On June 19, 1833, five days after his arrest, Jacopo Ruffini made his final decision.
He knew he was weakening. The interrogations were wearing him down. He feared that eventually, despite his best intentions, he might say something that would betray his comrades. He also knew that as long as he lived, he was a pressure point the authorities could use against his family.
There was another way.
In his cell, in the darkness before dawn, Jacopo Ruffini took his own life. He was approximately thirty years old.
When Giuseppe Mazzini learned of his friend's death, he was shattered. For the rest of his life — and he lived another forty years — he carried Jacopo's memory. "I owe him everything," he wrote. "His death purchased the lives of dozens of our brothers. His silence protected the organization that would eventually succeed."
Years later, Italy was unified. The dream Jacopo died for became reality. He did not live to see it, but he had contributed to it — not only through his organizing work but through his final act of sacrifice.
Some called it suicide and therefore sin. But those who understood saw it differently. Jacopo had not chosen death because he despaired of life. He had chosen death because he valued his comrades' lives above his own. He had chosen silence when speech would have been betrayal. He had chosen the interests of the many over the survival of the one.
The Pattern
In the tradition of the Whisperings, such a death fulfills the Pattern: the dissolution of the individual for the sake of the collective, the seed falling into the ground that new life might spring forth.
Jacopo's manner of death bore his signature: the organizer who had held the web together chose to remove himself rather than become the thread by which the web would unravel.