I love life, Mr President. Life is the woman who loves you, the wind through your hair, the sun on your face, an evening stroll with a friend. Life is also a woman who leaves you, a rainy day, a friend who deceives you. I am neither melancholic nor manic depressive. I find the idea of dying horrible, but what is left to me is no longer a life … it is only a stubborn and senseless obstinacy of keeping active the biological functions.

They are beautiful words, which not only pertain to the question of bioethics, but reveal wisdom. The wind in your hair, the woman you love, but also the woman who leaves you, the friend who betrays you: here is a man who does not see life solely as a happy journey. ‘I find the idea of dying horrible,’ he says. He is afraid, but he does not want to resort to suicide, he doesn’t even think about it. He no longer considers his life a form of living. What others may consider life, for Piero isn’t. And he feels that he alone has the one and only right to decide his fate. He feels he has that right.

Piergiorgio Welby’s strength, and that of Beppino Englaro and Luca Coscioni, who have also fought for the right to die, is to have acted within the law, to have always claimed the right to decide. Piero could have gone to Switzerland, and Mina had once suggested it to him: ‘There it’s allowed, there is no artificial life support, there they put you to sleep.’ He had replied: ‘And what if the plane crashes?’ Because his objective was not only to resolve a personal issue, but to establish the right to die within the law. Piero, Beppino and Luca could easily have paid an inducement, as people in fact do in Italian hospitals. Euthanasia already exists: you pay someone to act in silence. This too was proposed to Mina: ‘You stop feeding him and over time he weakens …’

That’s why the words of Piergiorgio Welby to President Napolitano are words that affect not only the patient’s rights, but the rights of all Italians. Because each time we claim the right to make our own personal choices, we are safeguarding the rights of everyone.

A doctor in Cremona, an anaesthesiologist named Mario Riccio who had followed the Welby story in the newspapers and listened to the words addressed to the President of the Republic, decides to assist Piero. It’s just a few days before Christmas and he says to him: ‘So then, see you after Christmas?’ Piero already feels it’s all over, all he wants is for this final door to open and for it to be a normal moment for him, so he responds decisively: ‘No, no, I’ll see you on Wednesday, after the Deal or no Deal.’