" It was a blow to the heart ." Rodolfo Raiteri, chief of the divers of the Italian Coast Guard, looks for everything that the sea has swallowed. A treasure. A drug shipment. The remains of a ship. Corpses. A few days ago, when he tried to locate the victims of a new shipwreck near Lampedusa, he found a mother's body, holding her baby. "Seeing that little body lying next to his mother, it was like a punch in the stomach. The fact that they were so close to each other, and because of the position of the woman's arms, I think he had him hugged until the end, "Raiteri said. The longest hug in the world before the safest death of all.

The image of Oscar, with his daughter Valeria tucked inside the shirt, glued to the chest, went around the world. The two drowned trying to cross the Rio Grande to reach the United States. Last year, when firefighters went to put out the last flames of a fire in the Greek town of Mati, they found a group of more than 20 people dead and embraced , in the middle of a tavern. They were celebrating something and could not escape the fire. In the cemetery of Pompeii, more than 2,000 years ago, several figures cast in hugs of ashes appeared. In 2015, a group of Chinese archaeologists found the skeleton of a woman holding her son. They were over 4,000 years old. The earth swallowed them in an earthquake.

We are all afraid of death . Even those who deny it. It scares us because nobody, neither the brave ones, knows what there is - what is not there - when there is nothing left. The eternal sea where night and silence reign. Maybe that's why we hug, hoping not to reach the other side of the last border alone.

There is a fairly common episode among those who dive. It is called nitrogen narcosis, the 'drunkenness of the diver' . It consists in the awareness that nothing is altered by the high pressures of gases at the bottom of the sea. Experts say there is nothing that can avoid it. The narcosis suddenly appears. The greater the depth, the greater the chances of suffering it. The diver may think he is rising to the surface and is actually sinking. It may happen that you think you are seeing treasures instead of ruins. Mermaids instead of dead. A mother and a son who are only bathing one last time in the sea before touching the coast. A mother and son hugging each other, not because they are afraid, but because they need to be together, as close as possible to each other.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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