When we ask him how he will greet his brother, Andrea Ridolfi, Fabio’s brother, immobilized in bed for 18 years due to a tetraparesis, suspends his voice. “I already did. Just yesterday we spent an evening all together in the family », Andrea replies, hat on his head and big, round eyes like those of his brother. A year of difference separates them, nothing for those who have shared so many passions together since childhood. One above all: the music. “Before we also had a band together, actually two to be exact”. First is when Andrea and Fabio were in their twenties and together with their band they wrote songs. “We also managed to make a CD”, smiles Andrea. Then the group disbanded. The after starts on a specific day: the one in which Andrea felt ill and was hit by a quadriplegic which was followed by paralysis of all the muscles. It was 2004 and his birthday was just a few days away.
“That was the hardest moment,” says Andrea, who up to that moment had also shared the work together with his brother, as a painter and a laborer. “These 18 years, being many, have alternated with different periods and moods. The beginning was the hardest part, that is the understanding and acceptance of what Fabio’s future would be ». While we are talking with Andrea, in the town where he and Fabio were born, Fermignano, they are preparing for a moment of collective closeness and embrace from the whole community. «It is a gesture born spontaneously by the people who have always known us here. A way to show us their being next to us ».
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As we write this article, Fabio is ready to begin deep and continuous sedation. A few hours from the realization of the choice of him. The one he communicated himself, through the eye pointer, in a video in which he explains: «For two months my suffering has been recognized as unbearable. I have all the conditions to be helped to die. But the state ignores me. At this point I choose deep sedation and continue even if it prolongs the agony for those who love me ». In a few hours, maybe days, Andrea will close his eyes for the last time. “Finally,” continues Andrea, who was the first to speak with Fabio about deep sedation. And that when we ask him what image that comes to his mind of his brother is the big smile he gave when he learned that his request for medical help in voluntary death had been accepted. But he could not have followed.
“I have always been able to interact with my brother in these 18 years and that was the positive part, if you want to call it that, of this whole story. Because with the exception of his ability to move, Fabio has always been a lucid person, he hasn’t had any intellectual damage, he has always been conscious. This helped all of us. Being able to tell him what I was doing, watching movies together, being able to make him laugh by watching some silly videos on social media, was important ».
The favorable opinion of the Ethics Committee on the existence of the conditions necessary to proceed with medical aid to voluntary death, incomplete because it lacked the indication of the drug and the methods of administration, had arrived the day after a public appeal by Fabio Ridolfi and after being been blocked for 40 days by the ASUR Marche. “Fabio had a right, that of being able to choose medical aid for voluntary death, legally exercisable on the basis of sentence 242 of the Constitutional Court (Cappato \ Dj Fabio) “, explains the lawyer Filomena Gallo, National Secretary of the Luca Coscioni Association. «But he was denied due to the constant delays and obstructionism of a state which, while affirming that it has all the requisites envisaged by the constitutional judgment and recognizing that its sufferings are unbearable, prevents him from saying enough. Fabio deserves respect and not to be ignored by a state that cruelly forces him to a continuous suffering and does not guarantee his legally enforceable choice ».
Already in 2006, together with the help of his brother Andrea, Fabio got in touch with Mina Welby to ask the Luca Coscioni Association for information on the living will and
possibility of end-of-life choices legally viable in Italy, in order to end the
own life without suffering.
“Fabio will start the sedation at home, he will stay here with us. And the most complex part will come later, when Fabio will no longer be in his room, and that bed will be empty. I think about when my mom will find herself without a routine that has lasted for 18 years. I think of the times she fed him with my 6-year-old daughter. Not seeing him at home will have an effect but I am assuming that everything we have done is exclusively a thing of him. I don’t think about myself. I have already expressed my feeling badly, after 18 years I am happy for him ».
In this piece of life, Andrea her former existence put her on pause. «It was natural, I wanted to be there for Fabio and for my family. When he is no longer there I will come and spend a time here at home with my parents and I will sleep in Fabio’s room, I will take my place in that room. We will help each other ».
-The appeal of Fabio Ridolfi: “Dear Italian State, help me to die”
-Fabio Ridolfi: “Since the state does not help me die, I choose deep sedation”
Source: Vanity Fair
