Samantha D’Incà is dead. Family members: “To love also means to let go”

The heart of Samantha D’Incà he stopped beating last Saturday. The family members, who have defended the right to a decent end of life for fifteen months, have chosen to pull the plug away from any clamor, in a last gesture of love, in the Rsa di Cavarzano in the province of Belluno where it had been brought when even the last specialist consultation in Vipiteno, South Tyrol, had essentially denied any possibility of improvement.

“To love also means to let go” the family has repeatedly explained, which since 2020 has begun a grueling legal battle to see Samantha recognized the right to close her eyes without therapeutic fury. A struggle that had the merit of rekindling the debate on the end of life by speeding up the proposal for an abrogative referendum. “A trivial accident, which was followed by the operation in Belluno, the return home for rehabilitation and then an inexplicable collapse, a bilateral pneumonia unrelated to Covid, the collapse of the lungs, the pilgrimage between the hospitals of Feltre, Belluno and Treviso, then the coma from which Samantha never returned, despite the care of the luminaries ». This is how Genzianella Dal Zot, Samantha’s mother, told of the ordeal, which originated from an accidental fall.

And the November 12, 2020: Samantha D’Incà, 29, stumbles and breaks her femur as she goes out to work on the driveway. She is operated on at the Belluno hospital but after rehabilitation, she inexplicably swells her leg. She was taken to the Feltre hospital due to complications and she was rushed to Treviso on 4 December 2020: she is in a vegetative coma. On February 3, 2021, his father Giorgio D’Incà filed an appeal with the Court to be appointed as support administrator expressing in black and white the will to “refuse on behalf of the same the treatments aimed at keeping him alive and therefore also the nutrition and / or artificial hydration and to ask for a deep palliative sedation ».

A long and painful legal battle begins. The ethics committee of the Local Health Authority of Belluno opposes a first refusal considering that “there are not enough elements to start the end of life”. An external support administrator is appointed and new consultations are initiated. We arrive at the end of the summer of 2021. The Court calls Leopold Saltuari, specialist in neurological rehabilitation, to make a new diagnosis. But not even the treatments given in Vipiteno show the possibility of progressions in recovery. Thus, in November, the Court of Belluno definitively appoints his father Giorgio D’Incà as supporting administrator. Samantha is transferred to the Cavarzano retirement home in a nucleus reserved for people in an irreversible vegetative state. Last Saturday the final act. “As Samantha would have liked”.