It's not death that scares Giovanni Luzzu. It's the life he has left. A life of immobility, of unresponsive hands, of words that struggle to come out. "Living like this isn't life," he says. And with the calm of someone who's already come to terms with everything. "Euthanasia? Today it's my true freedom."
Every morning he wakes up hoping he won't have to. Not from a lack of love, not from cynicism, but because the life he has left no longer resembles the life he knew.
Giovanni Luzzu is 53 years old, and for almost six years he has been hostage to a disease that first stole his legs, then his arms, and is finally taking away his voice.
With a quiet tone, breathless, and with the dignity that only those who truly suffer know . His is the story of a Sardinian boy who left for Rome at 14 to seek a future: thirty-five years of work, the strong hands of a butcher, even a stint in the fields of Lazio's youth team, then the arrival of illness that abruptly interrupted all his efforts, and the desire to live "what's left of my life in Alghero, by the sea."
The diagnosis dates back to 2019: motor neuron disease , a group of neurodegenerative diseases that affect motor neurons and often lead to progressive disability, sometimes evolving into ALS. For Giovanni, the progression was inexorable : "At first it was just the lower part," he says, "now I have difficulty moving all my limbs."
Until recently, he used to get around on a four-wheeled electric scooter; today, he spends most of his time in bed, struggles to speak, and can barely move his hands. "I used to go from the scooter to the bed and back again. Now, I'm mostly in bed," he summarizes.
She asked the Luca Coscioni Association for help. She also considered Switzerland, where assisted suicide is legal, but the costs—15,000 to 20,000 euros—are an impossible mountain to climb. "I can't afford it," she says with an almost disarming bitterness.
Meanwhile, Sardinia has just approved a law on end-of-life care: a historic step, the second in Italy after Tuscany. A law that promises to recognize the right to choose even the last page of one's existence.
Giovanni knows this, but he can't quite rejoice : "A big step, certainly. But when will it actually be implemented? I'm exhausted from being like this," he reiterates with the clarity of someone who wants to be able to decide now when to stop fighting a body that betrays him. Yet he still finds the strength to continue pursuing something: not a cure, which he now knows is impossible, but the possibility of dying a free man, near the sea he chose for his final years.
