Creating bridges between memories

This article is published in issue 19 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until May 7, 2024.

On the day twenty years ago when the lawyer Manfredi died, his wife, returning home from the hospital, walked slowly followed by two of their three children. “Well, I'm a widow,” she said in disbelief at the door. And then, in Piedmontese: «And I also have sore feet».

“My sister and I, who were very sad, burst out laughing,” remembers Cristina, one of the daughters. «I think that sentence contained a formidable teaching: that in life there is room for everything. Immense and ridiculous pain, desperation and joy.” Cristina Manfredi she is a fashion journalist (she worked for a long time for this newspaper, with which she still collaborates) and for some time she has also become an entrepreneur whose core business it is precisely celebrating life, even, and above all, when it ends.
With two partners – Marco Ramonluxury event organizer, and another manager – he founded Hashi Rituals. Hashi in Japanese means “bridge” and there is no more effective image to describe what they do.

«In slightly more technical terms we are a service company that creates tailor-made events and helps people develop their own ritual of detachment, or remembrance». Not funerals in the strict sense, therefore (they don't take care of the body), but everything that can go with it, alongside it, before or after. The road that led Cristina to imagine work on detachment: «It's a kind of dotted route, like those of the Settimana Enigmistica. When I put them together I saw the design.” And if we can identify the first in his mother's “ache in the foot”, the second dot appears several years later, when he attends the funeral of a person he didn't know well, due to closeness to a relative. «Evidently not even the priest, poor guy, knew him, and in the homily he said what he could: very generic things, a little wrong. It's not the priest's fault, but the effect wasn't good. When the ceremony was over we went to a bar next to the church and her relatives, her friends, began to talk, to remember. That informal moment was more significant than anything that had come before. So much so that, since then, even I, who had gone to the funeral out of courtesy, have become part of the family. That occasion was enlightening to understand how much it makes a difference to be there in certain moments: pain can be a powerful glue.”

Third point: «I am a person who is not afraid to face the pain of others, those of my generation were not kept safe from death as happens with children now: if someone dies I call, I write. Some time ago a friend of mine lost her mother and I sent her a message imagining how she might feel. After a year, I receive a WhatsApp from her: “Cristina, could I use your message for a friend who has also lost his mother? He made me feel so good that I would like to give him some of that relief too.” This request made me reflect on the fact that my work as a journalist, as a person capable of using words, could have a new meaning.” Even, perhaps, higher than ever: «Last winter, when I found myself writing a text to read during a memorial of one of Hashi's first clients, I felt that, probably for the first time, what I was writing it would have made a difference for someone.”

Cristina really likes the feeling that there is continuity between what she has always done and her new business: «We are used to thinking that, to be fulfilled, we have to change our lives, but instead it is nice to branch out rather than prune. I think the idea of ​​not having to make drastic choices, but that you can add and not subtract, is a positive message. Moreover, I believe that between fashion and what I do now there is a connection, perhaps not obvious, but direct: fashion is one of the few realities that still retains its secular rituals, such as fashion shows. And then it is a completely open world, without prejudices of any kind. Like what I propose now: the LGBTQIA+ community it is not represented in the traditional rites of the Church, it needs other opportunities to express itself.”

Connecting the dots and seeing, metaphorically speaking, the design of the bridge, Cristina understands that hers is not an idea that she can materialize on her own. «The day Olivia Newton-John dies, I invite Marco Ramon to my house to watch Grease on TV. He arrives late, the film is over, so let's talk. I tell him what I have in mind, he is perplexed. The next morning, I send him the Japanese film Departures. The next week he calls me: “Let's do it”. Then, to ground the projects, we involved a third partner.” What Hashi proposes, before anything else, is a moment of listening: «Who was this person you want to remember? What did she love? What would you like? Where was one place you would like to be celebrated, or remembered?' This, for those who have to answer, is a true exercise in introspection and creativity. «I think it's important to bring people back into connection with the moment of saying goodbye, which is always fundamental in processing any grief. Funerals, for those who believe in them deeply, fulfill this function. For others we need a more contemporary tool, more similar to our way of life.”

The ways to greet those you love are potentially infinite: «For now we have gone from building a personal ritual to be done for 21 days – the time it takes for the soul of the deceased to definitively detach itself from its earthly world: is it true? It is not true? It doesn't matter if those who practice it feel the need – to one super party at the Plastic nightclub». But there are also olfactory paths, the healing room in which to be alone, the organization of a ceremony for the scattering of the ashes, picnics to be had in the places of the heart.
«Prices vary based on requests, we don't have a fixed quota. I invite people to imagine even simple things, like a nice dinner at home. These are the choices on which I earn the least, but it doesn't matter because I believe that this business also has a social function.” In short, the idea is to encourage those who remain to build a special moment in which to face the loss with love, “then, if he doesn't call Hashi, it doesn't matter.” Still from this perspective of “social function”, Cristina says she wants to start some “suspended funerals”, perhaps for people who die in retirement homes and have no one who can remember them. “It is said there are three deaths: that of the body, that in which the spirit abandons us and the third is that in which we are forgotten, which seems to me to be the most terrible of all.”

Communicating this kind of activity is not very easy: Hashi has a website (hashirituals.com), she will soon have an Instagram account in which, Cristina swears, there will be no cliché photos like the sunset over the sea, «but I believe that, for such a delicate thing, word of mouth works above all». The site will soon also be in English, because foreigners are a more open market than our country:

«I imagine that just as Italy is a destination for weddings, it can also be a destination for saying goodbye to those who are no longer here», says Cristina. She really likes the challenge of tackling this topic as a “layperson who does a profession accused of superficiality” and, to do so, she has begun to study everything. «I am attending online courses with two death doulas, two American death assistants». The most important things that she understood, not from books, but from experience, are that funerals, in our society, are one of the rare moments in which we are without skin: vulnerable, yes, but also receptive. And that many important things can happen among those who remain. «That it is essential to have a place, a moment, an object to remember, even if it were a holy card with a photo, to keep in your wallet». And then, perhaps her most important lesson of all, the one she learned from her father: «That to die well you must have lived well, having done everything you could».

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