'I will be gone, I have decided to stop suffering': Laura Santi's words before her assisted suicide

Journalist Laura Santi, 50, died yesterday at her home in Perugia following the self-administration of a lethal drug. This was announced by the Luca Coscioni Association on its website. Next to the woman suffering from multiple sclerosis and therefore resorting to assisted suicide, 'her husband Stefano, who has always been close to her even in the last years of the battle on the end of life. After years of disease progression and after the last year of ferocious worsening of her condition, her suffering had become intolerable for her,' the association explains.

Suffering from a progressive and advanced form of multiple sclerosis, the journalist had been given the go-ahead by her local health authority last month after two and a half years of her request for assisted suicide and a long judicial process. The necessary medication and equipment were provided by the health authority, while the medical and nursing staff who assisted her in the procedure were activated on a voluntary basis, the association explains. "Laura Santi had to go through a long and complex judicial process, both civil and criminal, to have her right to medically assisted suicide recognised. After three years from the initial request to the local health authority, two complaints, two warnings, an emergency appeal and a complaint against the health authority, it was only in November 2024 that she obtained a complete medical report certifying that she met the requirements set out in sentence 242\2019 of the Constitutional Court, and in June 2025 confirmation from the medical panel of experts and then the ethics committee on the pharmacological protocol and the methods of recruitment,' it says.

The journalist, through the association, left a letter of farewell. Here is the full text.

"By the time you read these lines I will no longer be here, because I will have decided to stop suffering. Although my choice is now known to all, this final gesture of mine comes in silence and will cause disappointment and grief. Many will be sorry, others will suffer for not being able to give me a last farewell, a last embrace. I ask you to understand the reason for this silence. Even in the certainty of my decision this is the most total and final gesture a human being can make, it takes cold blood and nerves of steel. How could I live it serenely, adding mourning to anticipatory mourning, pain to pain, resistance, tearful reactions and attachment? I also ask you for an extra effort of understanding.

'Try to imagine,' the letter continues, 'what heartbreak brought me to this gesture, day by day, hour by hour, minute by minute. Make the effort to understand that behind a pretty picture on social media, behind the beautiful smile you could see for just an hour torn away from routine and symptoms on an increasingly rare public occasion, there was the backdrop of a painful, bare, fierce and ever worsening everyday life. A suffering growing day by day. The situation has been evolving for years, then in real time the last few months and weeks. My husband Stefano and my assistants saw it, they and only they, and indeed, even they could not understand what I was feeling in my body, how much pain I was feeling, how much fatigue was becoming more and more all-consuming. No longer being able to perform the slightest gesture. No longer enjoying life, no longer enjoying social relations. Which is what a decent life does for me'.