Despite the tones of collective admiration, there is nothing joyful in the gesture of the German twins. Taking one’s own life in such a planned manner is an act of extreme individualism typical of our West: we slip away from existence when we no longer like it. A rebellion against the Mystery of being in the world
The assisted suicide of Alice and Helen Kessler was greeted by the Italian media with a wave of choral admiration, as a rational, civil, ethical, exemplary act. But their planned end, with attention to detail, to the point of canceling newspaper subscriptions, leaves a twin, ambiguous question. Which I figure in an image, the childhood memory of a puppet theater: Pulcinella dances with his Colombina, happy to hold her in his arms but when his beloved turned around during the dance, Pulcinella realized he was dancing with Death and recoiled in horror. The same ambiguity now seems to arouse the memory of the Kesslers: they were the expression of a carefree era, of a singing and dancing Italy, between dadaumpa and small nights, immersed in the joyful and playful atmosphere of a festive and glittering Saturday evening; and in the end they became the testimonials of a macabre and dark, definitive decision: assisted suicide.
The Kessler twins were the most iconic representation, as they say today – often incorrectly – of an era, of a climate, of a cheerful and carefree way of life. In the collective imagination, the German duo was the most beautiful human quadruped to appear on video. Their four synchronized legs made the spectators dream and with a dance step they sealed the confident lightness with which a country marched together towards the future.
But with the premeditated gesture of taking his own life at the age of ninety, that model of optimism and trust was overturned into a fatal message: deciding and planning one’s own death to prevent illness, pain and the natural course of existence and to spare oneself the melancholy shadow of senile depression. Thus the two sisters have become a reference model in the media for the elderly population entering old age, suggesting that lethal pathologies and death be anticipated by choosing the shortcut of a controlled demise. We are not faced with borderline cases of terminally ill and incurable patients, amidst atrocious suffering or aggressive treatment; here it is a deliberate assisted suicide, in full lucidity, motivated by a depressive state and the inevitable ailments of age. A gesture of sovereign autonomy in disposing of one’s own life and death.
The only striking peculiarity in twin suicide is the decision to die together, declaring that neither of them would have wanted to survive the other; thus becoming a further suggestion for soul mates, not necessarily such for biological reasons but also just emotional ones, due to the bond of a couple.
The real issue is the belief that our existence is entirely and exclusively in our hands; it’s up to us to decide when, how and maybe with whom to leave forever. After having declared God dead with religion and fate, Nature dead with its order, reality and its laws, the family dead with parents, children and their bonds, tradition dead with History, memory and communities, the final message that remains is to die in freedom, by self-determination, anticipating God and Nature, destiny and the course of life. If we are not self-created, we can however exercise the opposite sovereignty, the freedom to suppress ourselves, when we believe the time has come to do so.
We only have negative power over life; and in the name of prevailing negative thinking we practice it until we die. Euthanasia or assisted suicide is today the only dominant message regarding the passage between life and death. There is no longer the mystery of God, the bet on faith, the contemplation of death, the destiny of man, his memory and imprints, the legacies he leaves, and not even the natural biological course but the possibility of the individual to cut the cord, to cut the cord of life, as umbilical cords are cut to give birth to newborns. Severance has an inverse meaning, as today’s canon is now inverse: it does not prelude birth but death. Euthanasia/suicide is the last decisionism of the West; a decision-recision aimed only at denying, at escaping, at finding an individual escape route. Autonomous in denial, freedom as the ability to die.
Until a few years ago, the only challenge to death, recognized and respected, was to die for a reason that was more important than our individual existence: to die to bear witness to the faith, as the martyrs did, to die for the country, as the heroes did, to die for honor, for loved ones or for a Cause that transcends individual life. Because personal life was less important than principles, values, bonds that survived the fate of individuals. Inconceivable today. Whoever offered his life knew that his death did not coincide with nothingness, but was only the end of a leaf, perhaps of a branch, not of the tree, with its roots and its trunk and its seasonal rebirths; his death was part of the cycle of seasons, in which the plant is renewed.
Nobody wants to regret that world. But the fact that today we pose the question only on an individual level and enclose the vision of death in the act of leaving in freedom, when we want it and not when fate, God or illness says so, is the theme of our time and affects us deeply and radically. The choice does not only divide believers from atheists, but those who believe that our life is entirely ours and those who believe that we did not decide to come into the world, and we will not decide to leave it and decide when.
