. So that Antonella decides to complete her daughter’s activity.

In moments of absolute suffering, Antonella finds help, support and consolation in her great religious faith and in the proximity of a lot of her daughter’s friends, who appreciated Luisa’s great personal and professional endowments.

Her Present

Antonella lives in everlasting memory of her daughter, still present in every corner of the house through photographs, children's drawings dedicated to her, certificates of merit and esteem, personal items. Through the computer, Antonella reviews the images that were most dear to Luisa and visits the sites that talk about her and her work in far-off places, tormented by war or poverty. Those images are her daily fuel. It is what she needs to carry out the important commitments she made in the name of Luisa and of the Association dedicated to her (Luisa Monti Onlus), founded by some friends of the young girl. Antonella and other volunteers of the Association go to the Philippines every year for one month. They also go, for one month, to Kenya and Tanzania in order to bring help and to deliver funds and collected materials (food, medicines, clothing, everyday objects). They are two months of great hardship and difficulty, she faces willingly always supported by the ideals that guide her life. She has already prepared the ticket for the next departure to Tanzania.
She keeps on following her daughter's voluntary service, considering this decision an absolute positive experience and the best way to transform such a sad and painful personal event into a resource for the benefit of the others.

Antonella also collaborates with the University of the Third Age of Bosa and the diocesan Catholic Action.

Anna Rossini, Sara Deiola