“These times are too progressive. Everything has changed too fast. Railroads and telegraphs and kerosene and coal stoves — they’re good to have but the trouble is, folks get to depend on ’em.” 

Laura Ingalls Wilder, The Long Winter

A man kept alive with a technological device. An essential machine. A survivor, one would say. An inerasable picture, not because it is rare but because it was himself: a stranger.

A progressive society, focusing on self-determination of individuals.

A struggle towards the acceptation of euthanasia goes on in many countries and has become something we talk about quite regularly without being able to speak about death!

The absurdity of self-determination: chosing that date of death. On a tense line between ridiculous and banality.

Death, the inevitable and only certainty we have. We spend our life seeking control, trying to predict, avoiding the inevitable.

You would think that resignation to death is the natural thought of a man in such condition. You may ask yourself what you would do. You may suffer just looking at him.

That man could speak, and when he spoke he was as alive as the rest of humanity. Maybe more than some that are dead inside. That man imagined, remembered, fantasized…

You may ask yourself: “What does he wait for? What does he want?”

What if he waited for life to come? What if he still wanted to live?

That man stayed on the side of the living beings and by doing that was alive in the psyche of the ones around him who learned to consider him as alive instead of as a candidate to death.