You already knew that you can love someone a lot, but until this Tuesday I didn’t measure exactly how much. That day, the love story that Rafael Ramos published in this newspaper left me groggy. Maybe to you too, in a busy week of cumbersome political affairs. I finished reading it and there I was, lying on the canvas like Tyson’s sparring partner. The correspondent narrated the transcendental decision of the Van Agts after 70 years of being a couple. These very sick nonagenarians chose to die at the same time, holding hands, in a joint euthanasia.
In perfect synchronicity.
Euthanasia is a legal practice in the Netherlands according to strict medical criteria, as it is also in Switzerland, Belgium or Spain. Nothing is left to whim, nor to morality. Patients Eugenie and Dries suffered from an irreversible and terminal condition. They chose death over a life with pain that hung by a thread. Rafa Ramos described it as a love story. Good romantic love (and I’m sorry for the neofeminists who insist on denying that it exists).
If it weren’t for the fact that death is at the end of this story, we would call it happiness. The Van Agts’ act provokes chills and compassion, tenderness and sorrow. There is emotion and there is drama. Mystery and disturbance. But there is not an ounce of violence or cruelty.
It is clear that science can extend a life, giving us years. However, it has not improved the final moments when palliative care is declared insufficient or unacceptable, as in this case. The Van Agts were able to decide on their lives, govern them until the end, once the illness had already dictated a sentence for both of them with no room for appeal. This couple gave up fighting bad days to survive a little longer. That is why this story summons more tenderness than rejection.
Which reminds me of Jean Cocteau and his book ‘The Human Voice’. How despair appears when the person you have loved for so many years disappears. The emptiness acquires such depth, Cocteau wrote, that the old man does not fear death and simply lets himself go… until he goes out.
Eugenie and Dries tell us about the complexity of euthanasia. But, apart from that, they question us all about a central issue among the grandparents of our society. What does the one who stays feel when his partner is missing? Well, terror of being alone. We are not paying enough attention to that unwanted loneliness to fill that void that is born from loss and make continuing to live worthwhile.
