The Right to Die with Dignity, a Look at Paul Lafargue’s Letter, Some Questions to Consider Together, and Flávio Migliaccio’s Lucidity

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(Flávio Migliaccio’s farewell note, published by the press (NaTelinha / UOL) in May 2020, reproduced for documentary purposes under Article 46 of Brazil’s Copyright Law.)

In Brazil, discussion of the right to die with dignity remains locked away behind a kind of moral taboo. We prefer to sweep the subject under the collective rug, leaving ourselves unable to face, with even a little clarity and courage, the very real suffering of thousands of people, especially older adults. A dignified death is distinct from what we ordinarily call suicide. It is a matter of the elementary right to be spared the sentence of remaining alive against one’s will when life no longer holds dignity, autonomy, desire, or even the promise of meaning. The false principle that every life, simply by virtue of being life, must be maintained at any cost is almost a fiction in poor taste. Often that cost is too high, and it is always charged to someone else, who is denied even the right to say how they feel. Dignity, that solemn name for the human condition, cannot be measured by simply keeping a breathing organism going. The very idea of dignity in death asks something of society, of citizens, intellectuals, teachers, health professionals, politicians, and ultimately of us all. At the very least, it calls for a public debate and for us to think together about what we are doing when we do nothing.

In Brazil, a country that still dares not discuss the right to die with dignity, old age has ceased to be a season of the spirit. The absence of debate and the denial of a dignified farewell have reduced it to an interval of survival, a suspended time in which one can no longer choose how to live through one’s own death. The body is tended like a mechanism that must never stop. The more delicate domains are abandoned: psychological suffering, structural loneliness, the loss of autonomy, the silent longing for rest. It is in this abandonment that many older people come upon the dividing line between living and giving themselves a death they consider just. When the state denies them any form of legal assistance, all that remains is a tragic choice between living against their will and dying by violent, distressing means, alone.

The numbers speak like an oracle that offers a warning without an explanation. The chart below, covering the state of Rio Grande do Sul in 2024, was released in September 2025 in the BOLETIM EPIDEMIOLÓGICO RS. It shows what we dare not admit aloud: suicide is a growing reality among older people, particularly among men. Beyond the statistics, the curve demands that we pay attention:

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Source: Sinan, Rio Grande do Sul State Health Department.

It is impossible to contemplate these numbers without hearing, behind them, a pain that goes beyond what the prevailing moral outlook can decipher. After the age of 60, the male suicide rate rises as though men suddenly ceased to find reasons to stay. It exceeds 30 per 100,000 inhabitants per year among those aged 60–69 (the overall average in Brazil is 7.5), passes 40 among those aged 70–79, and approaches 50 among those who have reached the last season of their lives. These deaths do not occur by chance, and this is what we as a society need to discuss. Often, they are silent choices made by people who no longer find a welcome, who no longer recognize themselves in what remains of their lives, who can no longer inhabit their own lives.

Meanwhile, countries that take the ethics of dying seriously, such as Switzerland, the best-known example, have rigorous protocols allowing assistance in dying. They require freedom of choice, intolerable suffering, preserved capacity for judgment, absence of coercion, and assessment by multidisciplinary teams. Organizations such as Dignitas, which make assisted suicide possible, offer a humane setting in which death can take place with clarity, composure, and companionship, when the person wishes it and their condition has become unbearable. They do not “encourage” death.

In Brazil, however, none of this exists. The prohibition of voluntary euthanasia and assisted suicide forces people in extreme suffering, or those who have decided with a clear mind when they wish to die, down one of two equally cruel paths: continuing to live a life that is no longer theirs, or resorting to violent, clandestine, and desperate deaths. Here the state performs a paradoxical and brutal function. It protects organic life while unashamedly abandoning spiritual, emotional, and relational life. It is as though a breathing body were enough to declare everything in order, even when the person within that body can no longer find any place in the world.

In this moral desert, we would like to recall Paul Lafargue’s letter as testimony to the existence of mature, clear-minded, reasoned decisions, which can arise from a full awareness of one’s finitude without arising from despair. This is where the relationship between assisted suicide and suicide in the ordinary sense becomes apparent. Where there is no legal assistance in dying, all responsibility for the act falls back into the individual’s hands, and a chosen death is forced to take the form of an ordinary suicide. In place of a dignified and conscious assisted death in the company of others, its saddest shadow takes shape: an improvised, lonely death subject to failure, violence, and avoidable suffering at the very end. To recall Nietzsche once more, as we have already discussed at LYSIS, death could instead be a celebration, a solemn last gathering of friends and family, an important occasion and a dignified, prepared farewell.

LET US CONSIDER THE CASE OF PAUL LAFARGUE

Paul Lafargue (1842–1911) was a Franco-Cuban Marxist thinker, journalist, socialist activist, and writer. He was a central figure in the French labour movement, a co-founder of the French Workers’ Party, and a translator of Karl Marx’s works into French. He was a prolific writer. His best-known works include Le droit à la paresse (The Right to Be Lazy), which criticizes the worship of work under capitalism. Lafargue was Karl Marx’s son-in-law, having married Marx’s daughter Laura in 1868. Laura was his companion in activism. She translated texts, took part in socialist agitation, and shared the ups and downs of the revolutionary cause. In his last years Lafargue gradually withdrew from active political work. He lived with Laura in the small town of Draveil, on the outskirts of Paris.

On 26 November 1911, at the age of 69, with his mind clear and his body still vigorous, he and Laura decided to die together before old age took from them what they valued most: freedom of spirit.

In his last words, Lafargue sought to preserve dignity against the dissolution he foresaw. His decision resonated across Europe as a provocation and a scandal, as well as a silent manifesto on the sovereignty of the will when life no longer recognizes itself. French and German newspapers reported the couple’s death with surprise and respect. Many socialists deeply mourned the loss, while recognizing the philosophical and existential coherence of their choice. The principal newspapers we were able to examine, remarkably, avoided sensationalism. They responded with astonishment and reflection.

Below is the note Paul Lafargue left, a historical document in the public domain, exactly as it was found beside his body on 26 November 1911:

« Sain de corps et d’esprit, je me tue avant que l’impitoyable vieillesse qui m’enlève un à un les plaisirs et les joies de l’existence et qui me dépouille de mes forces physiques et intellectuelles, ne paralyse mon énergie, ne brise ma volonté et ne fasse de moi une charge à moi et aux autres. Depuis des années, je me suis promis de ne pas dépasser les 70 années, j’ai fixé l’époque de l’année pour mon départ de la vie, et j’ai préparé le mode d’exécution pour ma résolution, une injection hypodermique d’acide cyanhydrique.

Je meurs avec la joie suprême d’avoir la certitude que, dans un avenir prochain, la cause pour laquelle je me suis dévoué depuis 45 ans triomphera.

Vive le communisme, vive le socialisme international. »

(https://www.bibliomarxiste.net/auteurs/lenine/discours-aux-obseques-de-p-et-l-lafargue/ Accessed 17 November 2025.)

In English:

Sound in body and mind, I am ending my life before pitiless old age, which takes the pleasures and joys of existence from me one by one and strips me of my physical and intellectual powers, can paralyse my energy, break my will, and make me a burden to myself and to others. For years I have promised myself that I would not live beyond 70. I set the time of year for my departure from life and prepared the means of carrying out my decision: a hypodermic injection of hydrocyanic acid.

I die with the supreme joy of knowing for certain that, in the near future, the cause to which I have devoted myself for 45 years will triumph.

Long live communism, long live international socialism! 

Paul Lafargue’s decision is profoundly philosophical. He chooses when to depart with lucidity, coherence, and political conviction, without yielding to despair. In a sense, he fulfils the Nietzschean ideal of “loving one’s own fate.” He sees the end as part of a complete narrative, the conscious conclusion to a life of commitment, as distinct from a failure of will or an inevitable decline.

This kind of death poses a powerful ethical challenge for us today. If someone, in sorrowful judgment, concludes that their time is running out, spiritually as well as physically, and wishes to depart consciously and with dignity, why should they be prevented from doing so under regulated conditions? The deaths of Lafargue and Laura are very far from an endorsement of suicide. They can be seen as a call to social and political responsibility, so that we may recognize that autonomy over our own lives must, in certain circumstances, include autonomy over our own deaths.

In recalling Lafargue’s letter and life, LYSIS does not celebrate death. From the outset, all our efforts have been an appeal to life in its fullness, beyond its biological caricature. We respect and seek to understand the philosophical courage of those who die with conviction, for mature and justified reasons, and who accept their own finitude as a last gesture of freedom. Some deaths belong to life as much as births do. A death that is prepared for and faced consciously, without surprise or violence, can be as human as a death that takes us by storm. In both cases there is life. What changes is the dignity with which the threshold is crossed.

This is the kind of courage that calls us to a mature ethical response and to political reflection equal to the problem. If we let the challenge be silenced, we will remain chained to the old belief that death must always be resisted, regardless of suffering, lucidity, or whatever meaning is left at the end of life. It hardly seems reasonable to deny people the right to say what they think and want about their own death, especially when, already in old age or facing their own abyss, they express a clear and considered wish to choose their hour, to choose their own time, the time that is theirs.

We therefore invite our whole community to consider some questions:

1.      What distinguishes a chosen death from a desperate death?

2.      What does the “right to one’s own death” mean? Does this autonomy have limits? How far does individual freedom extend in the face of our own finitude? Is there a difference between autonomy as a principle and autonomy as a lived practice, shaped by suffering, social circumstances, and abandonment?

3.      Why does our society insist on treating every decision to die as a pathological symptom?

4.      Brazil prohibits euthanasia and assisted suicide. What does this reveal about our conception of body, soul, and personal sovereignty? To whom does death belong? What role should the state and religious institutions play in determining whether someone continues to live?

5.      What moral dilemmas arise when someone, with a clear mind, wishes to die without suffering?

6.      How should we respond to people experiencing refractory suffering for which no relief is possible?

7.      Is it more ethical to force someone to live against their will, when they present reasons and arguments that cannot be answered, or to allow a peaceful and dignified death in a supportive setting? Are we immoral and inhumane if we refuse to permit assisted dying where the reasons for it are irrefutable?

8.      Why is suffering in old age still understood solely as a medical problem, when it also concerns meaning, dignity, and freedom? Is old age treated as survival rather than life? What role does ageism play in denying people a dignified death?

9.      Can voluntary euthanasia be understood as an extreme exercise of freedom? In what sense can the decision to die be compared with other profound existential decisions? What does “choosing one’s own hour” mean within the philosophical horizon?

10.     How should we think about the difference between letting die (orthothanasia) and helping someone to die (assisted dying)? What ethical distinctions need to be recovered?

11.     Does assisted dying threaten vulnerable people, or does it offer a safeguard against unnecessary suffering? Can we develop an ethical and legal model that protects both autonomy and vulnerable people?

12.     Would an assisted-dying model outside Brazil’s Unified Health System (SUS) be acceptable in Brazil? Would that create a privilege for the wealthier classes?

13.     What do religious traditions really say about the end of life? Is there a non-punitive interpretation of voluntary death in Christianity? Which moral prohibitions concerning the end of life are genuinely religious principles, and which are merely historical inheritances that we repeat unthinkingly?

14.     What philosophical, legal, and clinical elements should be part of the conversation? What else should we consider? How can we bring mental health, existential suffering, and autonomy into relation without oversimplifying them?

Answering these questions raised by LYSIS is a collective task.

At the end of this week’s article, before we bring this invitation to debate to a close, it is impossible to hear everything we have discussed without also hearing, like a terrible, beautiful, tragic accompaniment, the solitary voice of the Brazilian actor Flávio Migliaccio. In 2020, already in old age, he wrote his final note. It reads today almost as a diagnosis and an epitaph for the nation itself:

“Forgive me, but I couldn’t go on. Old age in this country is chaos, like everything else here. Humanity didn’t work out. I had the feeling that 85 years had gone to waste… in a country like this. And with the sort of people I ended up meeting. Take care of the children.”

The country that forces its older citizens into this sort of farewell is the same country that forbids serious discussion of dignity in dying. Migliaccio’s letter is the clear-eyed testimony of someone who saw Brazilian old age from within, who felt in his own flesh the abandonment, the loss of meaning, the collapse of public policies, and the cowardly silence of a society that refuses to look at its own dead and dying. Like Lafargue, in his own way and in his own time, Migliaccio called for lucidity. He said what nobody wants to hear: that moral, spiritual, and existential suffering can be as unbearable as physical suffering, and that old age, where it finds no dignity, can become an exile within one’s own life.

If Lafargue wrote his letter as a political manifesto, Migliaccio’s is a social outcry. One reveals the clear-minded freedom of a person who chooses. The other denounces the injustice done to a person who could not choose. Both make the same ethical appeal. We need to talk about the right to die with dignity in Brazil. We need to face the suffering of people who live longer than they wish to because they have been given no alternative. We need to break the taboo that condemns us to hypocrisy and teaches us to fear death more than we fear our own lack of humanity.

Migliaccio asked only that we look after the children. Yet implicitly, and more radically, he asked us to look after the old as well, including those who, alone in their final hours, wanted only a dignified way to depart.

All respect to those who found no support at the hour of death, when, having considered their own reasons, they could no longer see any reason to remain among us.

Alexandre H. Reis (Teacher and student).