Goodbye Samantha D’Incà. Mom: “She went out like a candle”

The thirty-year-old from Mugnai was subjected to deep sedation with the go-ahead from her father, who was authorized to suspend her treatment

FELTRE. Samantha D’Incà is gone. “She went out without suffering, like a candle,” says mother Genzianella, who was next to her daughter until the last moment with her husband Giorgio, who started the end-of-life procedure. Mom and dad spent their last night with her at the Gaggia Lante in Belluno, where she had been hospitalized since last summer. And Saturday morning, now deeply sedated and without suffering, Samantha concluded her journey.

The epilogue of the long story that saw the D’Incà family claim the right to the end of life path for their daughter in a vegetative coma took place in about ten days. Mugnai’s girlfriend, in a coma since November 2020 after a trivial fall at home, had never written it down but had said it with conviction to her family: if something had happened to her she would not have wanted to be kept alive by machines, a a situation which he considered “an inhuman condition”. And the legal battle that lasted months, with the family flanked by the lawyer Davide Fent, had reached a turning point in November, when father Giorgio, connected online with the Belluno court, had taken the oath as guardian of his daughter, therefore with the right to make the decision to “pull the plug” in case of aggravation.

An aggravation that occurred on Friday 11 March when, her mother said in a whisper, “she had a very strong collapse”. On the following Monday, the path to start the Peg suspension procedure, feeding with the tube, began, between Wednesday and Thursday the girl’s condition worsened further and deep sedation began, to accompany Samantha painlessly in her last trip. A procedure that took place as planned, with the go-ahead from the father who was authorized to suspend the treatment and the consent of the doctors who sanctioned the actual worsening of the girl’s condition.

“Saturday morning it went out,” says mother Genzianella in a whisper, with her husband GIorgio beside her. “We will not have a funeral or anything, we wanted to stay with our pain in the family, we would have released the epigraphs on Wednesday to let people know that Samantha is gone.” A strong and profound pain, that of the loss of a daughter in her early thirties. And even if expected, it doesn’t hurt any less.

«We are happy for Samantha, because humanly she no longer suffers, in the last period it was a continuous worsening. She went out without suffering, like a candle. Our goal was to give her peace that she did not suffer, and so it was », Genzianella says again.

Her mother and father were close to her, in the Belluno facility, for the whole last night. “Doctors and nurses from palliative care even came three times a day to see her, they were very good, in the last period she was suffering and for this she was given deep sedation”, explains the mother. «There were two of us, Giorgio and I, we spent the night with her. And now we too collide with the reality of our pain. The only positive thing is that Samantha has finished the pain, she has suffered a lot, almost until the end. For this, our thanks goes to those who gave her what she needed to take away the pain and let her go without suffering ».