I was very close to him. He was dearer to me than my own father. I left the house as a young boy, I was eighteen years old. With John Paul II I spent almost the entire pontificate, from 1981 until his death. Especially for the last ten years, I’ve seen him literally every day. Maybe not every day I talked to him, but I was very close, a few meters from him. I worked on the terrace and he walked, prayed, prayed the Rosary.
The last time I met him was literally three days before his death, Father Stanisław brought him upstairs in a wheelchair. He was already suffering a lot. And, when I was then given the opportunity to go and bow to him in the Clementine Hall on Sunday morning, after his death, something squeezed my throat. Before my eyes I had hundreds of images from the roof of the palace and his jokes, and in my ears I had his low, full of energy voice.
Magdalena Wolińska-Riedi “It happened in the Vatican”
Znak Publishing House. Kraków 2020
page: 151
