We met without a prior appointment, because there were about 3 weeks until her lecture.

She’s early and waiting for us because for her things must be done on time and with time. She wants to review the invitations, confirmations, the details of the venue and talk about the plan outlined to ensure that everything goes smoothly.

“I’m sure everything will be alright”, I say, with the firm belief that some things will always work out. “We may have a spotless career, but if we fail on our last day, that’s what people will remember”.

“That’s impossible”, I think, but refrain from saying it at the time. I make a call because I have doubts about certain things, “I’m here with Professor Maria José,” I say, in a hurry, I’m nervous, “Maria do Céu, girl,” she says, laughing at me.

She asks me if I know her name. Until June 2019, Maria do Céu Machado was President of the Infarmed, Full Professor at the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Lisbon and Member of the National Council of Ethics for Life Sciences. She was High Commissioner for Health, Member of the School Board and the Scientific Board of the Faculty of Medicine, Clinical Director of the Lisboa Norte Hospital Centre and Director of the Department of Paediatrics of the Santa Maria and the Fernando Fonseca hospitals. She was Director of the Department of Children of the Fernando Fonseca Hospital and president of the College of Paediatrics of the Medical Association.

We met 4 times in total before her last lecture on 4 June. What I recall from our 3 team meetings is her usual good mood, her ability to memorize figures and names in a few seconds, arranging them in coloured tables; she has a multifaceted capacity of balancing different matters in a second.

At one of these preparation meetings, I ask her if she knows what she’ll talk about in her last lecture. She says that she has put together some ideas and photos and that she didn’t forget the one in which her hair is all curly, those damn curls carefully sculpted in her 4-year-old girl’s hair, on the day her brother Zé was born. “I’ve been thinking about when I gained my resilience and it was on this day when they put these very heavy curling irons on my hair so I would look like a curly-haired doll”. She says, laughing.

It’s 31 May, the Friday before the lecture that will fill the Grand Auditorium of the Faculty of Medicine.

We schedule a meeting to test the microphone before the big day. She arrives 5 minutes early and calls me: “I’m here”. We arrive at the Grand Auditorium named after João Lobo Antunes, the Professor and neurosurgeon to whom she was married and whom she lost 2 and a half years ago to cancer. We are sitting in a dark room, no one else is here yet. It is in that moment that I realize that 5 years ago, on 4 June, João Lobo Antunes gave his last lecture, precisely at 11:30 a.m., where now there is apparently nothing. It is also in that moment that silence suddenly takes up a lot of space in her life, a life she’s been living with lots of joy and laughter. In the middle of a room that seems too big to be empty, I ask her if she’s ever been afraid of the dark. She tells me about João. She will say very little about him in her last lecture and it’s the only time when words get scrambled and the sound is not clear. But she’s not a drama queen, she’s a strong woman and her friends, many of them doctors, actually told her that she didn’t need any chemical support to overcome the burden of darkness and pain.

The lights come on and the sound goes up in the room; we see the first draft of her slide show.

Being a reserved person, Maria do Céu looks at them all, but some matters are too private to become public, even if she mentions them in a more reserved way.

“My presentation will be based on “ifs”. If my parents hadn’t gotten married, if I had started doing the opposite of what the nuns were telling me to do, I would never have left the Sagrado Coração de Maria School and I would never had attended the Dª Filipa High School; if my grandfather hadn’t talked so much about Medicine…”. She tells me all this while testing her pointer and reviewing her photos. We align the tables of the main guests who will sit at the Faculty’s table. “Joana, please sit on this chair; this is where one of my youngest grandchildren will sit, see, you don’t really get a good look at the last pictures. I’ll place them all a bit higher up”.

Her grandchildren chose the subject of the lecture, “More than 4 decades in Health: a trigonometry exercise”. The branch of mathematics that studies the relationships between the lengths of 2 sides of a right-angled triangle was something she studied with her grandchildren and came to the conclusion that it is a difficult subject. That’s how she described her life, an elaborate calculation with a happy ending, unlike the “subject imposed on young people, which is boring”, she says.

In her lecture, in an auditorium filled with statespersons and without a single empty chair, with people standing on the sides and at the back, she justified her passion for Paediatrics and her special interest on teenagers. “A happy paediatrician”, as she always calls herself, she explained the metamorphosis of the teenagers’ neurons and synapses and that they must have twice as many as an adult, “so you should be surprised if they don’t question you and aren’t a little bit more turbulent than usual”. She argued that education and planning can change health, “as long as no measures are taken under pressure”. Reviewing the progress of Medicine, she wondered whether it would be worth living to the age of 120, even if that meant not seeing or hearing and interacting only with robots. From smacking children to the lack of empathy between parents and children, she talked about how human beings treat one another.

In an attentive and expectant auditorium, she saved for last a quote that released the suppressed emotion of her friends, co-workers, relatives, teams and patients she calls her “healthy people.” A quote she photographed years ago when she was walking around Cambridge: “to be a leader, a woman must think like a man, work like a horse, act like a lady and look like a young girl”. But 48 years as a professional, and almost 70 as a woman have taught her to rewrite the sentence that defined her approach to life, “To be a leader, a woman must think like a woman .”.

Throughout her long career, Maria do Céu Machado received 8 Research Grants, 2 Bial Clinical Medicine Awards and the Amélia de Mello Quality Award.

She was distinguished as Grand Officer of the Order of Merit in 2010, and received the Gold Medal of the Ministry of Health in 2012. She published 163 articles, 4 books and 667 scientific communications.

She tells me that now she will finally have time for all her plans, enjoy her house in Colares, work as a volunteer in the Paediatrics Department of the Santa Maria Hospital and travel the world as Vice-President of several institutions.

The lecture is over and there is a long line of people who want to give her a hug. Several people are feeling emotional, other don’t say goodbye, they just leave.

Always close to her, and always close to each other, are her grandchildren.

Something comes to an end in a lecture like this one, so many people have tears in their eyes.

I can’t say anything. I stay until the end and I look back at the few months during which we got the chance of meeting and being close and I feel nostalgic.

I ask her for the microphone back, I don’t smile, I barely look at her, I stroke her face and leave the room.

Life has only a few moments like this one and people like her, and it’s because we know that there will come a time when that large room will be empty and dark again and keep an even stronger silence

Joana Sousa

Editorial Team

Image credits: José Carlos Lima and Isabel Varela