Heartrending message from Spanish conductor, 41, dying of Covid in India

Heartrending message from Spanish conductor, 41, dying of Covid in India

News

norman lebrecht

May 20, 2021

Santiago Lusardi Girelli, conductor of the Goa University choir, has died there in hospital of Coronavirus

His death had been called ‘an unbelievable loss for Goa’ after he raised choir singing to international standard while working as a visiting research professor.

Argentine by birth, Girelli was based in Seville, Spain.

This was his last message, sent on May 1:
I have been hospitalized for Covid for 12 days, with heavy pneumonia, in a small hospital in South Goa, India.
As you imagine it has not been easy, loneliness, uncertainties, pains and daily struggle to breathe, and all of which witnessing how this country I love so much is suffering from the pains of this pandemic, too has done it of this a very hard experience.
And here I am, one more, like so many times in my life, fighting in chaos, sustained thanks to the love of so many who love me and accompany me and embody with me this transition, I know many cry and suffer with me, know that the universe will pay you for your compassion with more than me with my life.
I have always believed that we are because we have been loved freely from birth, and it is precisely that love that has built us and prepared to cope with the little Easter of our life.
With so much that life has always given me, how much they have loved me, and the immeasurable gestures of love, gifts, people, and the immense tenderness that I have received in my life I can not but give thanks, and recognize that I have the heart full of gratitude to fight this battle and the one to come, because even though it hurts, and even though I’m blowing a gale in my lungs, I’m here on warpath, if, weak, but without fear of fighting!!!

 

Comments

  • Hayne says:

    This is so tragic as it could easily have been avoided with treatment. The Indian government hadn’t yet approved certain drugs. Immensely sad.

  • John Borstlap says:

    Deeply moving and disturbing.

    At the moment, India is in a cauldron of a health crisis, partly due to incompetent government. Incredible….

    • CRWang says:

      …And let’s not forget the Chinese Communist Party, which caused all of this misery in the first place.

    • Ashu says:

      [At the moment, India is in a cauldron of a health crisis, partly due to incompetent government.]

      Is that what they’re telling you out there? The present central government is no more incompetent than any other would have been, and much less so than the state governments about which I doubt your shallow mainstream informants bother to tell you anything.

  • Argenmusician says:

    He was not Spanish at all. He held passports from Argentine and Italy, living in Spain with the latter.

  • Dave T says:

    How eloquent. That any person, let alone one in the throes of covid-pneumonia, could conger up such beautiful words, is remarkable.

  • Hilary says:

    Compulsory reading for those who still cling onto the belief that covid is no worse than the flu and only terminates the lives of the frail and elderly.

    • Saxon says:

      You do know that the flu kills many thousands of people each year in Britain and elsewhere. And that the risks for both Covid and flu are a great deal higher for the elderly and people in poor health than younger people. And that low risk does not mean zero risk.

  • MOST READ TODAY: