"In 24 hours my world fell apart": Domenico's father's grief

Naples – There's a date Antonio Caliendo can't get out of his head: the evening between December 22nd and 23rd, 2025. Domenico enters the hospital, Monaldi, and the family begins a breathless race.

But those hours brought with them another wound, even more cruel because it came along with the first: "That morning my father Antonio passed away. And a few hours later we discovered my son's serious illness. In 24 hours my world fell apart."

He tells the Corriere della Sera story with the voice of someone who, since that day, has never truly returned to his old life. "I'm sick, I can't even go to work anymore; I'm a bricklayer," he says. Domenico suffered from dilated cardiomyopathy. A diagnosis that, in a matter of minutes, transforms a child into a patient and a home into a waiting room.

“I trusted the doctors. But I felt it.”

Antonio and Patrizia try to hold on to one thing: hope. "We parents still carried so much hope in our hearts, and so we entrusted ourselves completely to the doctors at Monaldi," explains their father, making it clear, however, that he doesn't want to tar everyone with the same brush: "Not everyone in that hospital is bad; there are also many good people."

Yet, amidst the procedures, consultations, and difficult words, a worry grows within him. A restlessness he can't explain but feels like a burden. It's in this climate that his reference to Professor Oppido also fits in: "Now I don't want to see him even from afar. The judiciary will clarify things."

The heart found, the wait and that premonition near the machine

News arrives that could change everything: Domenico has a new heart. The family returns to the hospital. Antonio remembers a simple, almost banal, and therefore devastating moment: a moment of solitude, away from hospital gowns and corridors, near a soda machine.

“We found ourselves alone for a moment, Domenico, my friend Lello, and I, who had accompanied us,” he recounts. And in that moment, a sentence escaped him that now sounds like a prophecy: “Lello, I feel something strange inside me. Let's go. I'm taking my son home!” His friend stopped him: “Are you kidding, Antò? A new life begins tomorrow for him.”

Antonio, however, confesses that his mind wasn't on the surgery, nor on the statistics: it was on normality. "I kept thinking only of the games Domenico and I used to play together on the big bed at home." This is where the most human part of the story lies: the nostalgia for a simple life, while everything around him becomes enormous, technical, irreversible.

“I've seen incredible photos”: the journey to capture the heart

The story also highlights a moment that left its mark on him: the recovery of the organ. "I've seen incredible photos: were those who left Naples to go to Bolzano to get the heart with that refrigerator out of their minds?" he says, describing images that remain hard for him to bear. And he adds the phrase that recurs like a bitter refrain: "I knew it was going to end badly."

The silence after New Year's Eve: "The doctors disappeared"

Then comes another breaking point: the aftermath. Not a specific gesture, but an absence. "I realized things had gone badly because after New Year's Eve, all the doctors disappeared; no one came to tell us anything," he says. It's a silence that, for a father, weighs as much as a diagnosis: because when no one speaks, fear begins to complete the sentences on its own.

In those days, he admits, the tension consumed him. "I was very nervous," and three days before his son's death, he says he had "a nasty argument with the security guards." The same guards who, last Saturday, he says, later embraced him "sincerely" in the hospital, after Domenico was no longer there.

Patrizia and the latest outfit: "Our brave little man"

His mother, Patrizia, gives a different name to the pain. She says that Domenico "has become a little angel." And she describes a gesture that speaks louder than words: she bought him a little suit "for his last trip," "with a tie and a flat cap on his head, just like when he went out with his grandfather Antonio."

For the family, he wasn't just a sick child: he was "our brave little man." And now, his father says, that child seems to be there, somehow: "I feel like he's sending us the strength to carry on, to take care of ourselves and his little brother and sister."

The promise: “You will have justice”

Amid the rubble, Antonio tries only one thing: keep a promise. He says that on Saturday morning, before Domenico died, he spoke to him as one would a fighter, not a patient: "My son, I will miss you, but I am like you, a fighter. And you will have justice."

And while the judiciary must determine any responsibility, the family has announced—along with lawyer Francesco Petruzzi—the creation of a foundation dedicated to Domenico. "It will help suffering children," Antonio explains. "It's not right for them to die the way my son did."