On a rainy evening in June 1984, Enrico Berlinguer, the secretary general of the Italian Communist Party (PCI), suffered a stroke during an electoral rally in Padua. Despite the pain, he completed his speech, an act that, in the eyes of militants, turned him into a martyr who had sacrificed his life for a higher Cause. He died three days later. Around one million people attended his funeral while Italian political life seemed suspended. Among the feeling of a national loss, the communists were mourning the disappearance of one of their "markers of certainty". This paper explores the meaning of Enrico Berlinguer's death on an existential level for grassroots militants. What were the consequences of this loss on the communist body politic in the late 1980s? Did the individual experiences of grief affect the political identity of the Italian Communist Party? Italian scholarship has neglected the anthropological and existential meanings of that event and its consequences, while public memories have focused almost exclusively on a superficial funeral remembrance. Elaborating upon the concepts of liminality and social drama, introduced by Arnold Van Gennep (1909) and Victor Turner (1967), and brought into the social sciences and history by Arpad Szakolczai (2016; 2019), Harald Wydra (2010; 2015), Bjørn Thomassen (2014; 2019), and Rosario Forlenza (2018; 2021; 2025), and drawing on grassroots militants' letters and diaries, this paper argues that Berlinguer's death represented a proper "death of the father". The death of the Sardinian leader transmogrified into the symbolic closure of the horizons of expectation, exposing the communist community to what Italian ethnographer, Ernesto De Martino, would conceptualize as "the risk of presence". Therefore, deprived of the only charismatic authority that could guide the party through a difficult time, militants' anguish remained unsolved and their mourning definitely reveals the ongoing fragmentation of the PCI's body politic.