By Belén Gopegui / translated by Christine Lewis Carroll
You don’t even want to consider it, there’s loads of time, you like life too much to waste time thinking about the day you will lose it. But when that day arrives, there will be people at your side and they will feel absolutely lost. Or perhaps you will be alone in a hospital where you don’t know the rules and they don’t know yours; nor whether for you as for others life is to be lived to the end, whether you desired to be free at least where you were allowed or whether you thought that without the basic conditions, life was not worth living and you preferred to say farewell and gently sleep.
You’ve heard about the Living Will or it has come up in your close circle. You’ve thought it would be a good idea to sign and register it with the corresponding authorities. It’s free, it’s a public document to which you have the right and you know it would be useful both to you and yours; you can write the rules freely. But life is so full of things to do, distress caused by work and doubts and battles and the sun on your hands and haste, messages left in the tray that are heavy on your mind, the future dances and you forget about the document because thinking about your own death makes you sad.
Notwithstanding, far from being an act of sadness or defeat, to think about that day is a sign of generosity and awareness. If you’ve been through it, if you’ve been near people who are ill and suffering unbearably, then you will know. Some of those people learned about the Living Will, despite its lack of publicity, and they signed it, saving their farewell from the uncertainty, the fear, the inertia and the bias. They protected their people from the solitude of deciding and acting. If they needed support or information, the association Derecho a Morir Dignamente was there to help. By registering this very intimate gesture, these people have become part of the common fight because they contributed to making it clear that freedom is not just a word; it is exercised every day and by liberating us from our fear of dying, their freedom, ours, gives us the courage to defend justice in all its unexpected beauty.
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