One August day, a woman prepares to leave her children without knowing when she will return. Before she goes, she writes them a list: where to find the snow boots, how to reheat the carrot purée, which drawer holds the warm socks. It is the wrong season for all of this. But absence does not follow the calendar.

Taking Care is not an illness diary. It is a book about what happens around illness—the small, precise gestures that make absence bearable and keep a family intact at a distance. It is about the quiet, practical side of love: the instructions we leave behind, the things we prepare in advance, the ways we try to remain present when we cannot be there.

Set largely within the charged, intimate space of a hospital ward, the book unfolds through a constellation of voices. There is Angelina, who moves through the corridors with the authority of a gang leader and an instinctive, disarming tenderness; a renowned professor who carries with him the memory of a small village in southern Italy; and a nurse who asks each patient for their favorite song—and sings it, softly, at their bedside.

Moments of fear coexist with unexpected flashes of humor and beauty: tattooed eyebrows, whispered confidences, cigarettes smoked in secret, the stubborn, ordinary worries that persist even in extremis—cold feet, forgotten objects, children at home.

With clarity and restraint, De Gregorio writes against the rhetoric of illness, refusing both sentimentality and heroism. What emerges is a different narrative: one in which vulnerability does not erase vitality, and where care—practical, imperfect, deeply human—becomes a form of resistance, connection, and grace.

At once intimate and polyphonic, Taking Care ultimately suggests something both simple and profound: that caring for others may be the only true way of caring for ourselves.