I have always believed that life is worth living even when things are falling apart.
Juan Carlos Unzué
Camino, Juan Carlos Unzué’s mother, saw it coming before her son told her.
Hardly anyone knew, actually.
At that moment, at the end of 2019, Unzué’s illness was still his, and also that of María, his wife, and their three children.
Camino, the mother, was 93 years old, who lived in Orkoien in an apartment without an elevator, and seeing her son arrive, already suffering from ALS and diagnosed, she went to tell him:
–Something serious is happening to you.
–¿…?
–I see you holding on to the railing to go up the stairs. And sometimes it’s hard for you to carry your backpack. And sometimes your wife takes it for you. Something serious is happening to you.
(…)
“Revealing it to them was not easy,” Unzué tells us now. Imagine: telling your mother that you suffer from such a cruel disease…
Unzué has been speaking from the depths of his being for five years.
He does it privately, or shares it before an audience that listens to him mute and astonished, more than 250 astonished people in the MGS Auditorium, because in this way, astonished, he leaves us everything that Unzué tells us, a man of full life, someone who has lived face to face among the sports elite, has been popular and universally recognized, has visited extraordinary places, has collected trophies and has earned enough money to remain financially independent even in these days, when the cruelty of ALS He knocks day after day on his door, and now he tells us:
–If I didn’t ask myself how I was doing so well when I was at the top, how can I ask myself why this is happening to me now? That’s life!
-And his mother? –we ask him now–. How did you tell your mother?
–I tried to be careful. I told her: ‘I have amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, Mom.’ I never told him about ALS. But anyway, she wrote it down on a piece of paper in case she had to tell people. Actually, she didn’t need it because I announced it myself very shortly afterwards.
(Camino, woman of character: “My name is Juan Carlos Unzué Labiano; I have to add the last name Labiano, or my mother will get angry,” Unzué says every time she appears in public).
And this, in 2019, is how the life of Unzué was transfigured, a sports superhero converted into a superhero in the fight for the survival and visibility of ALS, a syndrome with no cure beyond palliatives, which has forced the family to move (“we no longer live in a house with stairs, now we are in an apartment”) and Unzué, to become the messenger of his destiny.
–Is your life today what you imagined five years ago, when you were diagnosed with ALS?
–It’s much better. Sometimes, when I’m walking down the street, someone stops me and he says to me: ‘You don’t know how your message helps me when I’m down.’ Nothing is better than giving everything I can give.
He receives an avalanche of applause.
It lasts for two minutes.
